Having a business website offers a lot of advantages. For one, it makes it easier for potential customers to find you. A clean, professional website gives people an impression that your business is doing well. Once you gain their trust, you can easily turn visitors into paying customers.

The problem is that most business owners tend not to consider setting up a business website because they think it is a complicated process and will require a lot of money. Luckily, there are several website builders available in the market that makes the process a lot easier. WordPress is one of them. With WordPress, designing and launching a website is a breeze.

Still not convinced? This blog post will help you make an informed decision on why you should use WordPress to power your website with WordPress.

Grow your site as your business grows

WordPress started out as a blogging platform. Today, it has evolved into a dynamic content management system. You can add unlimited amount of blogs, photos, posts and pages to your site. You can even add some plug-ins to extend and expand the functionality of your site.

Easy to use

For those who are looking for an easy way to set up a business website, WordPress would be a great place to start. It is one of the most popular website builders, and is extremely easy to use. In fact, you can build your website in under an hour. No coding required. Plus, they have thousands and thousands of free themes, which you can use to change the look of your website. Now, all you need to do is to add your content. It’s that simple.

Search engine optimization

Search engine loves WordPress websites. Even before you add plug-ins into your site, WordPress has already done the hardwork to ensure that your website gets crawled. This will give you headstart in ranking your website.

But please don’t expect your website to land on the first page of Google just because you have WordPress website. Of course, you also need to put in some effort to increase your search engine ranking.

Save money

A lot of small business owners are hesitant to build a business website because they think it’s expensive. But the truth is you don’t need to spend a lot of money to set up a website. In fact, you can set up a WordPress website for free. The only real cost is domain and web hosting.

Since WordPress is easy to use, you can easily make simple updates to your site yourself. You no longer have to pay your web designer to add new blog posts or new pages. Thus, allowing you to save money in the long run.

 

As a small business owner, the last thing you want to be caught up in is a legal battle and additional expense for an image you, at the time, didn’t think twice about using. Even though it is alright to share posts others have made on social media in most circumstances (typically because sharing a post gives credit to the source and links directly back to the original post), you should not assume that every image you find online is okay to use for marketing or on your website.

Watch out, you could be sued.

How to Find Appropriate Images (For Free)

Luckily, there are a handful of sites with tremendous databases of high-quality, “royalty free” images. Additionally, Google has a search feature to sift through search results to find images that have been marked for commercial use. As long as you are grabbing the images from one of the below sites and giving credit where asked for, you should be in the clear!

Can you use that image? The top sources to find free images that are labeled for commercial reuse, free tools to edit images, and what to do if you get sued for using a copyright image online.

Pixabay

pixabay for free images

With over 920,00 free stock photos, illustrations, vectors, and VIDEOS, Pixabay comes in at the top of our list. Even for commercial applications, attribution isn’t required.

FoodiesFeed

FoodiesFeed top database for free images of food and beverages.

Food Blogger? Nutritionist? Just like food? This is the free image directory for you. With new images added frequently, FoodiesFeed offers a great selection of, you guessed it, food and beverage oriented photography.

Iso Republic

Iso Republic - Another great database of images offers images of architecture, food/drink, nature, people, urban, technology, textures, and other images. The wide variety is easy to sort and updated frequently.

Another great database of images offers images of architecture, food/drink, nature, people, urban, technology, textures, and other images. The wide variety is easy to sort and updated frequently.

Stokpic

Stokpic uploads new pictures every 2 weeks with a focus on lifestyle photography. These images are perfect for blogs and social media and the site is easy to navigate.

Stokpic uploads new pictures every 2 weeks with a focus on lifestyle photography. These images are perfect for blogs and social media and the site is easy to navigate.

Superfamous

The Superfamous database of images offers a vast variety of nature, landscape, and abstract images. These images are free to use for both personal and commercial purposes.

The Superfamous database of images offers a vast variety of nature, landscape, and abstract images. These images are free to use for both personal and commercial purposes.

Pin now and read later!

What Tools Can You Use to Add Text?

Adding text to images can also help make them pop. I used to tend to make templates in Adobe Photoshop, however, this was a little overkill for most situations. Now I use free tools that are available to anyone online. My go-t0 tools include:

Canva

Canva - empowering the world to design

Canva allows you to make streams for different image templates allowing you to easy copy a previous image to then adjust the background and text. Additionally, with Canva you have the ability to upload new fonts if your brand font isn’t a present and select your brand colors so you are sure to stay on point. Additionally, beyond social media sized images, you can create banners for blogs, ebooks, infographics, and more. Canva comes with free images, text layouts, and icons, but does offer the option to purchase some premium ones for $1.

Pablo by Buffer

Pablo by Buffer - An easy to use interface for creating image with text overlay and publishing directly through Buffer.

Buffer created Pablo as a way to make it easier to create images with text overlay. They offer a variety of different options you can control, such as filters and sizes, though much fewer than Canva. Pablo has free images you can use as backgrounds and various fonts preloaded. We use Buffer to schedule social media posts, so Pablo is a go-to choice for images with quotes that we wish to load directly to the client’s account.

What Happens When You Get an Email or Letter from Getty Images?

The goal should be to always use images that are released free of copyrights under Creative Commons, but at times everyone makes a mistake and overlooks using one image vs another. You may wake up one day to an email from Getty Images, for example, stating you owe $800+ for the use of a single image. My best advice here is Do Not ignore this notice.

Reach out to the sender and explain that you thought the image was royalty free and are incredibly sorry for utilizing it. Inform them that you have already removed it from the site (delete it from your image directory not just from the page it appears) and ask as politely as possible for them to work with you on the price of the violation.

Often they will come down in price depending on the number of copyright violations you have had. Just make sure you pay quickly and are more careful in the future!

The top sources to find free images that are labeled for commercial reuse, free tools to edit images, and what to do if you get sued for using a copyright image online.

This interview with Joe, the owner of Pebble+Oak, discusses the importance of speaking to your audience in both blog posts and on your website. We don’t expect our in-house team to be able to write coherently on every topic nor get the voice of all of our clients, so we rely on other writers to step up and fill in the void. Joe at Pebble+Oak is one of our go to copywriters who’s able to understand the vision of a business and articulate the unique selling points and their competitive advantage of their service.

interview with pebble and oak

BIMS: So Joe, how did you get into the biz?

Joe: I have always had a passion for writing, and after spending 10 years and the technology sector I saw the opportunity to begin working with clients to discover their own voice in an online world.

BIMS: When you write for your clients how do you ensure that you are capturing their voice not your own?

Joe: At the end of the day, writing is simply telling a story. Before I put anything down on paper for a client, I spend some time getting to know them, their company, who they’re trying to serve, and why they’re doing what they’re doing. I find that these conversations are incredibly insightful in terms of identifying and interpreting their voice and their message.

BIMS: How important do you feel it is for business owners to concentrate on SEO in the blogs and articles that they are writing?

Joe: Is SEO important? Yes. But, I found when business owners and writers concentrate too much on specific keywords, the message they are trying to convey gets lost. When this happens the connection with prospects and customers suffers.

I recommend coming up with a topic and outlining your article, then writing it without necessarily thinking about the keywords. If you need to, you can always add these in afterwards to make it a little more clear for search engines. Often, however, just the process of creating an outline for your article will innately highlight your intended topics.

BIMS: If we aren’t necessarily focusing on keywords in articles, what can we do to make sure that we are getting a big bang for our buck when we are writing blog posts?

Joe: There are a few tips that I highly recommend. First, make sure you or your IT person correctly knows how to load a blog or article onto a website. This means utilizing header tags and adding alt tags to your images. It’s great if you can break up the long content utilizing bullet points or numbers! Within your blog post don’t hesitate to add links to other blogs on similar topics or pages on your website that relate to the blog post itself.

Second, always make sure that you are sharing your article to external sources. My favorites are LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, digg, delicious, StumbleUpon, and reddit. (In other words, the Internet….)

And third, I always recommend finding external websites to write articles for rather than just your own site. Common examples include LinkedIn articles and Medium.com. Often, however, online publications and niche trade journals have the option for experts to contribute articles and content, as well. Contributing articles to these sources not only increases your reach beyond your current network, but it also helps to position you as an expert in the field. Above all, these articles create backlinks to your website!

BIMS: I know you are very busy, so thank you for your time! I’m sure you will be back for more interviews in the future. Before we sign off, do you have any closing remarks that could benefit new and old businesses alike?

Joe: There are a lot of buzzwords and “Flavors of the Week” when it comes to marketing your business online. It is easy to get lost in the noise and think “I should be doing that!” While many of these new ideas have merit, don’t lose sight of your values and your brand. Trends will come and go, but the companies who are consistent with who they are the ones that last.

60 blogs in 60 days challenge

Do you find that you spend hours rethinking and rewording your headlines? What if there was a way to speed up the time it takes to write a compelling article title, email subject, or ad header that actually gets clicked?

Have you ever wondered if more people would read your blogs is they had a different title? Probably! The most important step to writing is taking the time to understand your customers’ wants and needs.

So how do you write a winning headline that  will get you heard?

The following “formulas” from Mike Samuels of the McMethod are proven to get your read!

1. A Question…

Ask the most pressing question in your niche.

Example: What is the best software for webinars?

2. How-to …

How to X (try to use numbers in your X)

Example: How to make $5,000 in 2 weeks.

3. Liar, Liar

X Lies About Y. Here the goal is to induce fear. Your goal is to invert a typical relationship of trust.

Example: 7 Lies your marketing director told you about measuring social ROI

4. The Promise …

Make a big promise about results client’s can see.

Example: Get 1,000 subscribers to your blog in 3 days.

5. A Comparison

Why X [is better than, instead of, rather than] y. This works well if the comparison dispels major myths in your industry.

Example: Why you should be building relationships with referral partners not end consumers.

And my favorite quick formula for writing winning headlines:

End Result Customer Wants + Specific Period of Time + Address the Objections

Example: Make $100 in your first week while working only 1 hour per day.

Why do these headlines work?

Following formulas like the ones above increase clicks because they are specific, client-centric, and give actionable tactics that lead to real results. As long as your blog ties into the headline that you write, your readers will thank you. Most importantly, these formulas keep you from being vague.

As you are writing the headline, also make sure you know exactly what your client wants. McMethod gives the example of not saying “Lose 10 Pounds” if your client actually wants to “get ripped”. This obviously ties into being specific and client-centric, but can often be overlooked!

Have you worked on transforming your headlines and titles? How have you seen your open and click rates change using these formulas?

Write a killed headline in a quarter of the time

As a mom of a one year old it is incredibly important that when I am working I know exactly what needs to be accomplished and I have a framework for completing the tasks at hand. I’ve always been fairly good at not procrastinating, but I won’t say excellent, at prioritizing the things I need to get done. However, working from home with my daughter has proven to be quite challenging over the course of the year! For one, you never know if the nap is going to go longer or shorter than expected. Then there is the constant distraction of her learning new skills and growing to be more independent. Many of our clients, may second guess our decision to have Mary Catherine home while I work, however one of our big goals was that she would not have to be in daycare for the first year. Trust me, now that she is 12.5 months old, we are now looking at other options!

I have found the following steps to be essential to getting high caliber work done on time.

Tip one: First prioritize your day.

The night before I always create a list of the things that need to be accomplished the following day. From this list I know what are the top priority tasks. This helps me figure out those top three things that my business would not function without and what I could potentially hand off to one of our contractors. One way to prioritize your tasks is through the Bullet Journal technique. While I haven’t implemented this, folks I know who have found it to be incredibly helpful!

Tip two: Keep track of filler tasks.

In addition to the tasks that I know need to get done on a specific day, I also know the tasks that are outstanding but don’t need to be tackled immediately. There are additionally things that need to be done every week, but the day doesn’t really matter quite as much. These items I call my filler tasks. Filler tasks work wonderfully if Mary Catherine sleeps later than expected or is happy playing by herself, but still needs me to check in on her every once in a while.

Tip three: Structure around naps.

This next tip is combining the tasks above. My day is structured where my goal during Mary Catherine’s nap  is to complete as many of the top priorities as possible. When she sleeps longer I can fill the time with filler tasks. Additionally, during other parts of the day when I can concentrate on multiple items at once, I do these filler tasks, as well.

However, at times if Mary Catherine’s naps are much shorter than usual, I’ll need to tackle my list once my husband gets home from work and finish up the top priorities from the day. The worst, as I’m sure many of you have experience, is when you have multiple days of short naps and it feels like nothing ever gets done! During these days I put away my computer and just focus on Mary Catherine and the dog – hello work on weekends!

3 tips to increase productivity as a working mom

This post about SEO is focused specifically on aspects of your blog that you can easily adjust to help optimize it’s presence.

Below are 5 tips to increase your blog search engine optimization.

Tip 1: Use Header Tags

Breaking up content and using header tags helps search engines (read Google) understand what content is important and the flow of your blog post.
How to create a header tag: 
WordPress/Squarespace/most other content management systems: highlight text >> in Style drop down (typically the default is Normal or Paragraph) choose H1, H2, H3, or H4 tag. Best practices is to have one H1 tag per page, 1-2 H2 tags, and then for smaller sections have h3-h4 tags.
If you view the html or page source of your blog, these are noted by <h1> </h1>, <h2> </h2>, etc.

Tip 2: Media in your posts

Upload at least 1-2 images in each blog post and be sure to add an Alt Tag to the image.
How to: In WordPress when you upload a media file, there are text boxes for Title, Description, and Alt tag. We recommend copying and pasting the blog title as the alt tag of an image in your blog.
If you want to go above and beyond, insert an audio or video file into your blog post. Diverse media often works well to make your blog post rank higher than others on the same topic.

Tip 3: Internal Linking

We all know that inbound links to your content from 3rd party websites is useful for SEO, but so are internal links. Basically, these are just links between topics you’ve written about previously on your blog or links to services pages, landing pages, or promotions on your site.
Links like these help search engines to better see within your content what pages are more meaningful.
How to: I recommend making a list of the keywords you want to emphasize on your site and the landing page for these keywords (this can be another blog post). The first time this keyword appears in your blog, simply link it to the existing content. Do this for 3-5 keywords within your blog.
There are also plugins to help streamline this process. With these plugins, you’ll need to identify the keyword phrase, what page you can to link to, how many links should be added to each piece of content, and if the plugin should automatically add links to pages or just posts. These plugins can be incredibly useful, especially if you are writing frequently!

Tip 4: Alternate between different lengths of posts

Recent research showed that posts 350-500 words often received the most comments and shares whereas posts 1500 words long ranked the highest in Google. Our frame of thought is to vary the lengths of your blog posts so some are more apt to be “shareable” and others are meant to rank higher on search engines.
How to: If you’ve always only written shorter posts, combine them to form longer ones! We don’t recommend deleting the old post, but write a new message saying you’ve updated the post to include more information and link to the new blog post. When you combine the posts be sure to separate the different original blogs with H2 tags and the subtopics within these with H3/H4 tags.

Tip 5: Share your post!

Though Google doesn’t necessarily count every share to a social media or social news site (Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc) site as a backlink, however, these provide another opportunity for your target market to find your site online!
How to: You can either manually post each blog to these sites or you can use a variety of tools to make the process easier. We often use a combination of sharing directly to the network or website, using automation tools like OnlyWire, Zapier and IFTTT, and plugins through WordPress that link to our accounts.

What other tips do you have to make sure your blog post is SEO friendly?​

5 tips for better seo on blogs

A lot of business owners say they’re too busy managing their business that they don’t have time to write blogs. Others put off blogging because they think it’s just a waste of their time and effort. What they fail to realize is that blogging is a great tool that can provide a wide range of benefits for their business. This is especially beneficial for small businesses.

If your business doesn’t already have a blog, we encourage you to create one today. Here are 4 reasons why your business should be writing a blog. Hopefully, these benefits would encourage you to start a blog for your business.

Establish your business as an industry leader

Blogging allows you to share your expertise. Here, you can post how-to articles, tutorials, trends, industry news, your thoughts or opinion about relevant topics and more. If you run out of ideas to write about, we suggest that you listen to questions customers and prospects usually ask, and answer them in your blog. By providing them with helpful information, people will eventually look to you as a reliable source for information in your industry.

Let your brand’s personality shine.

Blogging gives you a chance to reach potential and existing customers. Through this platform, you can share your business’ story, provide more information about your products and services, as well as future events. Every post you publish helps increase brand awareness and provides more insight into your company. Through this platform, you can show people what your business is all about.

Drive traffic to your website

Writing blogs is one of the most effective ways to attract prospective customers and bring traffic to your website. Most people go online when looking for answers or when they want to learn more about certain topics. If you can provide them with content that are interesting, informative and unique, they’ll keep coming back to your website. Once you gain the trust of your target audience, it would be easier for you to turn them into paying customers.

Boost search engine optimization

Blogging is an effective way to improve your site’s SEO –if you do it right, that is. When people research about specific topics, most of them would only visit websites on the first page of search engines. Some would only check out the first 3 sites.

Search engines like Google reward websites that produce great content. By taking time to create good quality content and publishing one on a regular basis, your website is likely to rank on search engines. But if you write poor quality content or just copy someone else’s blog posts, Google will penalize you by placing your site on the last page.

With all the benefits listed above, now is the best time to start a blog for your business. If you need help writing them, please contact BIMS today. We can help you create blog posts that are informative, unique and relevant to your business.

You wrote a blog… now what?

We often are asked, “I wrote an article, what happens now?” This checklist provides an overview of the steps to publish your blog or article and how to share it as part of your digital marketing content strategy.

Prepare for Publishing

  • Write an effective post title that includes keywords and is persuasive
  • Divide text into smaller sections with headings
  • Deep link to past posts
  • Add a question at the end to encourage discussion
  • Add on-brand, SEO-ready images
  • Add “alt text” to your images, which will be used as your Pinterest pin description
  • Add a featured image (on WordPress)
  • Make sure your blog contains keywords and header tags

Share your Blog

  • Pin your post image onto Pinterest
  • Schedule it to be pinned to any Pinterest group boards that are relevant
  • Share your post on Facebook and Twitter
  • Create a LinkedIn Group Discussion from your Blog Post
  • Post your blog to your LinkedIn Company Page and Personal Profile
  • Schedule your post for Twitter 3-5 more times over next few days and weeks
  • Share an excerpt from your article to Medium.com
  • Respond to comments
  • Check the analytics of your post to see how much engagement it received. The worksheets in our Blogging eBook offer one place to store this information.
  • In 1-2 months, repin your post onto Pinterest and re-share on other social media channels

We often are asked, “I wrote an article, what happens now?” This checklist provides an overview of the steps to publish your blog or article and how to share it as part of your digital marketing content strategy.

What’s up with 60 Blogs in 60 Days?

This is a challenge I’m making for business owners (or marketing managers) to blog every day for 60 days straight. In our mind, blogging is one of the most important content creation activities you can do online. It not only is a way to show your expertise, it also provides collateral for you to share through other marketing avenues, and aides in boosting your on-site SEO.

Most small business owners can realistically commit to writing one blog every month, or those who really understand the value make an effort to blog once a week or hire a contractor to provide a few additional blogs here and there. Now imagine Google is trying to figure out which website is more relevant – one that has had 12 blogs in the past year, or one that has been actively updated, every day, for the past month?

Additionally, the blogs are a place for you to explore and dive deeper into topics that you haven’t focused on for a while or topics your clients and prospects care about. This additional writing can help you to position yourself as the expert you truly are.

What’s my goal with 60 x 60?

We have a team of individuals who write blogs for our business and for our clients. These blogs are incredible, but our writers aren’t in the daily grind of operating a digital marketing agency.

My goals for committing to 60 x 60 are two fold:

  1. To cultivate a community of business owners who are looking for support and guidance as they too work to change their business through blogging.
  2. To explore topics and create resources that we’ve rewritten over and over again for clients and prospects. These blogs are hopefully going to allow me to share my knowledge from the last 10 years of digital marketing and empower others to better position themselves online.

How can you get involved?

The more the merrier as we jump into the quest to write 60 blogs in 60 days! Please join our Facebook Group to gain insights into what practices and tips have worked for others on this journey or write in the comments about how you’ve taken your blog to the next level. We want to hear your successes (and failures), your goals, and the actual results of this practice!

Looking forward to working by your side as we transform our businesses!

Blogging Your Business

Whether you’re running a small business or a multi-million dollar company, having a business blog is important. It helps attract prospective customers, drive traffic to your website and enhances your inbound marketing effort. In order to reap these benefits, you need to create content on a regular basis.

While there is always something out there for you to blog about, overtime, you may find it difficult to come up with interesting and relevant topics to write about.

Here are 4 clever ways to ensure you never run out of blogging ideas

Recycle old content

You have probably written some great contents that your readers have enjoyed reading. These pieces of contents are packed with lots of information that readers still appreciate them even after posting them a few months ago. But with the surplus of information on the web, people tend to forget about these timeless gems as businesses and bloggers churn out content every day.

Instead of giving up on those long forgotten contents, you might want to breathe new life into your older articles by rewriting them.

Current events

Something is always happening, so you’ll never run out of topics to blog about. It’s understandable if you want to do away with politics, but if you have an opinion on certain issues, why not blog about them? Topics can range from industry news, natural disasters, latest celebrity hook-ups, trending videos, movie reviews etc.

Check the calendar

Most businesses focus on topics that are relevant no matter what time of the year. After all, these topics retain their value even after a few years and can easily be repurposed. While evergreen topics are valuable, you might want to include some seasonal topics as well.

Write blog posts revolving around the holiday season or holidays like St. Patrick’s Day, 4th of July and Thanksgiving. This is especially beneficial if you’re offering certain products or services that are specific to that holiday or season. Plus, there are less content around these topics; hence, helping you reach more new visitors.

Ask your readers

One of the best ways to know what types of post your readers would like to see is by asking them. Not only will it ensure that they’ll read your blog post, it’s also an effective way to connect with your audience.

Clever Ways to Ensure You Never Run Out of Blogging Ideas