New to this

[reeves1]

Hey there

Obviously Blogs have ben around for a number of years now

I run my own Independent Financial Advisors and have done for the last 15 years

I have read a lot about Blogging

I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice on good techniques/practices to get people to look at my Blog?

Also could some explain to me in a simple way what RSS Feeds are and how to utilise them?

Thanks for your help

[ChickenFreak]

My first thought is, what's your purpose for your blog?

Some possible, and not necessarily compatible, purposes, might be:

- To bring you publicity and customers for your business, as a public expert on the subject.
- To communicate with existing customers to make your services more valuable to them.
- To "monetize", to make money for ads.
- For the fun of it.

I'm tentatively assuming that you don't intend to put ads in your blog, because I think that ads for other companies, on a blog tied to your company, would look bad. Your customers are already paying you, and potential customers would pay you, so also making money from them through ads would feel, to me, unprofessional. I realize that you may not have intended any such thing, but I wanted to mention it.

So, to consider the possibilities, and keeping in mind that mine is just one opinion:

-- Public expert:

If you're trying to blog as a general expert on your subject, instead of just addressing yourself to your customers, that's a demanding task to take on. If you do this on a blog tied to your business, I think that it will need to be _very_ professional.

The text will need to be very carefully crafted and proofread and accurate. You might need to hire a writer to ensure that it's flawless. The blog will probably need a pretty slick, though preferably quite simple and tasteful, layout, probably one that you pay a good designer for. I suspect that you'll also need to get your own domain, instead of using a wordpress.com domain.

Anything perceived as not fully professional on a blog like this is likely to make the blog do more harm than good, as it can reduce your customers' faith in you. You're competing with the appearance, content, and writing of sites for large financial institutions. So this will be a _lot_ of work.

I realize that this all sounds very doom and gloom, but I generally think that it's best to see problems at the beginning.

-- Communicating with your own customers:

I think that the requirements here are lower. Your writing still needs to be correct and show attention to detail - people don't want their money handled by someone who won't take the time to get their punctuation right.

But a very simple, stock layout would probably be fine here. And you wouldn't need to write your own long articles, you could just point to information that you'd advise your customers to read. (Edited to note: I mean, with URLs. I'm not advising you to paste articles into your blog.)

-- To "monetize"

If you want to create a blog that you'll put ads on, I don't know if you even want to blog about this topic. Yes, it's your area of expertise, but it's also a _huge_ area on the Web, with bazillions of competitors whose blogs are better funded (paid writers, designers, artists, marketers) than yours would be.

A different, smaller niche is likely to be easier to get into.

And keep in mind that the average blog really isn't likely to make much money in ad revenue. Just one more customer for your main business is probably likely to make you far, far more than you'd earn from a blog.

-- For the fun of it.

If blogging just looks like fun, you might have a lot more fun with a blog on a personal subject like a hobby or other interest.

ChickenFreak