Posts Tagged ‘blogging for business’
Best Business Blogging Tips of 2009, Part 1
Sunday, January 10th, 2010How can you keep generating fresh ideas for blog posts? Use email to extend the reach of your blog? Build links and traffic? And most importantly, use a company blog to drive real business results?
Find the answers to these questions and others here in more of the best articles and blog posts on business blogging last year.
7 Ways to Keep Fresh Content Flowing On Your Blog by ProBlogger
Darren Rowse offers seven tips for avoiding “blogger’s block” and keeping fresh ideas and content flowing on your blog, from mind mapping and answering reader questions to taking advantage of guest post opportunities.
How to Build Your Blog Using Good Old-Fashioned E-mail by Copyblogger
Dean Rieck details several methods for utilizing email to promote your blog posts, as well as helpful techniques for encouraging email subscriptions and properly managing your blog email list.
37 Tips for Optimizing Blogs and Feeds – SES New York by Online Marketing Blog
Lee Odden interviews Michael Gray of Atlas Web Services, Sally Falkow of Expansion Plus, Michel Leconte of SEO Samba and Rebecca Lieb, VP of U.S. operations for Econsultancy, about SEO, link building and RSS tactics for business websites and blogs. Among the tips they provide: keep keywords in mind for blog posts and titles, write timely blog posts, and have your own domain.
10 ways to boost the value of your corporate blog by iMedia Connection
Chris Baggott offers tips for finding the “the successful formula for both high ROI and reader satisfaction” for corporate blogs that actually contribute to bottom line success, such as keeping search top of mind, producing an adequate volume of content, and writing with an appropriate tone (humble, humorous, honest) for a blog. Another noteworthy post from iMedia Connection is Top link-building strategies for your corporate blog, in which Justin Evans suggests tactics such as commenting on other industry blogs and linking to both your own and others’ blog posts on social bookmarking sites to build valuable links for blog SEO.
7 Tips for Making Your Blog Stand Out from the Rest by SEO Hosting
Eric Brantner presents helpful tips for making a blog unique and compelling, including building relationships with readers, promoting your blog “like crazy” through social media and guest blogging, and, my favorite: “if you aren’t first, be the best” when covering breaking-news type stories.
Why Your Blog Beats Your Website to Your Prospects by Content Marketing Today
Of course, blogs and websites serve different purposes for businesses. Website content is more static and focused on the company’s specific products and services, while blogs offer a steady stream of fresh content and thought-leadership type pieces. In this excellent post, Newt Barrett goes beyond these obvious observations, offering case studies of how business organizations have taken advantage of the unique strengths of each medium to drive business results and acquire new customers.
Content Marketing with Blogs: Fishing for Business, or Catch-and-Release? by Writing on the Web
The consistently brilliant Patsi Krakoff warns against “catch and release” blogging—attracting readers with great content, then failing to provide any call to action based on that content. To rectify this, she suggests what she terms the CODA system: Content, Outreach, Design, Action. The action isn’t always a sales pitch, but is a request to do something more than extends the relationship, such as following you on Twitter or Facebook, tweeting your blog post, subscribing, or downloading an e-book or white paper.
27 Blogging Secrets to Power Your Community by Community and Social Media
Chris Brogan shares more than two dozen tips for attracting more blog traffic, divided into three categories: Starter Moves (e.g. use an intriguing title, start with a question); Technical Stuff (e.g. clean layout, proper permalink structure); and The Bonus Round (e.g. share your posts using social media platforms, link to other blogs often).
10 ways to increase the number of blog comments by How to Make My Blog
Marko Saric offers tips for making your blog more interactive and conversational by generating more comments, such as asking questions, thanking your commenters, and commenting on other blogs.
Increase the Effectiveness of Your Next Guest Post with a Landing Page by ProBlogger
In this guest post, Jade Craven recommends using a landing page to draw traffic to your own blog through guest posts on other blogs. She identifies three types of landing pages, outlines three steps for creating a killer landing page, and shows two ways to get attention for the page. Another noteworthy post on ProBlogger is 11 Tips for Getting Your Comments Noticed on a Popular Blog, in which Darren Rowse offers tips for getting your comments noticed and driving traffic back to your blog such as being the early bird, disagreeing with the post, asking a question, or using humor.
How To Find The Best Free Image/Photo/Graphics Downloads For Your Blog Posts by Smackdown!
In this extensive post, Michael VanDeMar first explains why finding non-copyrighted images is important, then explains how to find free images through government websites or Creative Commons licenses.
Can Blogs Help Drive Purchasing Decisions? by Social Media Today
Crystal King reports that a Forrester survey from the second quarter of 2008 found that only 16% of readers of company blogs trusted them. She notes, however, that more recent research indicates that both readership of and trust in blogs is increasing. Another survey in late 2008 conducted by JupiterResearch/BuzzLogic stated that “50 percent of frequent blog readers say they have taken an action after reading a blog.” Crytal emphasizes the importance of building up trust with corporate blog readers, and concludes “Bottom line, if your company isn’t blogging, it probably needs to be.”
5 Ways Your Blog Can Make Money by Conversation Marketing
The inimitable Ian Lurie details five ways—well really four, since “steal & cheat” is, as he notes, not an advisable long-term strategy—to profit from blogging. The most promising? Using it to build your business, though as Ian notes, “It’s not easy. It takes a long time. But it works, beautifully. I have yet to see someone who writes insightful, thoughtful stuff 1-2 times a week fail at it.”
Ten Ways to Crank Out Killer Posts in Ten Minutes or Less by Remarkablogger
Michael Martine presents tactics for quickly knocking out quality blog posts, such as answering questions from readers, reporting the results of a reader poll, or writing about the coolest person you’ve met recently.
How to Write an Effective Business Blog
Friday, January 8th, 2010Blogs are not a traditional marketing medium. Blogs written like extended brochures (in promotional language) don’t get read. They’re boring. A blog is rather, a place to share useful content. Instead of saying “We’re the leading producer of widgets…” or some other such self-promoting statement, demonstrate your leadership by writing about the many creative uses of widgets, what to look for in a widget, recent developments in the widget field, or whatever. Certainly you can promote your company and product in your blog, but this should be more in the form of sponsorship than selling language. The Marketing Eye blog once recommended an 80/20 rule for content; spend 80% of your words sharing knowledge, and 20% on promotion. I’d recommend more like a 90/10 ratio of interesting content to self-promotion.
A blog is not an ad, a traditional Web site or an online brochure. It is rather a place where your employees can speak to customers and prospects in their own unique voices. It is a place to demonstrate the collected knowledge and expertise of your company (that is, your people). And, through comments, it is a place to have a conversation with your customers and prospects, informally and openly. Compared to other marketing media, a blog is closest to a (well-written and informative) newsletter, but easier, faster, cheaper, and with the benefit of interaction.
To get started, select a blogging platform such as Blogger, TypePad or WordPress. All are easy to use, but each has its own quirks and advantages. Factors to consider include the option of hosting the blog on your own existing Web site, RSS feed capabilities, Trackback functionality, and of course personal preference. Personally, I’ve found Blogger to be the easiest, but WordPress to be the most powerful.
Who should write for your blog? Anyone in your company with 1) halfway decent writing skills and 2) knowledge of value to your customers and prospects. This means customer service reps, consultants, engineers, technicians (as well as, yes, marketers and executives) – anyone with in-depth knowledge of your product/service and who has direct interaction with customers. While your marketing group should have overall ownership of the blog, contributions should be open to those closest to the product and the customer, with interesting information or stories to share.
Make it easy to contact the author(s) of your blog. Most blogs have a contact link somewhere on the site; a few don’t provide any contact information at all (a pet peeve of mine). If you want to drive business with your blog, MarketingSherpa recommends adding a contact email link at the bottom of every posting. (To avoid being picked up by automated email address extraction programs used by spammers, write the email address as something like “nameATcompany.com” or “name-at-company-dot-com.”) Adding contact information to each post is particularly critical when you have multiple authors contributing to a single blog. Include each author’s Twitter link as well.
How often should you post to your blog? A good general rule to keep content fresh, yet not over-stretch your resources, is at least weekly but no more than daily. An exception to this is in the case of breaking news (for example, an insurance company tracking the progress of a hurricane, a company announcing a merger), where several posts in single day may be justified. Two to three posts weekly is decent frequency for a business blog, with Monday and Tuesday posts generally drawing the best traffic.
Avoid being derivative. Commenting on an industry news article or a post on another blog is fine, but devote most of your effort to creating unique and interesting content; after all, you want your company to be seen as a thought leader and expert in your field. Excessive use of content that been posted or reported elsewhere may generate search engine hits, but it doesn’t add value and so won’t make your blog stand out. An exception is periodic “best of” posts from other industry bloggers, which are often popular with readers and search engines alike.
Keep your posts related to your business and industry. Granted, this can be wide-ranging (such as posting on specific new laws or government regulations affecting your industry), as long as the topic is both relevant and of interest to your customers and prospects. Avoid off-topic postings, general musings and rants.
Keep in mind the nature of blog traffic; according to research firm comScore Networks, “Because blogs often source their visitors from search engines or links from other sites (often other blogs), many draw relatively large audiences that visit infrequently.” This means that each post has to add some value in and of itself. If you refer to a previous post in your blog, provide the link to it. Posts don’t need to be long, they just need to be useful.
Provide an RSS feed of your blog. (RSS stands for “really simple syndication.” You can find a useful and not overly-technical explanation of RSS here.) Information consumers have embraced RSS because of the control it gives them over the information they receive (generally without spam).
In addition to an RSS feed, allow visitors to sign up to receive your new posts via email. This also gives you some insight into who is visiting your blog.
Should you accept outside advertising on your blog? If the purpose of your blog is make money itself, ads are a potential revenue generator. Ad programs such as Google AdSense are popular and easy to integrate. But if you’re building a blog to promote your business, the only “ads” should be promotion of white papers, special offers or other information specific to your company.
Follow blogs that provide helpful tips and insights on business blogging, such as Conversation Marketing, Copyblogger and ProBlogger.
With a well-crafted blog in place, you can turn your attention to promoting your blog (the subject of another post in the near future here).
Why Businesses Need Blogs
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009In short, because blogs are well beyond the novelty stage, and now a mainstream communication medium for b2b vendors. They are generally trusted and progressively more widely read, and they draw an attractive demographic. They are search engine-friendly and one of the easiest, fastest and least expensive ways to increase the online exposure of your business.
Technorati now indexes more than 133 million blogs; nearly a million new blog posts are written every day. According to a recent study, 77% of active Internet users now read blogs. 51% of businesses view blogs as the most useful social media tool. Forrester Research reports that 91% of b2b buyers use social media in some form, and 58% react to content in social media (including blogs). And it isn’t just middle-management types using social media for b2b decision making; 77% of senior management team members listen to podcasts or webcasts, and 61% visit company blogs.
Consultant Suzanne Falter-Barns has echoed the blogs-are-mainstream theme and suggests that blogs will displace email newsletters and e-zines. Growing and maintaining an opt-in e-newsletter list has gotten more difficult for several reasons. First, due to their proliferation (almost every business now has a company newsletter – I even get one from my garbage collection service!). Second, due to overstuffed in-boxes, largely because of spam. Third, and related to the last point, over-zealous spam-blocking programs end up preventing many legitimate marketing emails from reaching recipients, leading to low deliverability rates. Fourth, they are a lot of work.
Blogs, on the other hand, are fast and reasonably easy to create. Anyone in your company with an interesting story to tell or knowledge to share can contribute. They are less formal than a newsletter. They are interactive. And they are loved by the media as well as by search engines.
Search engines (particularly Google) love blogs, for reasons partly philosophical (Google owns blog creation service Blogger) and partly technical. Blogs make your site “stickier” and more likely to be revisited by prospects looking for fresh, interesting content. A blog is also far easier to build than a Web site, requiring no or at least very limited knowledge of HTML and FTP. Keyword competition is also less intense for blogs and RSS feeds than for commercial websites (through with the rapid growth of business blogs, this is changing).
As blogger Ankesh Kothari has pointed out, blogs are fundamentally nothing more or less than a form of communication. If you can make money using other forms of communication (e.g. email or direct mail), then you can make money with a blog.
Most blogs don’t draw large audiences, but with a narrow industry focus, they do draw a highly targeted readership. By creating a blog that provides real value within your industry niche, and promoting it effectively, you can attract those highly relevant readers, create interaction, and enhance your company’s image by demonstrating your unique expertise.
