I recently passed the 100 post mark on this blog.

To say that I have learnt a lot in between would be an understatement. To say that I have lots more to learn, would require an even bigger understatement.

It has been an enjoyable, frustrating and fascinating experience. I have gained readers; I have gained new customers and best of all I have gained many great new friends.

My posts have resulted in praise, in controversy, and in scorn. Readers have agreed with me strongly and readers have disagreed, with equal amounts of passion.

Perhaps, now is a good time to step back, and evaluate what has a 100+ posts taught me, about blogging and blogging for business.

Lesson Number 1 - Quality always Beats Quantity

With the amount of available information that is out there, you need to stand out from the crowd. To this end, it is always better to focus your efforts on the quality of your posts, rather than the quantity.

People now have a much shorter attention span, so to get them to actually read what you have written - requires that you offer something of real value. Spend enough time constructing each post, giving extra special attention to your headline (eye-catching) and your first paragraph.

Lesson Number 2 – Never Ever Sell

So many business blogs are merely a series or reworded advertisements for the particular business. It’s awful, awful, and awful and gives nothing of real value to the reader. Instead think Give! - give advice, give insight and give resource. Make your blog valuable, in the eyes of your readers.

So instead pose questions, stimulate debate, provide commentary, and invite other experts to write interesting posts. Remember, the more value your blog brings to your readers - the more lightly that these same readers will become your customers.

Lesson Number 3 – Popular won’t always mean Popular.

There can sometimes be a tendency to jump on a particular bandwagon, and post about what everyone else is posting about. While this can be sound strategy for more established bloggers - it is rarely sensible for new bloggers to follow suit. Where possible, try instead to come up with new ideas and new topics - or at least differing angles for your posts.

It’s perfectly OK to be controversial, so long as your opinions are considered, and that you truly believe in what you are saying. Be careful, because once you have committed a point of view to the public domain - you will need to be able to back it up.

Lesson Number 4 – Engage with Your Readers

The very best thing about blogs is that, they allow for you to engage and debate with your readers. If someone takes the time to comment and give their point of view, make sure to respond and thank them.

Don’t just engage with people through your own blog, instead follow them home to their blog and leave a comment. Reading and engaging with others bloggers, not only increases readership of your blog – but is a super super way of generating ideas for new posts. Be sure to credit the other person and invite them to continue to partake in the ongoing discussion.

Lesson Number 5 – Don’t Be Afraid to be Yourself

A big mistake many new business bloggers make is to try and write in a so called “professional manner” It’s much more important to try to be yourself and to let your uniqueness out itself in your writing. If you like a joke, well then - have a joke.

Don’t burden yourself with having to sound, or come across - all professional like. The most important thing is your message, and that you communicate it with language your readers will understand.

So it’s 100+ posts down, and hopefully many more to go.  I could say more, but I will save for it 200+.

Can I take this opportunity to say a BIG thank you, to the readers, to those of you who left such great comments, to those that republished my posts and to anyone from anywhere who ever stopped by.

Warning: By the way, blogging is bloody addictive and I still cant spell LOL.

Published by Niall Devitt @ BtbTraining  

Published by Niall Devitt, Btb Business Training

The following is based on a recent bad customer experience I had with an organisation (who should know better), here in Ireland. They problem arose, because they ended up making promises, which unfortunately they were unable to keep. I now know, that this was not entirely their fault, and that circumstances, beyond their control conspired to create a situation where they had to leave some people down. I happened to be one of those people.

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Published by Niall Devitt, Btb Business Training

This post is the result a conversation I had with one of my clients who is very nervous in terms of what the future holds for her business. Siobhan, this is for you.

Firstly, Lets get real here, this is by no means the first, worst or last recession. In fact, many businesses do better during recession than during boom times.

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Published by Niall Devitt, Btb Business Training

In part one, we talked about how some business bloggers create posts that resemble a series of reworded ads. This is, in my opinion a misguided S&M approach, which will rarely add anything to the company’s bottom line.

For a business blog to end up adding real value for that business, it has to first add value for potential customers/readers. Then and only then, will these potential customers be motivated enough to contact the business and give you an opportunity to turn them into actual customers. So how can you achieve this?

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Published by Niall Devitt, Btb Business Training

As a relatively new business blogger, I am constantly seeking out advice as to how to improve our blog. One very simple way for me to do this is to surf the net looking at other business blogs, seeing what they do well and sometimes what they don’t. It goes without saying that ultimately a business blog needs to add value to a business or else it is simply not worth doing.

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Published by Niall Devitt, Btb Business Training

Because this site is relatively new ( Jan 08), I have been trying since the start of the year to build up our PageRank and of course visitor numbers.

On Tuesday the 29th of April, we received our first official PageRank and in the post “Website Performance against Google’s Benchmarking” I discussed how the site was performing in terms of visitor numbers.

So here’s the update:

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Published by Niall Devitt, Btb Business Training

Search engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of increasing the volume of traffic to your website from the search engines for the keywords your target audience are using when searching for your products or service. The higher your site ranks for these keywords in Google and the other search engines increases the lightly hood of potential customers finding your site and buying your products.

Studies show over 40% of people clicking through on the number one ranked site with the numbers of clicks rapidly decreasing as you move down from position to position. In fact 80% of people do not search more than two pages deep so appearing on page number seven makes your website almost invisible to potential customers.

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Published by Niall Devitt, Btb Business Training

A few weeks back I posted “PageRank Thank Google” where I talked about getting our first PageRank for this, our new site. PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web and goes right up to 10, in other words, its one of the important factors in helping to get new visitors on to your site.

Google Analytics is a free tool offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about these visitors. it shows you how people found your site, how they explored it, and how you can enhance their visitor experience. Improve your website return on investment, increase conversions, and make more money on the web.

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Published by Niall Devitt, Btb Business Training

Its just after 11 on Tuesday the 29th of April 2008 and I have just noticed on my google toolbar that our new site has achieved a PageRank of 3.

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Published by Niall Devitt, Btb Business Training

Writing and publishing online articles is a great way to both promote your business by increasing the numbers of visitors and backlinks to your website.

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Published by Niall Devitt, Btb Business Training

We recently undertook a re branding exercise including changing our name from Real World Sales Training to Beyond the Boardroom, primarily because the list of services that we now offer has increased and the old name Real World Sales Training didn’t reflect this. As part of this re branding, our website moved to a new domain www.realworld.ie to www.btbtraining.com

A big concern when you have to move is that when you move sites you affect your site performance in Google and for a business like ours that depends on the web for enquires and leads, this is very bad news.

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Published By Niall Devitt, Btb Business Training

This is the second of two posts on creating an SME website.

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