Matters? Matters to whom?

Matters to those you’re trying to reach, your audience, your potential customers, your potential readers. If you provide useful, relevant, and regularly renewed content, chances are your blog will matter to those who matter to you. If you’re hungry for new clients, ready to make the leap from a site where visitor growth has been stagnant, but just aren’t sure how to get there, you might be ready for some help.

Corbett Barr just yesterday launched a 90-day, action-packed online course called, “How to Start a Blog that Matters.” Here’s a bit more about the course.

• This course contains 13 weekly lessons to guide you through starting a blog that matters over 90 days.
• You’ll start with choosing a great topic and setting up your blog and end with building your audience and spreading your influence.
• Each of the 13 lessons contains a specific action plan for you to follow each week. This isn’t just about learning, it’s about doing.
• The lessons are a combination of text, checklists and video. The course contains over 8 hours of video and 30,000 words of blog-building knowledge and advice.

Here’s a bit more from Corbett:

This course is based on the exact strategies I use when helping my one-on-one consulting clients start blogs. These clients pay between $6k and $10k to work with me. I’ve captured my proven blog building framework here so you can get the benefits of working with me, without the cost of one-on-one consulting.

I’ve taken courses from Corbett and I can’t say enough good about them. He’s transparent, doesn’t have tricks up his sleeve, and genuinely wants to help you succeed. If you follow his course and give it your best shot, chances are good that you will succeed, but it’s up to you to start. He even has a guarantee, see at the top of the page of How to Start a Blog that Matters.

Let me know if you sign up, I’d love to hear how it goes. But ever there were a time to pull the ripcord and get started with that blog you have been itching to do, doesn’t get much better than now.

He put together a sit-down-and-get-to-work post that holds nothing back, doesn’t make it sound easy, but gives you the guidelines, the tools, and the step-by-step processes to start getting some real traffic to your site. Don’t bother reading this if you’re not ready for action, if you’re not ready to put the pen to paper or the pedal to the metal: they’re real actions and they take real work. Ready?

Think Traffic’s Corbett Barr outlines “21 Quick Actions You Can Do Today to Set Your Blog Up for Massive Success“

Inbox: Where do I find the Gallery function?

Answer: WordPress Tutorial: Photo Galleries

Inbox: How do I get rid of all of these extraneous fields and buttons on my WordPress post  editor?

Answer: WordPress Screen Options

Water pipes and backlinks? Bradley please, what ARE you talking about?

Brittany Pettengill (Servpro of the Sunset) received a glowing review for her San Francisco fire and water damage company from Carole Isaacs of McGuire Real Estate in San Francisco. Carole had written up a personal account of how Servpro had come to the rescue of a nasty water leak at an apartment building. Carole gave a play-by-play of what happened and then how Servpro fixed it all–complete with an octopus, steam, and a dripping wet bathing suit.

How does this help traffic to Brittany’s site? Because Carole has a well-trafficked site (McGuire Real Estate), it has some weight. Because Carole used terms (keywords) that were relevant to Brittany’s business, it reinforces what Servpro site is about (fire and water cleanup). Because Carole’s site has lots of content and some of it about services that home owners could use, the site is relevant to Servpro’s. This is better than a shoe store linking to Servpro’s site. Because Carole’s post links directly to Servpro’s site, that gives Servpro’s site some “weight.” It’s also good for Carole’s site because she’s adding relevant content for her readers (home owners and home buyers). She’s providing them a service. Still following me?

It’s good publicity.

It doesn’t get much better than a case study written up about your business (well, a positive one!) and then linking to your site.Well, actually, it could get just a little better … if Carole had referred to Brittany’s business using keywords and then made the link to Brittany’s site using those hyperlinks, that would have scored a few more brownie points for Brittany’s site. In other words, maybe she could have written (and note the linked part of the text):

” … when the water was starting to drip through the ceiling of the downstairs, we called the most reliable water damage company in San Francisco: Servpro of the Sunset.”

Do you have clients or partners in your industry who could write up a case study for your site? Ask them if they’d do it. It’s good for them, it’s good for you.

Want to learn more tips to improve search engine optimization for your site?

You’d think that I, Mr. “Update Your Website,” would be updating his Yelp profile on an hourly basis, but I haven’t been. In fact, I only relatively recently put up a Yelp business page. I focus more on updating my own site about designing sites in WordPress and spend less time on the social networking sites. That doesn’t mean I don’t have my Likoma.com updates pinging LinkedIn and Twitter (they are), but it’s hard to keep them all updated, all the time.

So where to focus your (limited) energy? Probably depends on your business. But apparently I shouldn’t leave Yelp out to dry.

In my five posts so far here at SUCCESS, I’ve stressed listening. That’s almost 50% of the posts I’ll be writing here. Does that give you a sense of how I weight listening as part of your potential future success? It’s a big chunk of what matters. If you’re skipping this and waiting for the parts that will earn you money, these are the parts that will earn you money. It just takes work.

Read the full article here: Hotels in Manhattan: A Study in Success

If you’re looking to learn more about how to use Twitter (and other social media), contact Nadja Specht at Nuvota.

• Status Update
• Link in Your Blog and Slideshare
• Join Some Groups
• Answer Questions
• Connect Frequently
• But Recommend Only People You Can Vouch For
• Schedule Some Time
• Invite People

John Jantsch guest blogged for Chris and wrote about referrals.

When it comes to getting a significant amount of business by way of referral some companies are better at it. It’s not that they have implemented a better process for asking clients and partners to refer them, it’s that they are simply more referable.

In the business of referrals, trust is the most important reason a recommendation is made and, conversely, lack of trust the single greatest reason referrals don’t happen. There are countless ways that companies build and break trust with their customers, but most can be summed up with the term ‚”honesty.”

Here’s something your customers won’t ever tell you but that you had better understand: Your employees probably treat your customers about the same way you treat your employees. Let that soak that in for a minute.

Read the full article, “What’s Your Referability Factor?“

The other day, I saw a post from another website designer in the WordPress LinkedIn group asking for website hosting recommendations. Everybody and their cousin has a hosting recommendation, but I thought my answer was a little more helpful than many of the others, so I posted a comment. I didn’t just say, “I like hosting company XYZ.” but I took an extra 10 minutes and wrote up what I thought was a more insightful suggestion, complete with links and examples of companies I liked and had worked with. Because this isn’t the first time I’ve had this question (or this answer), I had already written up a How To post (complete with tutorial video) on my own website (Using Google Apps email for you@yourdomain.com) on how to do what I was recommending.

So later in the comments, Rob writes some thank you’s to people who commented. Here they are. I’ve bolded his response to me.

@Lucian, thank you for your vote for JustHost

@David, thank you for your input

@Stephane, thanks for your thoughts on shared hosting

@Bradley, yes, I’ve never bumped into anyone else on Surpass either. I’ve found them to be getting a little worse in the last few months – packing their shared servers with accounts in order to maximise profits.

Thank you for clarifying this whole Google Apps for mail issue. I didn’t realise you could use Google’s vast resources for your own personal you@your-domain.com mail address. That’s awesome! This actually slightly negates my need to move as mail was the #1 gripe with Surpass and literally took me hours to sort out. I watched your entertaining movie a couple of times.

@Paul thanks for your UK based recommendation

@Justin, thank you, you may well have saved me a few dollars there. You’re a star!

@Kevin, thanks, another one for Hostgator

People, I may well write a blog post on the back of this discussion as I think I’ve got some really good opinions and recommendations from some seasoned WordPress pros. Would that be OK?

You’ll see he carefully read through the comments and even went to my site and watched the video. Great, sounds like I helped him out. Of course, he is also helping me out by mentioning my helpful post and video on my site so others might come and see it.

So you ask, “That’s all delightful, but how does it help your business?”

For one, I see the website design business as cooperative rather than competitive. So this helps someone in my industry, my industry is stronger for it. But how it directly helps me are the hits/clicks to my site and the traffic that might follow. Maybe someone else reads this same post and thinks that my post is worth linking to from their site, maybe they Digg it or Tweet it or just mention it elsewhere on the web. These are all links to my site, they’re called backlinks. Backlinks are good. Backlinks are very important. But I’m getting a little technical. The bottom line is that I helped someone using my expertise and didn’t go unnoticed.