Important Tools For Nurse Entrepreneurs Who Blog
“When you blog, the entire world is your audience.” – Unknown
If you are already tapping into the valuable business tool known as “blogging,” you don’t need me to tell you that blogging has the potential to be as effective a marketing medium as Facebook or Twitter!
It’s an amazing platform in which to deliver value-added information about your products or services, plus being a slammin’-good way to communicate with people who share your hobbies, passions, interests, frustrations, and goals in life.
Anyone who has been a blogger for more than a month knows about the slew of “measuring” widgets out there that are designed to rate or “rank” your blog in the eyes of the Almighty Blogosphere. But what the heck is “rank?” Ranking a blog is kinda like measuring the health, influence, and standing of your blog and there are very specific ways to achieve that.
Technorati: Technorati is a site that indexes blogs and is an awesome place you can go to search for other people’s blogs. Kinda of like a Yellow Pages for blogs. Another cool thing it does is rank blogs. Blogs will appear ranked by topical authority within Technorati’s blog directory with #1 obviously be at the top of the pack. Signing up on Technorati is short and easy. When you do go through the “claim your blog” process you will need to put a post on your blog with a special code they give you. This verifies that you own the blog so all you need to do is put it in a new post and then delete it after an hour or so.
Technorati
Hubspot’s MarketingGrader: This cool (and free) site replaced the super popular BlogGrader a while back. This is a great tool to pin-point areas of your blog that could use some beefing up. Simply plug in the URL of your blog and MarketingGrader graciously points out areas of improvement. Cool beans…
Hubspot MarketingGrader
Alexa Rank: Alexa is a very powerful tool used to rank website traffic and it’s also used to measure how your blog or website stacks up against your competitors. The thing to remember about Alexa Ranking is that, the lower the ranking number, the better your ranking is. Your Alexa Ranking is used as a big deciding factor in valuing the advertising space on your website or blog by about 85% of advertisers. Should you keep your Alexa widget up if your stats aren’t great? Personally, I think you don’t want anything on your blog that is not complimentary to what you are doing. An Alexa widget with a crappy number is like shouting “I’m Not Popular!” to visitors.
Alexa Ranking Tool
Want to get your Alex ranking up? Try these steps and watch for results:
- Place an Alexa.com widget/plugin or chart on your website or blog ASAP.
- Install the Alexa toolbar on your own computer and encourage your readers to do the same on their computers (an blog post tutorial might be a great idea).
- Write rockin content on relevant topics and that are SEO optimized for traffic.
I will leave you with this thought. If you are blogging for fun and casual enjoyment, don’t sweat the numbers. However, if you are blogging for your business and you’re serious about your efforts, take the steps and use these tools to your advantage. Happy blogging!
Anna Morrison is the Founder of The EntrepreNurse™ Group and the annual EntrepreNurse™ Summit. Her work empowers Nurses to leverage their clinical experience to create profitable businesses with meaningful impact. She is the #1 Amazon Bestselling author of 5 Things They Never Told You in Nursing School. Her upcoming books include: The EntrepreNurse Club: Escape the Bedside, Make a Difference, and (Finally) Earn What You’re Worth, and the awe-inspiring Magnitude 7.0: Hope & Transformation After Haiti’s Apocalyptic Earthquake. As an inspiring servant-leader and in-demand speaker, and nursing career coach, Anna has helped hundreds of nurses re-connect to their passion for making a difference in the world, while improving their own lives. Anna runs the “I Coach Nurses” Blog online and her international volunteer work has been featured in The Miami Herald, on Good Morning America, Plum TV and Nurse.com. Anna is a member of the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses and the National Association of Legal Nurse Consultants.
