So have you noticed I’ve had an extreme makeover during the Christmas break?

An extreme blog makeover that is!

My journey in blogging is still less than 2 years, starting off in TypePad in June 2005, transferring to Wordpress in March 2006 and now a face lift so that it’s more “onbrand” and hopefully easier for my readers to interact with and find helpful brand building and client attraction resources.

I’ll talk you through some of the changes I’ve made in the weeks ahead, along side strategies I am currently implementing to ensure that my business blog supports my business strategy and marketing plan and the rationale for these decisions as some of the actions I’ve taken I think will be helpful if you are just starting off blogging.

My 20 years of experience in growing strong brands, what I do know is that, it’s important to keep developing and evolving so that we stay relevant and not only learn new strategies and ideas but apply them to help us grow our business and attract more clients – or for some of us less clients, just more of our ideal clients.

One resource I have recently come across and think you may find helpful is a newsletter focused on growing your blog traffic which in turn will help you build your reputation and your brand along side helping you attract more clients.

You see there are many reasons people write a business blog from blogging their book, to being found in the search engines.  But if we are not using our business blog as part of our marketing strategy to attract more clients which happens in part through driving more traffic to our blog, then we are missing a vital part of the jigsaw.

The resource is no cost and is Yaro Starak’s Blog Traffic Tips Newsletter.

Yaro recently write an interesting post about how he found the traffic to his blog dropped when he started to post less comments and insular blogging where we blog content but don’t connect to other bloggers or websites.

I know I have been guilty of  insular blogging – yes I have trackbacked and put links into my blog posts, but I haven’t spent enough time actually posting comments to other peoples blogs.

I know many leaders in professional services firms are not always happy to declare where they are learning form - I know in my Biz Growth Live weekly programmes that many people dial in but many will not speak up to say hello!

Blogging and networking online is just the same as networking offline and in person - we have to show up if we want people to connect with us.

I know many are wary of tools such as My Blog Log – I’ve introduced it on my blog just this last week but at the moment I’m not planning to put the photo’s on the front page that show the picture of the most recent visitor as I know that may deter some people from showing up as it’s a bit of a shock to see your photo there.  If you are using My Blog Log, how do you use it and what do you recommend?

In the case of blogging, writing content that we think will be valuable and hoping that someone will find it useful is not necessarily going to increase buzz about our brand.

Yaro recommends that we link to other blogs, review other blogs, email bloggers, do content exchanges, write an e-book with another blogger and join in with the discussion started by other bloggers.

When you leave a comment, adding commentary that is helpful to the blogger and to other readers will increase your chances of others following the trail back to your blog – in fact the first time I posted a comment to Yaro’s blog, someone came and left a post on my blog and told me they had added me to their RSS feed because they ound the content here relevant to their business (wow that is always good to hear!).

And just for the record, I found Yaro’s blog through a thread I followed today on Copy Blogger – just as he mentioned in his post, he had co-written a free ebook with Brian Clark – so when I read the ebook I was intrigued enough to mouse over to Yaro’s blog, followed another link and then came upon his Blog Traffic Tips Newsletter which I’ve now recommended to you!

Anyone up for collaborating and co-writing a short ebook or special report so we can collaborate and build buzz?!

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