CAKE Web Services Blog

One of the best enhancements we can make to a business website is an active blog.  A separate and distinct “sub site” that allows you and your team to rapidly publish your expertise to the web.  We have found the best results separating the blog from the main website, which contains more static content.  Of course the two sites are linked together, so as your blog content drives traffic, your main website (and your conversion rate) benefits.  The more active and dynamic nature of the blog will encourage user interaction, sharing and return visits.  The fact that you can have it separate (but connected) from your “static” website means you can rapidly deploy a blog, without having to completely overhaul your current website.

So why blog??  Content!  Establishing your expertise will drive more traffic and business to your website.  Content is the fuel for your online marketing efforts, both with your potential customers and the search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.  It just happens that the same thing which elevates your ranking with human website visitors, also elevates your search rankings.  If you don’t need to market your business and reach out to your customers, you can stop reading here. Read more…

If you’re new to blogging and WordPress, you might be struggling to customize your blog or find more ways for your sparks of genius (aka blog posts) to be found.  Below is a short list of must-have plugins we use on self-hosted WordPress installations.

The plugins listed below assume that you do want your blog to be found.  They also assume you have started a couple services that help you “push” your blog out to the world:

• Twitter:  A feed for everyone!
• Bit.ly:  Twitter posts are short by design.  When your blog “pushes” a link to your Twitter account, you don’t want your new Tweet to get overwhelmed by the blog link’s URL.  Unless you use another URL shortener service, signup for Bit.ly’s free account.  They’ll issue you a special API key to enter into the plugins that work with their URL shortening service.  Add click tracking to that and Bit.ly is a must have!
• Google Feedburner:  Both Twitter and Feedburner are essential tools to help you widen your circle of influence and “push” updates to followers.  They’re both free and very easy to set up.  Google’s Feedburner service even has an email subscription service that will allow you to place “Subscribe” links on your blog and/or website, then subscribers can receive automatic email updates every time you post something new to your blog. Read more…

Almost any website can be built to look “just right” initially, but as time marches on, your site visitors will  desire new material.  If you truly want to make your site a “resource” website for your visitors, you need engaging content.  Not just now, but tomorrow, next week, next month, next year…

That’s where most good websites go flat.  They don’t deliver in the long term.  This post will hopefully provide some insight, and also some solutions. Read more…

By Rob Bowen

(This excerpt was taken from an excellent article found at the Tutorial9 Website.  We’re normally all about the original content, but this article was so dead-on, we thought any attempt to write something similar would do this original article an injustice.  Enjoy…)

With the popularity of blogging showing little waning, I decided that I would offer a bit of a tutorial on how to blog. Effectively, that is. Anyone can sit down in front of a keyboard and punch out a post of little to no import or community relevence, but it takes a bit more than that to blog effectively. There are millions of people blogging all across the vast sea of cyberspace, and many of them are doing it the right way to maintain their visibility among the masses…

Click here to read the rest of this great article at the Tutorial9.net website!