BusinessBlogAngel

WillMeOn.com - will you will on Will Maybanks to London 2012?

Before I go 'short and sweet', I have to tell you about one of the projects that's been keeping me busy over the last month or so - www.WillMeOn.com. 

William Maybanks is a talented, British table tennis player with an Olympian goal; to compete for his country at London 2012. Table tennis has had it's funding for 2012 drastically reduced, so if Will is to realise his dream and compete on the world stage at London 2012, he will have to raise the necessary £300k himself. Given the current economic climate, securing a large sponsorship deal from any one business or individual is no longer a realistic proposition... and so the idea for WillMeOn was born! 

I know nothing about Table Tennis, but my 'entrepreneurial spirit', thirst for all things 'personal development' and professional obsession with social media and personal branding meant that from the minute Chris Ogle told me about Will Maybanks and the WIllMeOn idea he was hatching, I was on board.

Recent Business Bloggers' Blogs

I can barely believe it's been over a month since our last post! I see I've started a few posts along the way, but they're still languishing unpublished in my Typepad account.  To break the silence, I'm simply going to plug just a couple of business blogs which have recently had the Business Blog Angel treatment. Please drop in on them and leave your comments and encouragement - I know the owners will be chuffed to bits if you do. 

SueTrinder.com

Sue Trinder & Associates

Transforming communication at work.

Click image to enlarge.

.

Diary of a Property Investor

The PropertyMadeSimple Blog by Peter Stanley

Everything you ever wanted to know about property investing.

Click image to enlarge.

.

---

Are you business blogging yet?  Click here to discover why you should be...

Business blog benefits - can social media work for ALL businesses?

Most business owners and managers I speak to are quick to recognise the benefits and huge potential that a 'social media marketing' and 'business blogging' strategy can offer.  But occasionally, I'll meet someone who whilst 'getting' the theory, simply cannot imagine what on earth they'd write about. Certainly, some businesses might have an easier time of it than others, but I truly believe that there's a solution for everyone.  Proof, it it were needed, might be this business blog from UK wide skip hire business TopSkips.com which I discovered yesterday.   

The Skip Hire Blog is maintained by TopSkips' MD Mark Attwood and is a great business blog example. The content is fun, relevant and useful. The tone is, as it should be, light and conversational.  The varied use of media - audio, video and text - all adds to the visitor experience.  But perhaps most importantly, Mark clearly understands the power of key words.  Many of us struggle to identify the best keywords for our business - not so here; Mark is wisely keeping it simple with just the one term - 'skip hire' - which he then uses in the post title, in the post body and in the tags - lovely. 

What else could Mark be doing to drive traffic and Google ranking?

Joanna 'Confident Writing' Young - My Secret Weapon & Success Story!

OK, truth be told - in her role as Business Blog Angel Team Blogger, Joanna (left), had prepared 2 posts sooner than that last one - it was me that held them up because I wanted to finish something else I was working on before they went out.  Seems reasonable doesn't it, but it was taking ages to do.  Fortunately for me, Joanna is a stickler for regular and consistent posting and she took the initiative and wrote an alternative post which she knew we could publish straight away.

Now that blockage is removed, I feel the urge to share a few random thoughts with you. Since I haven't written here (other than my Holiday Greeting) since October 12th this may ramble on a bit, but anyway... staying with Joanna for a moment...

Video Tutorial for Business Bloggers #1 - How to Resize Images Without Special Software

One of my very recent projects, is the wonderful Thinking Blossoms blog for Judy Barber around her passion for photographing flowers. Cleverly, she is using it to promote her business by posting beautiful shots around which she can tell a coaching story. Anyway...

Crucial to her blog model is the ability to take photos from her camera and get them onto the blog. One of the challenges she faced was that the size of the pictures straight from the camera was waaaaay to large to upload to a blog post. Apart from the filesize issue, most people's screen sizes would prevent them from seeing the entire picture if she simply uploads them as is. On top of that, some of the pictures were taken with the camera on its side, so images would also be on their side.  Judy needed to find a way to resize, flip and rotate her images without buying or downloading any special software and/or learning what to do with it.  She asked me to look into it and then prepare her some kind of step-by-step instructions.

And so, the very first Business Blog Angel Video Tutorial for Business Bloggers is born!   
Click here to watch How To Resize Images Without Special Software now.

Business Blog - before and after

It's been a while since I shared any of my work with you...  Many of my clients need a little time to get into the swing of things before they reveal their business blogs to the wider world, but not this one!

  Click on the image (left) to enlarge these before and after pics.

Debbie Bissett is an inspiration! She runs at least three businesses, invests in property and is currently learning about stocks and shares. She wants her blog to act as a traffic driver to her businesses as well as to document and share resources on her wealth creation journey.

Latest business blog project...

Oh dear oh dear. Another huge gap since I last blogged. Once again, I've been spending more time taking care of other people's business blog needs rather than my own. I've given myself permission to work this weekend in order to catch up... there's so much I want to do. But before I get on with it all, let me share with you the latest blogsite I've created for a Toronto-based Image Consultancy...

Creating Charisma already had a website with a really strong and very stylish look and feel. My brief was simply to 'create a business blog to complement the existing site' - but as usual, I couldn't help sticking my 'marketing' oar in and recommending that we created a couple of graphical links to drive business to some core services. The company's founder, Diane Brooks spent 18 years as a corporate lawyer, so I shouldn't have been surprised by how incredibly quickly she 'got' everything. Check out the result here.

The Power of Blogging

I've been doing a bit of work today for my good friend Beryl Whiting.

Beryl has been blogging for just under a year and had set it up herself and it worked just fine. But I have been itching to get my hands on it and reconfigure it to work harder for her - which as you can see, I have now done - its's now more of a Blogsite.

But I want to share with you something she achieved without my help that clearly illustrates why you absolutely should be using blogging as a marketing tool for your business...

Thankyou Margaret Ntifo!

Well, this week has been an extraordinarily sweet one!

It started with a surprise bouquet of red roses and has ended with a truly 'heavenly' weekend in the Vale of Glamorgan - I'm going to blog about that, as soon as I receive the pics from Andreas.

  And in between those events, this...

"Following Judith Morgan’s suggestion to check you out with a view to creating a business blogsite, I found your service to be prompt, friendly and extremely professional.

It was definitely well worth delegating the technical aspect of my business to someone like you who seemed to know exactly what one needed from such a short call.

You had the superb knack of asking the right questions and made such fantastic suggestions that within a day, I had an up-and-running blogsite ready to use!

I honestly enjoyed working with you, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I am already thinking of a second project and cannot wait to discuss it with you. Thanks, and keep the good work going!" Margaret Afriyie Ntifo - www.MargaretNtifo.com

Is it uncool to blow my own trumpet In this way?

Thing is, I love what I do, so... at the risk of sounding all 'new age hippie'...

Blogging Busy

Wowser!

I have been a busy Blog Angel. 3 new business blogs or blogsites. 3 more happy clients.

One of them was Sarah Newton - the teen coach from the UK TV show "My Teen’s a nightmare – I’m Moving Out" and various other media appearances.

Sarah already had a Typepad blog on the go. In fact, she's been blogging for business since November 2005, but she wanted to update her blog to match the look and feel of her new website. Although she knows her way around the control panel reasonably well, she didn't really have the time or inclination to start working out how to do it which is why she called me in...