Archive for the ‘Business Blogging’ Category
How to Get More Blog Traffic – Real World Data
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011Every blogger wants more traffic. How to get it? The key is a balanced strategy of search engine optimization (SEO), social media, syndication and guest posting.
So where does blog traffic come from, and how does this change over time? Looking at data from the Webbiquity blog, several trends are apparent. This B2B blog isn’t necessarily representative of all blogs of course, but the trends likely aren’t much different for many business blogs. What’s important here isn’t the specific results from this blog, but what those results say about how to get more traffic to your blog.
Six conclusions that can be drawn from this graph:
It takes time to build a blog audience. Don’t expect miracles right out of the gate, or get discouraged by low blog traffic at first. Patience is a virtue, and persistence is rewarded. Even those early posts may draw significant traffic over time as your blog gains traction.
Direct and referral traffic are highly correlated. It’s striking in the graph above how the lines for direct and referral traffic remain nearly parallel over time. But it makes sense: the more often your blog is “seen” on other sites, the more people will bookmark it, subscribe to your RSS feed, and type in the URL directly.
SEO doesn’t produce immediate results, but is crucial over the long term. Just as it takes time to build a following, it also takes a while to build credibility and authority with the search engines. Note from the graph that search was the lowest source of traffic to this blog for its first three months, and for six of the first nine months. But it’s been the top source of visits for nine of the past 10 months (the only exception resulting from the spike in direct and referral traffic to the Nifty 50 Top Women of Twitter post). And even with the falloff in direct and referral traffic over the last two months (more about that in a moment), search traffic has held up fairly well.
A closer look at Google stats (see below) reveals an even more remarkable point about search: while direct and referral traffic tend to be “spiky” based on the popularity of individual posts, search traffic is more consistent over time.
Social media is important. Of the top dozen sources of traffic, four were social networking or related sites: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and HootSuite. Twitter is the most productive, driving more than half of all non-blog social media visits. Including blogs, more than one of every seven visits came through social media (blogs, social networking, social bookmarking, or tools like HootSuite and bit.ly) sites.
Syndication is also helpful. Three of the top 12 traffic sources for this blog were syndication or content aggregation sites: B2B Marketing Zone, Social Media Informer and Social Media Today. The best syndication sites will vary by industry, so choose sites appropriate for your blog subject manner. Don’t overlook smaller blog directories and RSS syndication sites that can collectively drive notable traffic (as well as providing valuable links for SEO purposes).
Digging deeper into the Google Analytics results and correcting errors (such as GA sometimes mislabeling search visits as referral traffic) yields a more detailed picture. Search is the top source of traffic for most blogs over time. But search is affected by every link, so a multi-faceted approach is critical. For example, links from other blogs may provide only modest direct traffic, but they influence search engines and other social media sources, as well as increasing direct traffic.
Post frequency matters. Back to that dropoff over the past two months—in a way, this blog is a victim of its own success. Because I’ve obtained several wonderful and active clients through my blogging, I’ve had less time to write posts over the past 60-90 days, and the resulting dip in direct and referral traffic is readily apparent in the first graph above. But for corporate blogs, the lesson is clear: maintaining consistent post frequency is crucial to maintaining high blog traffic and continuous growth.
A substantial share of “Other Referring Sites” traffic to this blog comes from WebMarketCentral, the website marketing resources portal. The lesson for companies is to feature your blog prominently on your corporate website, as that can be a rich source of visits.
All in all, your specific results will vary, but again the key to getting more traffic to your blog is a balanced approach of activities including search engine optimization (SEO), social networking, social bookmarking, syndication, blog commenting and guest posting. And of course writing compelling content for your audience.
New Features Added to B2B Marketing Zone and Social Media Informer
Wednesday, August 17th, 2011Several great new features were recently added to the B2B Marketing Zone and Social Media Informer by co-founder Tony Karrer. One of the most obvious is that posts now include images, making the sites more visually appealing than the former text-only design.
Both of these sites bring together content from leading experts and companies like Brian Carroll, Paul Dunay, Ambal Balakrishnan, Harry Hoover, Gini Dietrich–really too many to list. You can find a long list of the Featured sources on the right side. There is a lot more content that comes in as well beyond the Featured sources.
The home page itself will show you the latest and best content at any time. For example as I’m writing this, I see a few great posts right up top:
- • 3 Questions To Ask About The Qualified Lead You Just Received…
- • Do B2B Editors Get Twitter?
- • The evolution of social media power and influence
Best is decided by the system based on social signals – that’s clicks, views, twitter, delicious, and other kinds of inputs that tell us what people are doing with the content. And the goal of both sites is to make sure that great content from lesser known sources still makes it to the top.
Each day, week, month and year, each site generates a “Best Of” Edition. You can change the Edition at any time. That allows you to see some really great stuff beyond what you typically see on the home page. For example, included in the July 25th edition on Social Media Informer are these posts (among others):
- • How Small Businesses Can Use LinkedIn to Grow
- • Fifteen Incredible Mobile Statistics
- • Web Presence Optimization, Reloaded
Posts on both sites are categorized by subject. Topics on B2B Marketing Zone include social media, inbound marketing and business blogging. Social Media Informer covers topics such as social networking, small business and brand monitoring.
The intent of the sites is to aggregate and make it easy to find great content. You’ll see only see a snippet of each post. When you click the link, you will be directed back to the source. In other words, we curate the content, but don’t own it. You can still comment and interact with the content on the original site.
Visiting these sites is a great way to find fresh content, but you can also subscribe to newsletter digests on both sites.
This is a quick overview of the new features on these sites. Tony and I look forward to continuing to improve them. If you have thoughts, or comments, please feel free to contact Tony Karrer via email at: akarrer@techempower.com.
20 Ways to Generate ROI from a Corporate Blog
Tuesday, May 10th, 2011The “ROI of social media” (or lack thereof) is a hot, and still hotly contested, topic. I summarized arguments from both sides a few months ago in The Social Media ROI Debate. More recently, numerous writers including Olivier Blanchard, Neil Glassman and Mark Schaefer have tried to make the case that social media ROI is real, can be measured, and must be measured.
Yet a Bazaarvoice/CMO Club study showed that only 15% of CMOs could point to a “significant return” from Facebook marketing efforts, while 9% report no ROI and 35% basically had no idea. Jacquie McCarman argued in It’s Not Your CEO’s Fault He’s a Social Media Moron that “Most C-levels will scroll down to the bottom line to determine effectiveness of any campaign but what many don’t realize is that the bottom line definitions have changed with this new-fangled internet technology. All of the old measurements are moot.”
Austen Mayor writes that although “executives like numbers,” social media efforts should proceed even without hard ROI attached because “The sooner a company starts climbing the deep functionalities learning curve, the sooner their Klout score will be at a respectable level,” and “social media might be bigger than the industrial revolution in terms of societal effects.” On ClickZ, Heidi Cohen reports that even at this stage, only one in three companies are even trying to measure social media ROI, because doing that is hard, though she also outlines five other social media metrics that matter. And another recent study from McKinsey concluded that, whether you can directly measure ROI or not, companies that embrace social media are more profitable than those who don’t, and “those that fail to implement social media could be making a “critical mistake”.”
It’s challenging to get the metrics really needed to measure social media ROI primarily because social media is much more like public relations than it is like direct marketing or search engine advertising. It can influence your prospects to buy from you, but doesn’t normally lead straight to a purchase. Nevertheless, social media activity consumes resources and therefore must produce business results–or those resources will be spent somewhere else. Marketers need to do the best they can with measurement, but also think about how to move their social media followers, who are often near the top of the purchase funnel, into and along the sales process.
The core of social media marketing efforts should be the corporate blog. Through a blog, marketers become publishers, providing their audience with relevant and valuable content. Publishing has historically relied on advertising, or sponsorships, to pay for content production. Corporate blogs can operate in a similar fashion, except that the sole sponsor or advertiser is the company itself. Essentially, marketers need to (carefully and tactfully) advertise on their own blogs. What should they promote? Here are 20 ideas.
Promote white papers / eBooks / reports for lead generation. According to MarketingSherpa (and many other sources), generating qualified leads remains the top priority for B2B marketers. Use “ads” in your blog sidebar, and in-post text links where appropriate, to drive visitors to your white paper or other gated content download pages. When you come out with a new white paper, summarize one of the main findings in a blog post with a link to the page to download the full document.
Generate webinar registrations. Again, you can “advertise” upcoming webinars in your sidebar. Also, as with white papers, write up a short summary of the webinar in a preview post linked to the signup form. After the webinar (if it’s been recorded), write a follow-up post answering questions from the event and directing visitors to the recorded version online.
Build your email subscriber list. Feature a newsletter signup box prominently near the upper-right corner of your blog. From time to time, write “teaser” posts informing readers of what content they are missing, but could be getting, as a newsletter subscriber.
Invite visitors to hear your experts speak or meet you live. Exhibiting at an upcoming trade show? Speaking at an event? Attending a local tweetup? Let your readers know! Social media is a great way to make more in-real-life contacts.
Get more from your presentations. For those readers who aren’t able to make it to that industry event to hear your product expert speak live, extend the life of that carefully crafted presentation by posting it on a social content sharing site like Slideshare. Include a call to action at the end of the presentation or a link to learn more.
Display testimonials linked to case studies in your sidebar. Your customers’ words are more powerful than your own.
Offer a free trial of your product (if practical).
Link to product information from within your blog posts. While it’s inappropriate to simply write a blog post extolling the wonderfulness of your product or service (that’s a marketing slick, not a helpful blog post), there will be times when, in presenting a solution to a problem, a mention of your product naturally fits in. Or better yet, a text description of your product (e.g. “help desk software” instead of the product name). Link it to the page on your website about that product. Most readers won’t bother clicking on the link, but those who do likely have an interest in the product. And as a side benefit, this is helpful for SEO.
Make your content easy to share by including social sharing buttons on your blog posts. This doesn’t directly lead to ROI, but when readers share your content, they are enhancing your reputation by implicitly giving your their endorsements.
Grow your social network by including links to your Twitter account, Facebook page, YouTube channel and other social media points of presence. Again, this doesn’t produce leads directly, but it gives you more “at bats” with your audience.
Integrate social media activities with your CRM system. If there is an individual in your CRM system who is also following you on Twitter, or who likes you on Facebook, or who has left a comment on your blog, that should be noted. If there are several individuals from the same prospect company doing these things, that should really be noted. Don’t pass up the chance to get closer to these people.
Respond to comments (helpfully and appropriately). It’s not always proper to “sell” when responding to a comment, but when pointing someone to information about your products or services that can solve their problems is pertinent, don’t be afraid to do so!
Amplify new product or service announcements (carefully). A blog post isn’t the place to publish a press release, but when apropos, it is a perfectly reasonable place to link to one. Promote the announcement in your sidebar or link to naturally from within a related post.
Answer questions in your blog posts. Some of the most popular posts I’ve written on this blog were essentially extended responses to client questions. Common customer questions will very often pertain to your products or services. Again, while blog posts shouldn’t be too salesy, it’s perfectly acceptable to mention products or services (with links to more information, case studies or white papers) when required to answer an inquiry.
Gather market intelligence. Response rates for email surveys continue to decline; who has the time to answer a survey? (At least without a very attractive incentive to do so.) A corporate blog is a great vehicle, however, for gathering intelligence from your customers and prospects in small chunks. Include a quick poll widget in your sidebar to gather answers to yes/no or multiple choice questions. Ask essay-type questions in your blog posts and encourage readers to answer with a comment.
Showcase your customer support. Got some great support resources online? An active and helpful support forum? A responsive customer support Twitter account? Write about and link to these resources in your blog; customers may need to be reminded, and prospects may (hopefully) be impressed by the breadth and sophistication of your support offerings.
Promote your “evergreen” content and assets. These can be things like lists (e.g., Aira Bongko’s extensive list of Twitter apps or Ken Burbary’s wiki on social media monitoring tools), industry-specific glossaries (like this one on IT service delivery terms), free online tools (HubSpot’s Website Grader has been a phenomenally successful lead generator), collections of resources, free software utilities–the possibilities are limited only by your creativity.
Highlight your partners. If you sell through any kind of channel, find creative ways to link to your partners, either within blog posts (for example, when discussing a specific topic where one of your partners has expertise or writing about a specific geographic region) or even by “advertising” for them in your sidebar. Helping your partners ultimately helps you. Recognition on your blog can even be an incentive for greater performance.
Make it easy for the press to contact you. A well-written blog can be a PR magnet. A journalist is conducting research for a story…finds your blog…is impressed by the facts and knowledge conveyed and wants to learn more. Where do you send them–to a standard blog “contact us” form? A better approach is to make it prominent and easy for members of the media to click directly to your website’s online newsroom or media page. Link to this in your sidebar and on the “About” and “Contact” pages on your blog.
Highlight your company’s community involvement. Okay, this won’t directly produce leads or sales, but it helps spread the kind of publicity that can definitely cast your company in a favorable light, help generate media coverage, and make people more likely to want to do business with you. Be strategic about this; look for opportunities to showcase your company’s expertise while also doing good for society. Two quick examples:
- • A manufacturer of industrial control devices donated some of its products and engineering expertise to students at a local college to help build a solar-powered vehicle for a green energy competition. The car won, but more importantly so did the students, the college, the company (which got some great press and was able to show off it’s engineering capabilities) and, ultimately, perhaps the environment.
- • An IT services firm donated the time of several of its developers to local non-profit groups for a weekend. Again, the non-profits benefited (by getting applications built at no cost, including an improved online donation system for on group), the firm was able to demonstrate the prowess of its developers, and the event was well-covered by local media.
Social media ROI may indeed be challenging to measure, but ultimately, it’s a business activity requiring resources and so it must produce a return. The ideas above are a place to start. Got more? Please share them in the comments.
12 of the Best WordPress Guides, Hacks and Plugins of 2010
Thursday, February 10th, 2011WordPress is no longer just the leading blog platform, but is now the most popular open-source CMS (content management system) as well. Among the many reasons for the popularity of WordPress: it’s affordable, search engine-friendly, reasonably easy to use, and extensible through an incredible array of plugins.
Discover some great sources for free and reasonably-priced themes, essential plugins you may not be aware of, SEO tips, and other interesting techniques and hacks here in a dozen of the best WordPress guides of last year.
WordPress Themes and Plugins
31 Websites Where To Find Free HQ WordPress Themes by W3Mag
The English is broken but the list of free template sources, like Wp Mojo, eBlog Templates and ThemeLab is excellent.
20 Excellent Free WordPress 3.0 Themes by Blogfreakz
Another excellent selection of free themes, including Heliumified which has a nice Apple-like look and feel.
10 Free WordPress Themes for Small Businesses by American Express OPEN Forum
Zachary Sniderman highlights 10 interesting free themes, along with recommendations on how each could be used and optimized.
32 Essential WordPress Plugins I Use…And You Don’t! by Andy Beal
An outstanding list of useful WordPress plugins from Andy Beal, author of Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online and the brain behind the Trackur social media monitoring tool.
25 Top WordPress Plugins You Should Know About by Ask WordPress Girl
Angela Bowman shares her “clean and simple list of the plugins I use most often on my WordPress sites” for SEO, feeds, forms, security, Twitter and more.
WordPress SEO
10 SEO Tips To Get Your WordPress Blog Ranking Highly In The Search Engines by SEOheap
Helpful guidelines on plugins, post titles, pages, permalinks and pinging improve the search engine rank of and increase search traffic to your WordPress blog.
8 Effective SEO Techniques Every WordPress Blogger Should Use by BloggingPro
Robyn-Dale Samuda offers guidance on navigation setup, image tagging, sitemaps, permalinks, plugins and more for search-optimizing a WordPress site or blog.
WordPress Tips, Techniques and Hacks
How I Create and Manage A WordPress Website by Graywolf’s SEO Blog
Michael Wolf likes to use WordPress to create “magazine or newspaper style site(s)…(because) it’s easier to administer, easier to get writers to upload and format their own content, and it has RSS and other social tools built in or that can be integrated very easily with plugins,” and in this post explains his process for setting up a WordPress site from keyword research and “evergreen” content to design and backups.
The Comprehensive Guide for a Powerful CMS using WordPress – Part one: 101 Techniques for a Powerful CMS using WordPress by Noupe Design Blog
***** 5 Stars
A nicely crafted and illustrated reference to how to do a variety of things with WordPress from setting up a static home page and custom navigation bar to adding breadcrumbs and widgetizing a theme, footer and page menu.
5 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do with WordPress by Let’s Do It!
Zeke Camusio shows that WordPress isn’t just for blogging; it can also be used to build an e-commerce site, social network site, image gallery, email auto-responder system or message board.
Code to Create Custom Share Buttons for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & Delicious by B2B Online Marketing
If you want to make it easy for readers to share your blog posts socially—but find social media sharing tools such as ShareThis overkill because of the overwhelming number of options they present—here are simple code snippets to create custom sharing buttons for the most popular social networking sites.
35+ Most Essential WordPress Tricks and Hacks by Artatm
Ever wondered how to insert some standard text after each post? Automatically display each post’s word count? Number your comments, or make author comments stand out? Learn how to do all of that and more in this outstanding list of WordPress tricks, categorized into Post Hacks, Comment Hacks, Tags,categories and Archives hacks, Search hacks and Other General Hacks.
B2B Blogging Trends for 2011
Tuesday, February 8th, 2011Blogging is often viewed as the core component of a B2B social media marketing strategy, and other than discussion forums, it’s the most mature component of social media. Facebook, Twitter and even newer tools like Quora may be sexier and get more attention, but blogs are the workhorses essential to making social media marketing work. Research from HubSpot shows that small businesses with blogs have twice as many Twitter followers as those who don’t. Increased search engine visibility, targeted traffic and enhanced brand image are just a few of the benefits of business blogging.
So what’s next for B2B blogging? What trends are likely to emerge in the coming year? To answer those questions, the founders of the B2B Marketing Zone asked 22 of the most influential b2b marketing and PR bloggers—including Roxanne Darling, Jay Baer, Ardath Albee, Erik Qualman and Chris Abraham—for their prognostications. You can get the whole story in B2B Blogging Trends in 2011, a free (and no registration required) white paper from Aggregage (the software that powers the BMZ site). Among the findings:
- • If you don’t have a blog yet, 2011 is the year to start one. As less than half of all B2B companies currently have blogs, there’s still an opportunity to stand out and establish thought leadership in your niche. If your company doesn’t have a blog, you’re not a laggard…quite yet. But time is running out to grab the best intellectual spots of turf on the B2B blogging landscape.
- • Blogging helps a company demonstrate expertise, it’s ideal for search, and as Blake Landau points out, “As push marketing becomes less effective, blogs become more important.”
- • Blogs are not islands; as pointed out above, they are the central point to social marketing efforts. Blogging is most effective when integrated with other communications efforts including PR and email marketing.
- • Although there is still opportunity to get started with a business blog, it’s crucial to do it right. Jay Baer predicts an “explosion of bad B2B blogs” in the coming year as companies scramble to embrace the medium, but many fail to do it well. To stand out and achieve business success with a blog, it’s critical to focus narrowly on the information needs of your customers and prospects, as Kristin Zhivago and Harry Hoover both note.
There’s much more. Again, you can download the complete Aggregage white paper on B2B Blogging Trends in 2011 here.
