Your Blog: Is it a Good Idea to Co-Publish it with a Colleague?

Question: I am an interior designer and I have a friend and colleague who is a real estate agent. We each would like to start a blog. Would it be effective for us to do a blog together since our two areas are related?

One of the first things to ask yourself when conceiving your blog is: “Who is my audience?” “Who is going to get benefit from the information I can share?” In this case, a combined interior design and real estate bIog may not be a very good idea. Are the people who are interested in interior design the same people as those who are interested in real estate? Not necessarily.

For instance, if your friend the real estate agent posts a blog about, say, the perils of buying a home in foreclosure, the person who is interested in buying vintage furniture for their living room will probably think “this blog doesn’t give me the info I’m looking for” and not come back.

However, that doesn’t mean that you should never co-write a blog. Many bloggers invite guest authors to post on their blogs if the content is valuable to the audience. For instance, I recently co-wrote a blog with Elizabeth Beskin of Fifth Avenue Digital. We attended the O’Reilly Twitter Boot Camp together and wrote “10 Things I Learned at Twitter Boot Camp” (see blog from June 18th) and posted it on our blogs. The subscribers to both of our blogs found the information very useful.

I recommend “31 Days to Build a Better Blog” which is a terrific e-Book published by ProBlogger.net. It will really help you identify what you bring to the table in Social Media and get you on track.

Tags: Blog, Blogging, Social Media

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June 26th, 2009

Google PageRank: What is it? Is it Important for SEO?

Question #1: What is Google PageRank?

Google PageRank (PR) is a number that represents the importance of an individual web page in the eyes of Google. So, when lots of web pages link to a specific web page, it shows Google that the page is popular. That means good stuff to Google because their ultimate goal is to always deliver the most relevant, quality content to their users.In other words, if a page has a PR of 9 or 10 (10 being the highest), that page has won a popularity contest!

Question #2:Is Google PageRank Important for SEO?

Well, that’s a really good question. There was and still is a lot of speculation as to whether a high PageRank benefits a web page’s ranking in organic listings (SEO). However, it is ALWAYS good to have as many quality inbound links a possible directing people to your web pages.

If you have the Google Toolbar installed in your browser, you can see the PageRank of each page as you browse the web. Don’t know if you have the Google toolbar, or want to install it? Let me know and I’ll be happy to help!

Tags: Google PageRank, Google PR, SEO

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June 25th, 2009

10 Things I Learned at Twitter Boot Camp

On Monday I had the pleasure of being able to spend the entire day at Tim O’Reilly’s Twitter Boot Camp at the New World Stages in Manhattan. There were wonderful speakers and wonderful advice on the use of Twitter for your brand. Here are a few pearls of wisdom I took away about this exciting new communication tool.  (more…)

Tags: O'Reilly Twitter Boot Camp, Social Media, Twitter, Twitter Boot Camp

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June 18th, 2009