Cost cutting is the buzz word these days. Go to any office work place – whether it be a big corporate office or a small business location. Cost cutting is what everyone is trying to do effectively. What are some of the ways by which you can considerably cut down on costs?

One, get rid of multiple telephone lines.
How many lines do you have in the office? Two or more? Why don’t you evaluate your set up and see how many lines you really need. If you are running a small business, I doubt that you would need more than 2 lines. You do not need a separate phone for each person. While that would be more convenient, think of the money you can save if you have only one or two main lines and use extensions for others.

Two, limit business travel.
If you need to travel for meetings and similar activities, why not look for an alternative such as telephone and video conferencing? With the technology that is available to everyone these days, there really is no excuse to spend more than is necessary for meetings. To save even more, invest in a VOIP package that will cut your telephone costs considerably.

Three, make sure everyone turns their PCs off at the end of the day.
The habit of many employees is to leave their PCs on when the leave the office. While this is convenient – no need to boot up the next day – the electrical consumption does add up. Remind everyone to shut down and turn everything off or even assign people to check everyday. You will be thankful for the power savings that translate to money.

No I am not going nuts. I know that you must be thinking that hiring more people at this point in time is the last thing on your agenda. But if you think about it, if you have the money to take on more employees, this is the perfect time to do so. Let me explain why.

I am sure that you are aware that many companies are either laying off employees or closing shop. This means many things but the main thing that concerns you is this – there are a lot of talented and experienced people who are in the market for a job. These people used to have security in terms of their salary but are now out on the streets, looking for a source of income. Consequently, if you have the extra cash to spend, you might as well snap up these talented people who are hungry for jobs.

There is no doubt about it, there is a shortage of jobs and a surplus of manpower at the moment. The sad truth is that many people who are unemployed are reassessing their priorities when it comes to what jobs to take. This means that you, the employer, can find great people perhaps at a lower expense.

Another aspect which could be beneficial to both employee and employer is the flexibility of work relationship. Instead of hiring a full time employee, you might be able to work out a part-time position. These opportunities – and more – can actually open up for you in these hard times.

Two posts ago, we talked about how commenting is important in niche blogging. More so, we emphasized how important it is for you to choose the blogs that you leave comments in; that, as much as possible, you should choose the blogs that are the most popular in your niche.

The next question then is this: how do you determine which blogs are the most popular in your niche? Here are some tips to help you find those blogs. They are really easy and you may actually be doing some of them already.

Technorati
Everyone in the blogging business knows about Technorati. Even newbies are quite aware of what Technorati is and how important it is to building up one’s blog. One good thing that I like about Technorati is that you can download a file of the top 10 blogs in any of the existing category. That means almost no work for you!

Del.icio.us
Here is another simple way to find the top blogs. Just go to http://del.icio.us/tag/topic+blog.

StumbleUpon
I have been hearing about StumbleUpon for the longest time but to be honest, it was only recently that I joined the community. I wish I had done it earlier. There are tons of people using StumbleUpon and the classifications are quite specific. However, there is no single file that you can download like in Technorati. Still, StumbleUpon is a good way to find blogs in a particular niche.

Of course, these are only some of the tools that you can use. Do you have any suggestions as to how to easily find the top blogs in a niche?

In the previous post, we took a look at the first step in picking your niche, which is to narrow down your interests. The next step would be to assess the potential traffic for your blog. In the interest of monetization, you have to be able to somehow forecast the potential interest that your niche would get.

There are many tools which you can use to determine this point. One kind of tool that you might want to use is a keyword tool – there are plenty in the market. Google has even come up with a new tool – Google Insights – which can help you determine search patterns.

Wordtracker is another useful tool. Ken McGaffin writes about it:

Wordtracker is a great tool for helping you identify and quantify niche markets. Keyword research tells you what people are looking for online and so helps you assess the size of the market for any particular product or service. To explore the size of any market, there are three stages involved:

1. Find the most popular keywords in your niche market.
2. For each popular keyword, see how it is used in longer search terms and use the total predicted volume of searches to estimate the number of people searching for that particular keyword.
3. Add up the total predicted volume of searches for each popular keyword within the niche to give an estimate of the size of the market.

Based on this and your narrowed down list of interests, you can already pick your niche. Do note, however, that the tools mentioned in these posts are only some of the many out there. Do not limit yourself to them.

I once heard someone say that there is a place in this world for everyone. I guess we could also say that there is a niche for every blogger. It is a matter of finding the right one. So how do you go about picking your niche?

I have been reading a bit on what other bloggers with experience have to say about this step. In the course of my reading, I found two somewhat different ideas. On the one hand, some bloggers think that if your main goal is to make money, then your main consideration when picking a niche should be to find a niche that is most profitable. That is, people all over the world should be searching for keywords relating to that topic everyday.

On the other hand, some bloggers think that your main consideration should be finding a topic that you are passionate about. The rationale behind this is that you should be able to sustain your writing. More so, your passion will be reflected in your writing if you pick a topic that you truly care about. Of course, it goes without saying that you should be knowledgeable in the niche that you pick.

So which is which? I suggest that you create a balance between the two considerations. It is understandable that you would want to choose a niche that has potential money making opportunities. Then again, if you could choose a subject matter that has both money making potential and is of interest to you, wouldn’t that be a much sweeter deal?

In the previous post, we discussed what kind of blog you should start – a niche blog (a blog focused on a particular topic) or a composite blog (much like a personal journal which covers a wide range of topics). Let us focus on the niche blog for the moment. I mentioned that a lot of blogging experts tend to lean towards the niche blog. Why is this so?

I came across a post on this at Tzuvelli, a blog focused on strategic blogging and monetization. The blogger lists 12 reasons to start a niche blog, I’d like to share some of the most important points (at least from my point of view).

1. Creating a local niche blog creates the opportunity for you to get from behind the computer and go out into the community.
2. Blogging is no longer simply an ethereal prospect but you can truly connect with your readers.
3. If done right, you could leverage your blog to become well known in your community.
4. With a local niche blog, you can leverage those high cost AdWords in a meaningful way. It is easier to write content related to keywords like car insurance, mortgages, lawyers because you can relate it to what is going on in your community It is easier to write about these things because you know what is happening in your community.
5. It will become easier to build a group of local contributing writers to where you could eventually move into an editorial position. Manage and expand.
6. A local niche blog with strong ties to the community would probably be easier to sell. And likely more profitable, since you can get higher add revenue.
7. Depending on your location there may not be very much competition.

What do you think, convincing enough?

For the longest time, we have been focusing on topics with regard to businesses and corporations using blogs to help increase their visibility. It is in fact a very rich subject which we can expound on more. However, a conversation that I had with a colleague the other day gave me ideas.

She is a working mother who is in dire need of an extra source of income. She earns quite well but the burden of her family’s finances and bad financial decisions in the past is catching up with her and really stressing her out. Knowing that I have been involved in blogging for quite some time, she approached me to find out more about it.

Don’t get me wrong – I was happy to help her out. What really struck me, though, was her question: Can I make money off blogging?

Indeed, can one make money off blogging? The answer is a resounding yes! Yet what bothered me – and still does, actually – is the fact that there are people who are new to the concept of blogging and that their primary consideration is to make money.

I can foresee some smiles forming as my words are being read…idealistic, idealism, and rose-tinted glasses are some words that are probably entering your minds right now. What is wrong with that kind of thinking? After all, this is a blog focusing on everything about business, right? So making money as a primary consideration should not bother me.

Then again, I would like to think of blogging as more than making money. I would like to think of this activity as providing content to those who are looking for it. With this perspective, monetization seems secondary.

(Disclaimer: I am planning to focus on blog monetization for the next few weeks so don’t take this post as a rant against it! Just voicing some thoughts out loud.)

Photo courtesy of groovehouse

Don’t overlook the importance of PR
According to the Business Week article, PR is a large part of blogging. This, I think is one of the strongest points of blogging. It provides an easy and convenient way of communicating with your clients. They can leave comments without going through the normal channels of communications (e-mail, phone calls, snail mail, etc.). Your part is to address these comments as fast as you can and as effectively as you can. The idea is to deal with the comments in real time without neglecting any of them. If you decide to forget all about the interaction between you and your customers through your blog, then you might as well forget about corporate blogging. Not only will you be wasting a very good feature that blogging is offering you but you will also risk negative publicity.

More importantly, place high value on full disclosure
Don’t try to hide your intentions when you do your marketing through blogging. More likely than not, you will end being found out and everything will blow up in your face. If you want to pay bloggers to create buzz for you, then do not hide the fact. Who is to say that your strategy is faulty anyway? As long as you do not try to dupe people and your intentions are made clear, you’ll be alright.

In the last post, we talked about two things that you may want to consider with regard to corporate blogging. Just to recap, they are:

-Bloggers should be trained in their task and they should know their limitations
-Fake blogs are not always the right way to go and there are risks associated with them.

Let us look at some more considerations when it comes to corporate blogging.

Consider tracking blogs
This means tracking other blogs – not your own corporate blog – that may be following your own blog. This would mean that someone in your company – it could be you or someone else – should spend some time in finding out the buzz going around online about your company. Why is this important? Because you can find out relevant information from the actions of others online.

Case in point: Big Blue is testing advanced technology called Web Fountain, which analyzes billions of postings to see if they predict spikes in consumer behavior. Last year, Web Fountain plumbed the blog world for buzz on books and then compared it to sales data from Amazon.com. In about half the cases, researchers could predict the sales growth that would follow the buzz.

This was an example provided by Business Week. If you can use your blog to predict sales growth to a certain degree, why not take advantage of that possibility? More so, you can find out what your customers and clients think about you and your services. Read other blogs which may have mentioned your company or your service or product and see if there is information that is relevant to you.

Photo courtesy of sgis

You may have heard from some people that blogging is just “one of those fads.” “It’s not going to last forever.” “They will soon tire of it.” Perhaps one of the main reasons that some people think this way is due to the fact that there are countless “dead blogs” littering the Web. Yes, many people get all excited about blogging, set up their own blog, and forget it after a while.

Yet if you take a harder look at the situation, you would also see countless other blogs making it big. Even those that do not have that large of a readership are continuing to thrive. Based on this, I do think that blogging is here to stay – at least for a while.

The question now is this: how do you maintain you business blog so that it will remain competitive amidst the tons of other blogs online?

I found the answer while I was reading an entry on BizzFlip:

The best entrepreneur blogs – and often the most successful ones — do more than just promote the entrepreneurs or their projects. Star power can draw attention, but it won’t sustain it if the blog doesn’t “give.”

Makes sense, doesn’t it? The tendency for some business bloggers is to merely promote their products and services. If you rely solely on this, you will probably find yourself running out of content to write about quickly. That is, unless you come up with new products and services all the time, without fail. Of course, we know that that is not always the case.

On the other hand, if you impart other information – useful tips, tools, strategies, and even inspirational anecdotes related to your business niche – then you are giving something more to your readers and you are thus able to sustain your business blog’s attraction.

What are you giving your readers?

Photo courtesy of studiotau