If your small business has a website (which it should!) then you should most definitely consider having a blog. Blogs are not just for rambling musings about peoples’ day-to-day lives and opinions, rather blogs are a fundamental way to improve traffic to your website and expand your business.

Blogs can be a great way to bring new customers to your business, or even to engage with current customers on a more personal level. A blog gives your business a voice, and a personality, and people do business with people. Giving your small business its own voice through a blog can be a great way to build your brand.

Having a blog also enables customers to engage with your business; they can comment on blog posts and have their own say about what it is that you and your small business do, how they think it could be improved and can even respond with praise for you service!

Blogging can also be a great way to increase web traffic. People often stumble upon blog posts relating to information they were looking for and will then visit your products or services from there. Chances were, if they were looking for something you have written about they are likely to be interested in your business!

There is another way blogging helps increase your web traffic, and that is by the increase in relevant, fresh content on your website. If you have a blog on your website the search engines love websites that have regularly updated, unique, relevant content. This in no way means you need to blog every day, but updating your sites’ blog regularly holds many benefits in terms of search engine optimization.

As well as creating a great avenue for fresh content to be displayed on your site, blogging also creates a new way for you to incorporate your key search terms in to your site; without it seeming ‘spammy’ or unnatural – if you talk about what your company does and related fields, chances are the keywords you are focusing on will naturally occur.

I love blogging about business and WinWeb.com – I find it exciting, and an exhilarating part of owning my own business. Give it a whirl, you just might love it!

I just received another email from technorati in which they told me that my loyal readers and blogroll entries no longer have any meaning to my blogs technorati ranking.

If you write for an audience like mine, where over 70% of my core readers don’t even have a website, it is very difficult to get anywhere with technorati. Does that make my readers or my blog less relevant. According to technorati it does – well, I beg to differ on this.

I am certain, that not only my blog falls outside of this very narrow band of technology insiders and geeks, which in my opinion makes technorati a useless tool to a large proportion of internet users and bloggers.

On another node, they can’t even pick up blog mentions on none registered blogs, this makes technorati a completely useless and distorting barometer of the blog-sphere.

Still, they want me to spread the “technorati” word for them, while they become more and more useless to me, so I’m sorry, but I have to decline this request for help.

Google ranks by popularity of the post in it’s niche. That appears to be a much more evenhanded approach, even twitter seems more appropriate.

So I guess my opinion is that technorati is no longer relevant! – ST.

Here is the staggering truths, how our Darling-Brown dream team – nightmare team – paid out $2.4 trillion of our tax-money on the UK bail-out, or should I say the UK bank bail out.

We all remember the Darling Brown spin:

Darling-Brown: “We are best placed in this global crisis! We will do what needs to be done”

… and so on. Well here are the facts:

1. UK spend 94% of its GDP on the bail-out,
2. in total just under four times as much as the US, based on GDP
3. equating to over £30,000 ($50,000) per person in the UK
4. five times more than the US ( $10,000 per person @ 25.8% of GDP)
5. UK is the biggest loser and worst placed in this economic down-turn.
6. World-wide – $ 10.8 trillion of which UK – $2.4 trillion, US – $3.6 trillion, $3.2 trillion all the other rich nations and $1.6 trillion by rest of the world.

These numbers show that the UK is the worst affected country world-wide by a almost 4:1 margin.

How some of the money was spend:

• £650 bn – government guarantees to banks against losses,
• £400 bn – “purchase” of assets and lending to banks,
• £200 bn – cash to stop banks from collapsing,
• £290 bn – recapitalization & nationalizing of banks, this is equal to £11,500 per household

TOTAL of over £1.5 trillion directly into banks – unbelievable, staggering – who has been made responsible for this mess?

The government has “borrowed” this money. National debt:

• 2008 – £526 billion
• 2009 – £609 billion
• by 2014 it is predicted to be a staggering £1.37 trillion, the interest alone on this will be £60 billion.

More than half of the spending on the NHS will be just interest payments to cover the national debt and equal to the education budget.

Between 2007 and 2008 our loss in personal wealth has been £31,000 per household. The effects of “quantitive easing” and the unprecedented loss in the value of the £, will increase the pressure on our personal wealth even further.

The effect on all of us, not only Jeremy Clarkson, will be felt for decades to come, our pensions, house prices, the ability to buy foreign goods, travel & holiday – will all be impacted by these follies of a few, including our current government.

How to move forward? What we need is more self-employed, small businesses, home businesses. We need people who understand what it mean to make money. People who understand and care enough to realize when we are being lied too and given the famous Labour spin.

The banks enjoy a special status in our society, they should not be allowed to abuse this status. If they do they need to be asked to repay the damage that they have caused. Not only the loans that they were given, but also all the damage they have caused us personally with their reckless behavior.

If you and I go out and cause reckless damage, we will be ordered by a court to pay for the damage. What is happening here? All the talk is about remuneration for bankers, profits in Q3 and so on. The banks should not make a profit until they paid for the damage they have caused us all.

As for this government, I have no words for the unbelievable spin and deceit of the British population. – ST.

Blogs are a great source of information, especially for small business & home businesses. So many bloggers share their vast knowledge and experience with us all online and for free. Many of these blogs have become an invaluable source of information and insight. Lately however, I noticed a trend that makes it almost impossible to use some of my favourite blogs because of the amount of advertising and the way the advertising is intermingled with the real blog content.

As a blogger I understand that content counts and that it takes time to create this content. I also understand that we can’t live of readers “love” alone and that blogging is a way to earn a living too.

But I would suggest it is a fatal mistake to distort a blog page to such a degree with advertising, that it becomes unusable and a turn-off.

On some blogs you have to run the gauntlet to even get to the content page, first the almost full-page, badly targeted ad for something useless and then a page where you are hard pressed to make out the blog post headline.

I have been to some of my past favorite blogs lately and I was beginning to wonder if there was any content with the headline? I had real trouble piecing together to different bits of the main article because of adds.

I will no longer go to these blogs while they are dominated by adds in this way – maybe RSS could be the answer. – ST.

Anita Campbell over at the Small Business Trends, the Über-Blogger when it comes to SME blogging, has just released a list called ‘The Ultimate Small Business Twitter List‘. If you are interested in small business and home business issues this list will give you a lot to read about.

I – @stefantopfer, have been honored by being included alongside people like Guy Kawasaki – @guykawasaki, Brian Clark – @copyblogger and many others. Some of my friends are on the list too, like Shama Hyder – @shamahyder and John Jantsch – @ducttape. There are many new twitter bloggers for me to follow, so I have a lot of following to do.

Let us not forget to follow Anita – @smallbiztrends and to thank Anita for her outstanding work to compile this list. A little birdie is tweeting that WinWeb – @winweb will be kicking off, …. or should I say tweeting off soon, follow WinWeb on Twitter now so you don’t miss a beat, sorry tweet.

Happy tweeting and following – it is a great business & marketing tool. — ST.

Using social networking sites for small business is as essential as being able to write an invoice in todays largely online based economy. It will help you to extent your business network and provide for two important business functions all at the same time:

• Outsourcing – by networking you will get to know peoples skills, see their previous work, work with them on a per project basis and with that timeshare professionals;
• Sales & Marketing – by networking you will find new clients, offer advice, become a trusted business partner and make money.

You always need to take care when doing business online, but you can get references from others, see their work and work out a payment plan, based on completion stages of the project.

Here are the social networking tools I use the most:

• LinkedIn – it’s a business social network with over 30 million users.
• twitter – is about micro-blogging and has over 2.5 million users.

I also use facebook, but have not made much off it so far. I only have limited time, so I focus on the best social networks for me.

Why not sign up today and join me and millions of others in the new and fast developing social networking business environment. –ST.

UPDATE 2008-12-10: If you want some proof have a look at this on enterprisenation.com – a social network.

I think I have, you can follow my madness. Like our OnlineOffice, twitter is an online tool, so you do not need to install anything, if you don’t want too. I love this little tool, it is great for small business. At first glance you may not realize it, but it’s brilliant. The best way to understand it, is to sign up and watch others, you’ll get the idea soon enough. Again – think global, do local, more about that in a later post.

In this post I would like to share some of the twitter applications I like to use:

• TweedDeck is my favourite, since you can have different columns for different groups, replies and direct messages, very handy. IT’s free, but make a donation if you can.
• Adjix -> Twitter, is a bookmark-let that sits in your browser bookmark bar and let’s you tweet about anything you see on the web in seconds – great tool – free too.
• BrightKit, I’m just getting starting with this one, but it let’s you have more than one account and allows you to plan you tweets releases by time. Great for blogging.
• Tweetie for my iPhone, it is easy to use and handy on the go.

BTW, make sure you don’t use all of them at the same time, as twitter will only allow you 100 updates per hour for all your APIs, so you could run out before the hour is up. This does not apply for the twitter web interface.

Yes, I have gone tweet mad, but I like it. You should give it a go. tweet, tweet…. tweet!– ST.

Here is my weekly selection of favourite small business blog posts, I hope you enjoy some of them:

• Guy is talking about my favourite subject – bootstrapping. I don’t agree with all of it for my readers, but if you are in the business to grow fast and large this could be for you.
• Shama discovered odiogo and has changed the name of her website – Click To Client. Different name, but still the same great content.
• eMoms have 23 Tips to Take your Business To the Next Level – Step 1….. – great post.
• A timely piece from The Digerati Life on ‘Money Tips To Cope With Hard Times!’
• Doing Business in a Recession is not easy, but John helps you to focus on the important stuff.
• Jeff Cornwall believes the glass is still half full, I agree with him.
• John Jantsch is certainly right when he says, ‘ Marketing Is Everyone’s Job’.
• Laura Spencer forgot to mention WinWeb’s OnlineOffice, but the rest is spot on in her piece about, ‘How to start a freelance business today‘.
• Emma just has a great site for any home business, I love her stuff.

That is it for today, I’m off to our Christmas party soon, I guess there will be no blogging tomorrow.

You must be getting bored with reading my blog, my ranting on about outsourcing, cost-contol, OnlineOffice, bootstrapping, work-life balance and so on. To solve this problem for you, I thought I will now and then introduce a new blog to you. To make things as painless as possible for me, I will have the owners of these blogs tell you themselves about the blog and themselves.

First up Tom Lindstrom – Editor, The Home Business Archive:

        Tom Lindstrom

As part of our OnlineOffice we offer web-services like web-hosting, email, online shop, online file-store and a wordpress blog. Blogging is most certainly the most inexpensive and direct way to communicate with possible customers, you can

• blog about your products and services; explain certain aspects better;
• blog about your company and your business mission;
• blog about your industry, comment on development and differentiate yourself;
• blog about case studies to do with your product and services.

In other words communicate with others on the internet and market your small business. There are many hosted services out there, which are more or less easy to use. Our approach has been to make the blog a plug-in to the basic web site you can setup without any IT skills. With our free 24/7 live support we can help with any issues, should you have any. problems.

For me blogging is a bootstrapper technique to attract new business without having to spend any more money. In the mid-ninties I used to tell people to get a web-site, today a web-site should be standard for any small business and a blog a must if you want to succeed in the future. You may believe that blogging is all about attracting global audiences, when in reality you can use blogging for very local markets, too. It certainly beats sending out leaflets and it is better for the environment.

If you have a story to tell, tell it – nobody else is going to do it for you. ST.