These days most businesses are handling a considerable number of their operations online. Many companies are finding that many of their commercial transactions are being handled online, much of their marketing campaigns are being waged online, and even many in-house operations are being pursued online. For instance, a good number of companies conduct seminars for leadership training online.

Many companies are also storing their data online, in the cloud, in order to save money on hardware and energy costs. One of the newest online trends for businesses is reputation management services, all of which seek to shape a company’s brand by developing positive web content and SEO. Where once a company might have focused their Public Relations budget entirely on events and publicity, the rise of the Internet and social media has forced all industries to keep track of brand awareness online. Here are a few of the ways this is being done:

Bring in the bloggers

Many prominent bloggers will write sponsored reviews and if their blogs receive considerable traffic a link to your company’s site can accomplish a number of tasks at once. One, it is a great source of link-building, which helps your SEO. Two, it (hopefully) creates positive content about your brand name. And three) with the help of social media you can get the post shared, tweeted, dug, stumbled upon, etc. Your company should have it’s own blog too, which is necessary for any kind of meaningful SEO.

Engage with consumers directly

One of the most beneficial aspects of social media for businesses is the ability to easily engage with consumers through Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linked In and dozens of other sites. Where branding used to be limited to television and print advertising, the Internet presents an entirely new niche for brand management. Use Twitter to monitor what people are saying about you, build networks, index conversations, integrate third party tools into your company’s blog (again, your company should definitely have a blog). In 2010, Pepsi spent their entire Super Bowl advertising budget on social media promotions—20 million dollars. So, yes, it works.

Keep track of negative reviews

Bad Yelp reviews can badly harm your business. In addition to releasing positive content to counteract the negative, you should engage with the reviewers. Offer them incentives to return to your service. Address their concerns and grievances. In many ways, reputation management is the new PR, or at least the newest incarnation of it. If your company is looking to get an advantage over the competition, optimize yourself for the web and invest in online reputation management.

If you’re a blogger, there are many issues to consider when creating content, promoting it, and designing the aesthetic of your blog. Whether you work for a marketing agency like Quick Sprout with a number of different online clients or are launching your own blog, ask yourself these six questions in order to get yourself on the fast track to success:

What is your niche? Don’t blog in a vacuum. Decide who your blog is for and actively write for that audience. If your blog is about graphic design, specify what medium of graphic design—online, advertising, manufacturing, etc. Any general category you think of can be drilled down into at least a half dozen other sub-categories. Honing in on the most lucrative sub-category and niche audience will allow you to focus your content, marketing, and publishing outreach.

Do you update multiple times a week? One of the best ways to make sure your blog rises to the top of search engine queries is to frequently update your content with media-rich posts. In fact, fresh content is one of the most important and fundamental elements in search engine optimization as well.

How familiar are you with your content management system? Most CMSs, from popular ones like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla to smaller, simpler systems like PageLime, Konductor, Zimplit, and Perch, allow bloggers incredible tools for customizing their content and aesthetic.

Do you study your analytics? Most content management systems allow you to monitor your inbound links and see what search engine results are leading readers to your blogs. This affords you many useful ways to calibrate your keywords and tailor your marketing strategies. The further you dig into your blog’s stats the more you will learn about what kinds of people are reading your content, how long they are staying on your site, and whether or not they’re sharing your posts.

What is your approach to SEO? Hopefully you’re utilizing a combination of keywords, meta-tags, link building, social bookmarking, and a wide variety of other search engine optimization tactics. SEO isn’t just for online marketing agencies. Bloggers can employ on-page SEO strategies that can greatly improve their page views and value.

Do you use social media? You should integrate social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, and YouTube as well as social news aggregators like Reddit and Digg. Notonly do these sites expand the reach of your blog across the Internet, it opens you up to new readers.

Answering these questions will not assure you of blogging success, but it’s hard imagine you won’t be headed in the right direction. The all-star blogger will be simultaneously considering how to improve his/her content, aesthetic, stats, and outreach strategies.

About the author
Guest post by Nick Jameson. He is a freelance writer specializing in business and marketing

There is so much more to finding employment and creating a career today than many people realize at the get go. While many people no doubt find positions by sending out their resumes and custom tailoring their cover letters, today’s tech centric-society lends itself well to new and more appropriate forms of self-promotion. Blogging has become a hobby, career, and tool for thousands and thousands of individuals around the world. Using a personal blog to essentially brand yourself and market your skills to the professional world has fast become the approach in today’s harsh job market. Follow these four blogging tips and self-marketing basics to create a personal blog that sells your best professional qualities and helps potential employers gain special insight into your abilities.

Simplicity and Clarity

The key to a successful website of any sort is simplicity and clarity. This is true for most things, including marketing. You want to be clear and direct with your intent and purpose. With your personal blog, you should create something that carefully communicates what you wish to tell. Your writing style should be clear and to the point. Tell your readers up front what your interests are, what the purpose of your blog is, what your accomplishments are, and what you wish to gain from them reading your material. There’s no point in using fluff language or fillers. Just tell people exactly who you are and what you are doing and see how they respond. Of course, I mean all of this directness to be done in a professional manner. You must sell yourself through your blog. Be clear and simple in your intent. 

Be Forward

This concept goes along with simplicity and clarity, but is slightly different. You want to be forward and up front. Self-promotion can only be successful if it is seen. Direct potential professional contacts to your blog page, so they can see your qualifications and potential. Having this blog can demonstrate to potential employers your perseverance to finding a worthwhile career and your thoroughness. Creating and maintaining a blog requires a significant amount of dedication and effort. With any type of marketing you have to put yourself out on the line. Be bold. Reach out to your desired audience and make them look at your blog.

Looks Matter

As any marketing professional would tell you, it really is all about looks. The way things are visually presented to you make a difference. Looks influence the way people feel about something and how they perceive that thing. If you are using your personal blog as a way to communicate and connect you’re your professional network, you must pay close attention to the appearance of your site. Make sure that the information is easily navigable and the site is uncluttered. Websites online that look outdated or busy always serve the opposite purpose they intend. You want your online resume (which is essentially what your blog will act as) to be clean, clear, and professional looking. Add some of your own personal style touches, but don’t overdo the pages and muddle the site’s purpose.

About the author

This is a guest post by Eliza Morgan who is a full time blogger.  She specializes in writing about business credit cards. You can reach her at: elizamorgan856 at gmail dot com.

7 years ago, on a similarly cold winter, but less snowy if I remember correctly, I went ahead and started my very own blog on the Blogger platform. It was long before the Google buyout of this popular platform, long before I gave up on my dream of being a journalist and, yes, long before the wonderful world of PR won me over and sparkled this version of the Words of a Broken Mirror Blog.

Seven years later, I have tested a lot  of everything that has to do with blogging, from niches to frequency to communities. I kept learning more about coding and customizing and html, and JavaScript, and how blogs generally work. A few social media channels later, lots of business articles, guest posts across the blogosphere, a few hosted contests, a travel blog and an online magazine for women, I am still blogging with the same great pleasure I experienced 7 years ago. 

I have grown and so has my career. I have launched my own company in the mean time and although we’ve had our share of difficult patches, it has always been profitable and every year made it better. It also gave me the choice I always wanted, at least in theory – choose how and when to work and never have just a job again.

To this day, nothing makes me happier than a comment on a post I’ve written. To this day, I am not more thankful for anything, from new business to recognition, than I am  for the many wonderful friends I made online. Some still are close by after all this time, some have went on with their lives, but I cherish them all, as they have all taught me something, shared a nice word when I needed it, offered their piece of advice when I asked for it and somehow helped me get so much closer to who I wanted to be.

In all honesty, the Words of a Broken Mirror PR and Marketing blog has been a bit sidelined in the past months. Life, work and clients took over and I have posted less often here. The good news is things are about to change. Mirror Communications is doing well, we will expand our team a bit and we have a lot planned for 2012. Nice surprises for us and for our friends, new projects and more services and packages to launch. That is why WoBM will only grow stronger and more useful this year so stay tuned and again…

….THANKS FOR READING, FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY HEART! Happy blogging to you all!

Guest post by Susan Daniels

When most people think of blogging, they don’t conjure up images of brand blogging. However, even Coca-cola has a blog to further empower its brand. Brand blogging helps your business out in two ways: it gives your customers a sense of community and it allows you to gain greater online visibility.

But starting a brand blog doesn’t simply mean writing an article every couple of days or so. To make your brand’s blog successful you need to incorporate the following into your every day posting:

Media

A brand’s blog should never be text only. Images and videos including the brand should be integrated throughout the blog to make it more appealing to readers, and you don’t need to hire a creative agency to create these for you. You can easily take and create them yourself; however, if you aren’t competent with your video editing, hiring a professional may be beneficial. Including images and videos also give you a greater chance of a post going viral which can greatly increase your PageRank – and thus, your overall online visibility.

Relevancy

One of the most important aspects of blogging is content relevancy. If a soda product is your brand, then you don’t want to be writing about dog food. Instead you want to be writing about anything and everything that pertains to your brand – the people behind the brand, different flavors being released, projects you may be involved in, and any other interesting tidbits.

Hype

When you have a blog that is focusing on a certain brand, you want to make sure that you are able to create hype through your posts. If you are improving a brand or making changes to products and services, you want to give your brand loyalists little insights into doing so. Not only will this get them excited and coming back for more, but this will also keep them from panicking when an updated product or service is released that may be slightly different from the old ones.

Creating an image of a company is hard, and trying to get as high as you can in the search engines is no easy feat. However, blogging can greatly help you attain new customers, engage the old, and manage your online reputation – all of which are needed if you wish to remain successful.

About the author
Susan Daniels is a freelancer writer that specializes in business and technology.

Guest post by Jayson Jones

Of the many blogs that pop into existence (at the rate, in fact, of one blog per second), the vast majority are a form of “personal space.” These intentionally personal blogs are a sort of online journal, more about having a sense of territory than of really developing a following. However, for those who care about having a truly successful blog, the focus must shift to accommodate one group, and one group only: the users.

There are plenty of things you can do to make your site better for visitors; you can get an online web design degree, look up everything you can find on successful blog designing, or better yet follow these five simple tips that will help improve user experience on your blog.

1. Streamline Everything

On most blogs, there are links, pictures, design elements, advertisements, and just about everything else you could imagine, all littering the site haphazardly. Not only is this unattractive, but it’s nearly impossible to navigate through.

Streamline everything you can. Make navigation clear and simple to read, eliminate unclear or unnecessary elements, pull advertisements out of places where they interfere with navigation, and otherwise streamline the site. At the end of the day, users should be able to look at your page and know where everything is without a second glance.

2. Make It Easy on the Eyes

While making your site clean and streamlined will give some benefit here, it’s also important that it’s attractive overall. However, the term “easy on the eyes” is being used intentionally. You shouldn’t improve your design at the expense of readability or ease of use, so always avoid big design elements above the fold and black backgrounds with light text for your main content.

3. Use Widgets

There are blog widgets that do just about everything, ranging from speeding up your blog’s load times to making it easier to leave comments. While you shouldn’t over-pack your site, there’s almost no blog that can’t benefit from at least a widget or two.

4. Be Useful

People come to blogs for the sake of one person: themselves. Help them by creating useful content, such as tips and tricks. Additionally, in “standard” content, be sure to link to appropriate sites when relevant, cite sources when they’re mentioned, and otherwise make further exploration easy.

5. Ask Your Visitors

If you really want to know the nit-picky details that would make your visitors feel more at home, ask them yourself. You can do this by posting questions on your blog, but remember that many people still won’t respond. One of your best solutions is to invest in online survey software. However, this option is also very tricky; a survey request that’s too brazen will irritate visitors to no end, while one that’s too subtle will be missed entirely. This is a wise investment in learning your audience, but be sure to approach with care.

By making your site attractive and easy to navigate, simple to use, filled with rich content, and adapted to the needs of your visitors, you’re sure to improve the overall user experience. This is no footnote on optional quality, either. Remember, a loyal user base is the foundation to any truly successful blog.

About the author

Guest post by Philip Rudy

Getting your website some exposure can be one of the hardest things to do, especially when you are first starting out. Getting traffic to your website revolves around a lot of different things, like making sure you have great on-site SEO and a website that has great value to begin with. Once you have these two basic (but sometimes very difficult to accomplish) things in order, the next step to gaining more traffic involves link building – which means generating a lot of back-links, meaning links that are on someone else’s site and lead to yours. Google recognizes back-links as one of the biggest key ingredients to ranking a website and the more you have the better your website will rank in Google’s search engine.

So how do you get quality back-links?

Obviously some back-links are worth more weight in Google’s eyes than others. If you’re a beginner in the website industry, then you have probably done your fair share of “how to get back-links” research. There are a ton of good ways to get back-links out there – some work and some don’t. Places people usually start are link directories and article directories, which are always good to have in your link building plan, but will not get you very far unless you pick out some great link directories and do a humongous article directory campaign.

The best and most effective way to get back-links when you are first starting out is by building relationships with other website owners out there. Building relationships with other websites can benefit you in all sorts of different ways, and one really cool thing about running your own website is that each and every site out there is very unique, each and every one requires very different processes when it comes to developing it and each one also calls for building unique different types of relationships on the web.

How do You Develop These Relationships?

I’ve always said link building is like public relations on the internet, but building these relationships is much more useful then for just link building (that is usually only the beginning stage). Creating relationships on the web will benefit your business or website in so many different ways and you will be able to do things with the help of others that you were not able to do before. Building up relationships on the web is like building up resources and you will be able to turn your simple website into an authority website by doing so.

Starting out is the hardest part. A good way to start link building is guest posting. Guest posting requires you to write an article on somebody else’s website that will link back to your site, just like this post right here. It is a great way to do link building and is one of the closest ways you can get to a “natural link” (at least in the eyes of google) as possible. Creating your own blog that you can use for great and unique content that focuses more on people rather than search engines is also good for building relationships and hiring content writers is a great way to get a lot of good content created at a fast pace.

Another good way to get your online relationships rolling is to join forums that are directly and indirectly related to your website niche. Forums can be a great place to not only build relationships and connections, but to find work for yourself or find it from others! There are a lot of good forums on the internet for all sorts of niches, and getting involved would be a smart thing to do.

Obviously Facebooking and Twitter are going to be here for a while. Instead of using them for SPAM and stuff that no one is ever going to read or find useful, try to keep it interesting and unique on there. Use it as a tool for providing information that actually counts and you will find that it will actually start working for you as well. The internet is just like the offline world – it’s all about relationships!

About the author

Philip Rudy works for ContentCustoms.com, a website that provides article writing services.

2009 has been a year of many changes. It’s been a year of accomplishments and joy, as well as the year when a lot didn’t go according to plan, in both personal and business life. I would have wanted to skip the 2009 review and go straight to my 2010 plans. But that would have meant skipping some important steps of the process and make it less effective. So what happened in 2009?

On Words of a Broken Mirror, it’s been a year full of significant posts and essential lessons. I didn’t exactly meet my own plans of posting frequency, but I am extremely pleased with the quality of everything published here, as well as that of the guest posts I have written for other blogs.

2009 was also the year when I went from part time to full time business owner. Mirror Communications kept growing, I continued to work with IT companies and tackled other fields as well. I switched from spending part of my day in a client’s office to working fully on my own. This of course came with some organization and time management issues. It’s still fairly new but I’m getting better at it every day.

In what my PR and Marketing agency is concerned, there’s much work ahead. But I have had the opportunity to try a lot of things together with my clients and the results made us all very happy. We are currently plotting and planning what to do in 2009 It hasn’t been an easy ride, but it’s been challenging and inspiring and I am sure it’s been a very good decision, career wise, to start my own business.

In late August, together with two friends of mine, I have launched an online magazine for women, Cenusa de trandafir. It will turn 4 months on Christmas and it already has quite some traffic, good ranks and my personal reasons for happiness and excitement – over 1000 comments already, daily conversations with our readers on Twitter, many guest authors of which some became permanent authors! Compared to our competitors, we’re doing great at building a community around the magazine. The future holds a complete redesign and a lot more work from the entire team

I kept planning all year to revive my travel blog. It took me a while, but in November I again started posting frequently on Travel Spells! Better later than never, as the saying goes

I also started writing a book in 2009. As I have mentioned before it’s a vampire story. A few close friends (including Joanna Young whom I haven’t thanked enough for all her help and support) have read what I have written and their positive feedback fueled my desire to keep going. I was planning to release the book in December, but things got a bit delayed.

The personal part of 2009 has definitely been a wild ride. Yet I am happy and thankful for everything that has happened! Life sometimes makes us the most wonderful surprises ever!  And based on how I feel in the month of December, I can honestly say 2010 will be an amazing year on all levels

Alex Cristache, the mastermind behind Blogsessive.com and the QBKL Media design studio, has just release a free PDF eboook called “Corporate Blogging Guide”. This comprehensive collection of useful tips and back to the basic explanations of the whole blogging process is meant to help companies assess their need of a blog, draw some goals, come up with a blogging strategy, choose the best available tool and start reaching out to the blogging community.

All you have to do to get this business blogging ebook is to subscribe for free to Blogsessive’s RSS feed and you’ll spot the download link at the end of each article in the feed. If you’re already a Blogsessive RSS subscriber, you only need to click the link, it’s already there

Yours truly played a little but significant part in the process of getting the Corporate Blogging Guide published, meaning I helped Alex translate and did a bit of editing as well. So download it, read it and let Alex and I know what you think Oh, and happy blogging!

There hasn’t been one day in 2009 when I got bored. As my world kept changing in every aspect that could change, I kept experimenting, adjusting, learning and meeting new people. So reading along the lines I have written and published all year and trying to find the essential words for 2009 was quite an interesting experiment. It reminded  me of where I’ve been, what I have discovered and of how this particularly full year has altered my views on certain aspects, including my thoughts about who I am and what is important for me.

Joanna Young’s challenge to find the essential lines and the essential posts of 2009 wasn’t easy easy. But it was fun and I managed to find the essential lines for both me and the readers of this blog. An important lesson that I see as the most important of the year that’s about to pass. It’s not something new, it’s not at all complicated…

“Sometimes we are reminded of the big secrets in the business world by what appears to be the most unrelated situation.”

And along these lines not one, but two posts stand out. Both describing important skills and lessons that have to do with marketing and promoting your business. Both showing how I learned about them in what seemed a completely unrelated situation.  My teachers? Bikers and stray dogs! The two posts I’m referring to are:

5 Social Media Lessons You Can Learn from Bikers

What feeding stray dogs taught me about word of mouth marketing

While I am the first one to admit that riding a bike and playing with the dogs are not the best moments to think of business connections, these lessons are still valid and they are essential. We are so focused on business tips and tricks, on case studies and examples, on checklists and plans, on tasks, schedules and success recipes that we easily overlook what’s right in front of us. An business seminar is hardly the only place where you can learn to be better at what you are doing. A business book is not the only piece of writing that can help you enhance your skills!

I challenge you all to join Joanna’s group writing project and analyze what you have posted in 2009. What are your essential lines? And which is your essential post? Write your entry by Spetember 27 and make sure you tell Joanna about it!