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Business Blog Step 5 - Look and Feel Right

Guest post by: Gary Baker

Article Overview: While the content and the writing style of your blog is important, so is its look and feel which reflects on you and your business. All blog packages come with a basic template but there will be many which will use it. To avoid just fading into the crowd, make sure that you customise the template or create a new one to give your Blog its own look and feel.

Business Blog Step 5 - Look and Feel Right

While the content and the writing style of your blog is important, so is its look and feel which reflects on you and your business. All blog packages come with a basic template but there will be many which will use it.

To avoid just fading into the crowd, make sure that you customise the template or create a new one to give your Blog its own look and feel.

Put up a Profile

Let people know who they are dealing with. A blog is interactive and people like to know who they are interacting with, so add some pictures and even a video!! You also want people to be able to contact you by commenting on the posts on your blog.

There are three main ways in which your posts are stored on your Blog: as part of a Category (or grouping), as a monthly or weekly Archive and as an individual post using a Permalink.

Categories

You can choose whatever categories you like and when you write a post, you assign the post to one or more categories according to its content. It is then filed in that category as well as appearing in the main body of the blog. Make the category description short and to the point.

Archives

Blog posts are also filed in the Archives section - usually this is done by month. The Archives are created automatically for you and the posts placed in them according to their date, so there is nothing for you to do in that respect.

Permalinks

The Permalink is the web address of the individual posts and is very important. The default address in many systems will simply give the number of the post. You are able to change this to the title of your post and other criteria which would give a more descriptive URL

Be careful when setting up permalinks. If you change the structure or format of the permalinks in the future then addresses of all the past posts will change as well. This means that if people click on pages in the search engines they will be sent to the old address.

Dealing with Comments

You should decide if you want comments from only registered posters, allow comments to appear immediately or you moderate them before they appear. Keep it as open as possible, even though there is a lot of comment spam where irrelevant comments are posted.

In most cases, you are looking to engage with the people who leave comments, so if they respond and ask a question then make sure that you reply to it even if they are not favourable. It's best not to ignore these comments by handling them with grace and tact.

Tracking who visits

You should aim to record the number of visitors that you are getting, where they came from and the pages that they visit, just as with a normal website. This will allow you to understand which elements appeal most to them and which topics they are reading about most often.

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Article Tags: blog, blog lesson, blogging, business blog lesson, business blogging, how to blog, internet marketing, internet marketing, internet marketing tools



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