Blogging has absolutely transformed my business.  I had blogged for SEO purposes over the last couple years but never blogged to build my own brand.  It’s been over a year since I first launched my blog and it’s a long time coming.  You can take a look at my very first video here.  Be warned, I’m pretty stiff

http://successfool.com/video-1/

Since I started blogging to position my brand out there in the marketplace, a lot of people ask me the question, “How do I start blogging,” How important has blogging been to your business.”

Well I’ll answer one of the questions today and then have my partner Justin Brooke answer you tomorrow nigh LIVEt on my Internet TV show SuccessfoolTV.  Justin has been ROCKIN IT lately with his blog.  Quadrupling his traffic for his already successful blog Site Fliiiiiiiiiiing!   (you gotta say it that way with the exclamation mark!!!)

How important has blogging been to your business?

I tell entrepreneurs and small businesses all the time… “blogging is the nervous system…the cornerstone of your online presence.”

Because of the success that I’ve had with my blog, I’ve been given the opportunity to speak at conferences, coach others how to use social media to grow their business, ran my own conference and the list goes on and on and on.

Listen, there’s so much traffic on these social media sites, we’re talking a LOT of traffic.  Twitter is the fastest growing social network on the Internet, Facebook is growing at over 700,000 new users everyday.  If Facebook was a country, it would be the 6th largest in the world.

So the goal for businesses shouldn’t be just to communicate with folks on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, and keep the conversation on those particular sites and try to offer products and services.  The goal should be to start a conversation with these people, add amazing value to people’s lives, then funnel them back to your blog (NOT a lead capture page) where you can add MORE value to their lives.   THEN, if you do a good enough job, you’ll have an opportunity to win over their business.

So has blogging been important to my business success, ABSOLUTELY.

Here’s some of just a few benefits of blogging for your brand or business:

- Brand awareness
- Traffic
- Research
- SEO (search engine optimization)
- Building relationships with your customers, clients or prospects
- Can review products or services in your industry
- Lost cost marketing
- Positioning you or your company as the “thought leader” in your niche
- Reputation management

How important has blogging been for YOU?  Would love to hear what your stories.

When I did keyword research for a small web design firm in Oklahoma City a number of years ago we had very little restrictions. I was able to research words to my hearts content and place those words in the meta keyword tag and behold our clients were being found on popular search engines. Now realize this, at the same time Google wasn’t the juggernaut that it is today.

Back then we looked like absolute geniuses if we could get websites ranked high on services such as:

Excite
Alta Vista
Metacrawler
Webcrawler

It was common practice that if we wanted to drive large amounts of traffic we would use verbiage that people spoke in their vocabulary everyday. An example of this would be we might prefer a particular beverage, so we simply say “Doctor Pepper”, “Coca-Cola”, “Pepsi” and didn’t think anything about it. So we would in turn, if you were marketing a cola beverage we would use that same verbiage in the keyword meta tag and viola you’ve successfully into the market place with some of the big name beverages and you were off and running.

In 2009 the rules of the game has changed dramatically, and the practices we used in the early nineties simply can not be utilized today. Many people do not realize that over the years court cases have laid down a barrage of legal presidence that could land one in severe legal trouble simply by ignoring copyright and trademark law. One look at our spam folder where trademarked words such a “Viagra”, “Cialis” and “Lipitor” and we could begin to question how one could use those words in their email marketing campaign without any sort of legal repercussion what so ever.

Make no mistake, using copyrighted or trademarked catch phrases or names in a keyword campaign is a violation of copyright law and the legal department of the companies who own such copyrighted and trademarked material will have a field day hauling you into a federal court (in the United States) and sue you or the company you represent into oblivion.

I recite the following cases:

On June 15th, 2007 Vulcan Golf LLC, filed suit against Google and a number of “parked domain services” for trademark infringement over the use of AdSense for Domains on websites with allegedly infringing domain names.

On October 17th, 2008 American Airlines, Inc filed a lawsuit against Yahoo Inc and Overture Inc, over the use of their copyrights and trademarks to be sold as keywords to be used in commercial and paid advertisements.

On June 18th, 2004 Tiffany filed legal action against E-Bay as part of their counterfeit suit, claimed trademark infringement, claiming their trademark was being used by select users using the service unlawfully.

The list goes on and on, so what does that mean for you? It means you are treading a very fine legal line when you attempt to use certain verbiage in your keyword marketing campaigns and you could be opening yourself for an array of legal consequences by using such verbiage.

When in doubt, one should always make liberal use of some free Internet resources to check and see if the terms you want to use are copyrighted or trademarked:

United States Trademark Database
http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=tess&state=r9kfk7.1.1

United States Copyright Database
http://www.copyright.gov/records/

You might be asking yourself:

“Is that it?”
“Is that all I have to do?”
“If I look up the terms I use in those two resources, and if nothing comes up does that mean I am in the clear?”

I might be running the risk of being an absolute “killjoy” here but here is the answer:

“No!”

Other countries like the United States have their own individual copyright and trademark laws and while I was unable to locate specific cases in which someone in the United States was held accountable for copyright or trademark infringement in other countries, it’s naive to suggest that this too couldn’t be a possibility. While, I am not a legal expert I would encourage everyone who is reading this article to always exercise caution. For it’s always best to be safe than sorry.

What are your thoughts?

**Please read entire message to enter a contest where you can win a free seat into my 8 Week Coaching program:  Social Marketing Rockstars**

My friend Justin Brooke has finally had enough of all of the lies out there about SEO.  One SEO “expert” says one thing and then another says something else.  So he’s written a report called SEO Lies.

Go here now…

Get SEO Lies

You’ll see all kinds of proof that Justin’s methods of doing SEO work and THEY WORK GOOD! He’s even showing you how he’s getting multiple front page rankings.  Sometimes even taking over whole pages in Google (now that’s impressive).

You’ll be amazed at the price he is charging too. Justin says he’s purposely got the price so low so he can make sure everyone has a chance to have the success he’s having.  It’s only $1, 1 Buck, 1 Bone.

Here’s a few things you’ll learn in SEO Lies:

- Learn why Justin never pays attention to NoFollow or DoFollow
- See him disprove all the lies about using Duplicate Content
- Also see proof that you don’t need tons of content.  Justin has squeeze pages with less then 300 words on the page ranking on the first page of Google, Yahoo, and MSN

I reviewed  it and totally endorse Justin’s stuff. You will too when you go buy SEO Lies here…

SEO Lies

Now here’s the contest to enter a chance to win a free $497 seat to Social Marketing Rockstars.

All you have to do is leave a comment in the comment section with the best quote from the ebook.

Okay this isn’t the best paragraph, the best concept that you come up with because of the ebook, but the best quote.

So here’s your opportunity to get my 8 week coaching program for $1 plus uncover some of the SEO myths out there.

I’ll probably let this contest go one week if not sooner.  I’ll keep you posted.

IMPORTANT – I’ll be announching the winner through my newsletter so if you’re not on my newsletter (upper right hand corner) then you won’t find out you win.

Make sure to sign up to the newsletter now as I’ll announce the winner then you’ll have 48 hours to claim your ticket or it’ll go to the next best quote.