Thought leadership effectively means  establishing credibility with an audience to produce extra brand equity for a blogger and by extension of the blogger’s company.

Thought leadership was found to be an important goal by many bloggers in the Backbone Media Corporate Blogging Survey 2005. Respondents to the survey stated that the top three priorities for bloggers starting a blog were 4 “another way to publish content and ideas,” “thought leadership,” and “build a community.” The same respondents were asked what issues continued to be important in their current blogging strategy. Thought leadership and idea sharing were the most important factors. When asked about the impact of their blog on their company, the following factors were identified as bearing the most impact from their blog: “another way to publish content and ideas,” “thought leadership,” and “RSS syndication.”

There are reputation benefits from establishing yourself as a leader in your community, but there are also some practical benefits for search engine rankings. If a blogger establishes himself or herself as a leader in the blogging community with a good following of readers, there is a good chance other bloggers will cite and link to the blogger’s posts and comment on those posts. Those links may help with boosting the ranking of a blog in a search engine for any keywords listed on the blog post. Those higher rankings may translate into more traffic to the blog. A blogger, and by implication, the company that employs him or her, will gain credibility and influence in their community by writing blog posts that establish the blogger as a leader in ideas in their blogging community.

What do you think is important for establishing credibility as a blogger? How did you gain your credibility and what tips would you give for budding bloggers to replicate your success?

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The way you present your e-business to the world is the key to its success. Its so important that your website looks professional and credible so that customers will trust the products or services you are selling. Ideally, your site’s content will also be interesting and unique enough that they appreciate your brand and remember to shop with you again. You need to develop two types of content to make this happen: a “Hollywood pitch” and website copy.

The Hollywood Pitch

It’s important to have a clear idea of what your business does and what it offers to its customers—both for your own thinking but also because friends, family, customers, and even potential investors are all going to ask you, “So what does your business do?”

The best way I have found to encapsulate your new business concept is to use what I call the “Hollywood pitch technique.” You identify the basic elements of your business and compare them to familiar, existing concepts or previous successes in a pseudo-mathematical equation.

In Hollywood, new movie and TV program ideas are often pitched this way because it uses already existing success stories to give listeners a quick, positive impression of what you are proposing. Boiling down your business idea to this quick summary will also help you focus on what is important and unique about your business.

For example, the hit TV show American Idol might have originally been pitched in Hollywood as “an updated Star Search with Hollywood Squares-style celebrity judges and cell phone voting.” Similarly, the Austin Powers movies might have been pitched as “1970s James Bond meets Inspector Clouseau to save the world!”

Figuring out the key concepts and buzzwords for your e-business will also help you write effective copy for your website and construct effective “meta tags” to help your search engine rankings.

Now, ask yourself: How can you summarize your new business using this Hollywood pitch approach?

Copywriting for Your E-Business

Even if you’re selling commodity products like batteries or socks, you’ll need accurate and persuasive product descriptions to convince your audience to purchase from you.

If you are offering more unique items or services, your website needs to communicate the value of your goods in a concise and compelling manner.

If you’re embarking on a more information-intensive or publishing related venture, your copy will essentially be your product, so it is even more critical to your success.

In all cases, the Internet can once again help you deliver compelling written materials cost-effectively, even if you are not a good writer (or speller) yourself. Don’t underestimate the importance of well-written copy because it is more important than you may think. You’ll need good and regularly updated copy for:

• Website pages
• Product descriptions
• E-mail newsletters
• Customer service documentation
• Advertisements
• Business correspondence

If you are a good writer, you can probably fulfill your e-business’s content creation needs yourself. There are two basic situations, however, that may warrant your getting some writing help:

• You are not a particularly good or fast writer (or at least you don’t enjoy it).
• You are too busy to do a good job at writing the copy your business needs.

As usual, the Internet can help you solve your problem. (By now you knew I was going to say that, didn’t you?) There are thousands of experienced writers available who would be happy to contribute to your site’s content needs on a project basis. You can find good writers looking for work by going online and posting a small ad (usually for free) to ask for help with your specific writing needs. Good places to start would be ELance & Craigslist.

Regardless of how you recruit your part-timers, ensure you are specific in your ads about the length of the written pieces you need and the style (e.g., product descriptions, advertisements, informational articles, website promotional copy, etc.), as well as your deadlines and offered compensation.

You’ll soon find that finding and hiring freelancers is a great, cost effective way to increase your productivity. This strategy also will work well for graphic artists, Web designers, photographers, customer service staff, and even salespeople.

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For some people, writing is as natural as talking. For others, it takes a little getting used to. If you are new to blogging and you’re not accustomed to writing for an audience, you might feel that your posts are awkward, clunky, and not really what you meant to say. This can result in a kind of writer’s block where you repeatedly start and then delete sentences because they don’t seem right.

Still other first time bloggers are afflicted with a kind of stage fright. Their thoughts, emotions, and opinions are going to be readily available to the entire world at the click of a button. And that can be intimidating. What if I come across as some kind of know-it-all? What if people don’t “get” me and just think I’m a jerk? What if my sixth grade English teacher reads my blog and finds out that I’m still a bad speller? There are a million reasons not to venture forth in your new independent publishing career.

Relax. It’s okay to make mistakes. It’s okay if some people think you’re a jerk, and it’s fine if some people don’t “get” you. There will be others who do. And you’ll be happy once you get in and realize that the water’s warm.

You just need to find your voice. Write to your blog as you would talk with a friend. This is a good way to ensure that your personality comes through in the prose. You can always go back over your work and clean it up a bit, but it’s good to get it down initially in an off-the-cuff manner because that’s when the good stuff comes out.

The more you blog, the more you will discover about yourself. You might be surprised to find that you are linking and commenting about a certain subject that you wouldn’t ordinarily seek out. You might discover, like many people, that blogging is a path to new interests and a way to unlock thoughts otherwise lost in some corner of your brain. Blogging can take on a very intimate “journal” feel or a more “newsy” direction. Either way, the idea is that by putting your thoughts into words on a daily basis, you begin to see over time the kinds of things you gravitate toward. And those things often turn out to be different from what you expected them to be.

Finding your voice also makes for a good blog. Everyone is different, and blogs reflect their authors’ personalities and opinions. That’s why people read them, and that’s why they can be so addictive. Sometimes you just have to tune in to a favorite blog to see what that person has said about the latest news story or to read his or her take on a movie you’re thinking of seeing. Finding your voice is one of the perks of blogging that can really help you become a better writer. Don’t think about it too much; just blog every day, and your voice will develop.

What did you do when you first started out blogging, and how did you feel when you went to create your first blog post? Worried, happy, uncertain? Tell me your views by leaving us a comment.

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There’s an old adage in the business world: If you want to improve something, you have to work at it some more. If you’re going to get serious about increasing your audience, you need to get from the how many read me” to the “what do they like” data, and that’s going to mean using some free tools and marketing methods.

Here’s a longer than usual list of small but useful things you can do to build your blog. We’ll start with some basic, cover-your-bases stuff and move on from there to more advanced techniques.

• Know your stats. At a bare minimum, you need to know where to find your stats in your blogging software and/or have a Site Meter badge. As RSS continues to ramp up, an absolute must, is a free or paid FeedBurner account!

• Who are you? Don’t be coy about your About page and profile if you want to garner readers. Even if you are blogging anonymously, give your readers something. Checkout Darren’s post, on How to Write Your “About Me” Page.

• Master basic social skills. Whether you love or hate social bookmarking sites like Digg and del.icio.us, at least some of your readers love them, so make it easy to vote for your posts. There’s a multitude of ways of doing this, but the easiest and the one i recommend is the ShareThis plugin which creates a popup menu when clicked, with links to all of the major social bookmarking sites to submit your content. You can see an example of this plugin at the bottom of this post. Try it out.

• RSS above the fold. For blogs, “above the fold” means before you need to scroll, and that’s where you want your RSS stuff. For example, this is the location you will want your standard, FeedBurner, or specific RSS reader badges to reside. Making it as easy as possible for readers to subscribe to your blog and save clicks pays off.

• Get listed. Multitudes of blog directories are out there. Three you should make the effort to check out and get listed in are MyBlogLog, Globe of Blogs, and Blogarama. Looking for more blog directories? See Kevin’s post, 75 Websites You Can Submit Your Blog To for an excellent list.

• Get listed, part 2. Don’t forget website directories that accept blogs, such as the Yahoo Directory (paid), the Open Directory Project, and specialty directories in your industry or geographic location.

• Respond to comments. At the risk of boring you, let me say it again: Blogs are a conversation, and that means you absolutely should respond to comments. Doing so will turn first-time visitors into loyal readers. For more information on getting more comments, see Start The Blogging Conversation.

• Post on weekends. Conventional blogging wisdom is you shouldn’t post on weekends because fewer people read blogs then. By the same token, there are fewer posts competing for attention.

• Show your back stock. One way or another, get a list of your best/most popular posts onto the front page of your blog. There’s no better way of turning a chance meeting into the start of a lasting relationship with your blog. A good wordpress plugin for this is MostWanted.

• Give credit and links where they are due. Simply put, the more links out of your blog, the more people will link to your blog. So even when you can’t pin to a specific post, link to that blog or website and give credit where it’s due.

• Post when your readers expect you to post. When you post creates expectations. If you post twice a day for months then not at all for two weeks, your readership will drift away. Know what your posting goal is and keep to it, and don’t be shy sharing that with your readers.

• Make use of trackbacks. When you’re blogging about some major blogger’s post, either positively or negatively, use your blogging software’s ability to send a trackback to that blogger. You will be surprised how often the trackback recipient will comment on your posts. This technique works only if you’re blogging in earnest, not fishing for links. For more on Trackbacks see Darren’s post, Introduction to Trackbacks.

All done? Here are more ways to get more readers that take more effort:

• Make friends with fellow bloggers. That means follow their blogs, be helpful, get to know them, and comment intelligently. Don’t ask for links up front. Don’t expect instant acceptance. Don’t be irrelevant. And don’t nag!

• Use photos. The right photo triples the impact of a good post. Take them yourself, find them at Flickr already permissioned at  (2.7 million and counting), or spend a dollar each at iStockPhoto.

• Post your photos at Flickr. People are interested in seeing themselves and other people. If you take digital photos, post them to Flickr and include a Flickr gallery on your blog.

• Participate in newsgroups. While newsgroups have faded in recent years, you’ll find at least one very active newsgroups covering just about every topic imaginable. Dive right in. And don’t forget to include your blog’s URL in your signature line.

• Use Squidoo. Build one or more lenses to showcase your best blogs about a given topic, or which together form a great tutorial, or just to establish your reputation as someone who knows a thing or two. Checkout Pigboom’s post on Improving SEO with Squidoo.

• Convert old posts into new ezine articles. What’s the difference between a great post you did on a subject six months ago and a free ezine article that drives traffic to your blog? About ten minutes’ effort on your part at ezine sites like iSnare, Ezine Articles, and especially the SiteProNews directory of article directories.

• Guest post. This technique has worked wonders for me over the last few months. Offer another (more influential) blogger guest posts to keep the content rolling while that blogger is on vacation, overextended, and so on. This technique presupposes you have some sort of relationship going, that the other blogger has either asked for guest posts or seems ready for the idea, and that you have at least a few posts that would fit the bill.

• Provide answers. In just about every area, there are current questions that need answers. Think about the subjects you blog on. What questions could a little non-blog research or data-gathering answer? A good tool for finding subjects that people are currently in need of answers for is Yahoo! Answers.

So there are my 20 top tips for building the reader base of your blog. Of course, there are many more methods available to bloggers to aid them in building their blog, whats your methods do you use? How did you generate the amount of subscribers you have at your blog, and how long did it take?

If you liked this article, please share it on del.icio.us or StumbleUpon. I’d appreciate it.

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