B2B Marketing Blog | Webbiquity

Posts Tagged ‘business blogs’

Best Business Blogging Guides and Tips of 2010

Monday, January 3rd, 2011

How can you improve your blog’s position in search engines? Grow your audience? Effectively generate content contributions from subject matter experts in your organization? Produce more stylish and readable content? Find free, high-quality images to add visual appeal to your posts? Avoid common mistakes that can cost you traffic and goodwill?

Discover the answers to all of these questions and more here in the final selection of the best guides and tips for business blogging from the past year.

Blogging Guides, Tips and Techniques

The Step-by-Step Guide to Guest Blogging by 2 Create a Website

One key way to spread the fame of your own blog is to guest post on others; you reach a new audience, hopefully pick up some new fans, and get valuable backlinks to your blog. Here, Ann Smarty contributes a guest post on best practices in guest posting, from planning your approach and brainstorming topics to following through by responding to comments.

5 Reasons Why You Should Respond to Every Comment by Daily Blog Tips

In another guest post, Pat Flynn details five benefits of actively responding to comments on your blog, such as the fact that doing so encourages more comments: “People don’t leave comments just so they can be left unread. By replying, you’re not only letting people know that you’re actively involved in reading the comments, but you’re encouraging them to come back and comment again later.”

7 Ways to Promote Your Blog Posts for Maximum Exposure by Quick Online Tips

In yet another guest post, Jonathan Beebe offers seven common (e.g., promote via Twitter and Facebook) and not-so-obvious (e.g., use automated social bookmarking tools like IMAutomater and Shareaholic tips for increasing traffic to your blog.

How To Optimise Your WordPress Ping List by Pimp My WordPress

A colossal list of more than 120 sites to add to your ping list for automatic notification each time you publish a new post.

Best practices for a killer corporate blog by iMedia Connection

Sarah Hofstetter offers 25 outstanding tips for developing, maintaining and promoting a successful corporate blog, from creating an editorial calendar and incorporating visuals to setting up email distribution and tracking actionable metrics.

Blogs are Becoming the New Front Door for Prospects: Is Yours Open? by MarketingSherpa

Sean Donahue notes that, “If you’re still on the fence about the importance of a company blog, consider this trend: Many B2B marketers report that their team’s blog — not the company homepage — is now the most popular entry point for online visitors,” then provides tips for maximizing company blog success.

Why Host a Blog on Your Corporate Website? by ClickZ

The smart and prolific Mark Jackson supplies five compelling reasons for adding a blog to a company website, both subjective (a blog gives you the opportunity to demonstrate thought leadership) and objective (blogs are much more effective than typical commercial website content at attracting unsolicited links).

What’s Up, Blog? Seven Ways to Revive a Neglected B2B Blog by MLT Creative

Acknowledging that “Blogging is hard work. You must consistently create relevant compelling content,” Martine Hunter presents seven tactics for re-engaging with a neglected blog, including refreshing old blog posts, turning news releases into blog articles, and enlisting guest bloggers to lighten the workload.

How I Achieved Blogging Success In 30 Days by bizchickblogs

In you guessed it–another guest post–Wayne Howard describes his method for quickly building the following for a new blog, using tactics such as Facebook postings, the BloggerLuv community, Twitter, LinkedIn and contests.

Inciting Insight: How to make thought leaders think by The Communicator

Peter Schram offers a “recipe” for designing a thought leadership program within an organization to create a steady stream of fresh and compelling content, such as priming the pump: “Ideas are usually generated incrementally. This means that the more ‘inspiration’ that a thought leader is exposed to, the more valuable and insightful their ‘Big Ideas’ will be.”

35 Ways to Market Your Blog by Junta42

The brilliant Joe Pulizzi shares his list of 35 “common and some uncommon” methods for promoting a blog, from putting your blog URL on your business cards and leveraging Twitter hashtags to showcasing employees and using the blog as your customer FAQ.

Is blog marketing dead or just growing up? The naked (conversation) facts by conversionation

J-P De Clerck reports that less than half of companies have blogs, despite the fact that “blogs are real social media hubs and cornerstones of inbound marketing.” Furthermore, many of the companies that do blog don’t do it well; nearly three-quarters of all corporate blog posts don’t reflect the company’s message. Given that more than half of all Internet users in the U.S. read blogs, and the figure is expected to rise to 60% in the next four years, J-P notes that corporate blogging, far from being “dead,” is an area of growing importance and opportunity.

How to Make an Awesome Corporate Blog by Entrepreneur Magazine

Bianca Male shares tactics for corporate blog success (such as “Your content should go beyond your company…contribute to the discussion of topics that readers are interested in, by talking about trends in the industry and having thought leaders offer their take, for example”) and links to some noteworthy examples, closing with “If you can’t commit to focusing on fresh, interesting content, avoiding all direct marketing ploys, (and) getting creative and moving beyond boring company info…just don’t do it.”

10 Proven Blog Marketing Tactics You Can Use Today by The Future Buzz

Adam Singer provides 10 valuable tips for effective blogs, including investing in a custom design, connecting with the social web “power users” in your segment, and even making enemies (the kind that will debate you blog-to-blog).

What Can You Learn from 7 Awesome Corporate Blogs? by KISSmetrics

Cameron Chapman highlights winning corporate blogs (such as The Facebook Blog), discusses the key features and provides takeaways from each (e.g., “having a huge blogging team that includes employees from throughout your organization makes your blog much more engaging for users. Your CEO should be blogging, but so should your interns”), and concludes with a brief guide to starting a corporate blog.

9 Awesome Ways to Market a Business Blog by HubSpot Blog

Kipp Bodnar details nine techniques for increasing traffic to a company blog, like including your blog URL on business cards and in corporate email signatures, name-dropping media editors and other influencers, and checking out content networks in your niche (content syndication and aggregation sites such as Social Media Informer in the social media space).

Tim Gunn’s Top 5 Tips for More Stylish Content by Copyblogger

Erika Napoletano channels fashion authority Tim Gunn to provide style tips for bloggers, such as “SEO is not the new black” (“you don’t have to optimize every piece of content you create) and “conversation never goes out of style” (embrace comments).

Get High Resolution Photos And Edit For Free by Trailblaze Social Media With Josh

Joshua Lyons reveals his favorite source for free photos and his favorite free online tool for editing them.

Five Key Ingredients for a Successful Corporate Blog by Sysomos

Mark Evans offers five commonsense, but not always adhered to, recommendations for corporate blogging success, starting with the need for quality content: “Content that provides insight, perspective and information. At its core, a corporate blog has to give its readers information they can use to increase their knowledge, learn new things or receive insight.”

Ten Blogging Mistakes I Learned in Year One by Nectar

Josh Wade shares 10 common blogging mistakes to avoid, like misspelling someone’s name when you highlight them in post (oops!), picking fights, trying to be everywhere rather than focusing, and being a conformist.

8 Incredibly Simple Ways to Get More People to Read Your Content by Copyblogger

Pamela Wilson suggests that “writing less and styling your text so it’s easy to read” is key to attracting greater blog readership, and offers corresponding tips for doing so effectively such as breaking up blocks of copy using subheads, bulleted lists and numbers.

Blog SEO

11 Must Do SEO Tips for WordPress by Better Blog Building

An excellent list of SEO tips for WordPress blogs, including using (optimized) images, installing key plugins like All In One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps Generator, and linking within your posts to relevant older posts.

6 Ways to Optimize Your Blog for Search Engines by Social Media Examiner

Jim Lodico offers six helpful tips for improving your blog’s position in search engine results. While the tactics themselves are mostly common knowledge, the value of this post is in the tools Jim recommends (such as SEOCentro’s Meta Tag Analyzer for optimizing meta tags).

7 Ways to Create Blog Content That Attracts More Back Links by Digital Labz

Links are critical both for SEO purposes and attracting direct traffic–but they don’t appear magically. This post provides proven strategies for naturally attracting more backlinks to your blog posts, such as capitalizing on current events, making big lists (think “101 Tips” rather than “10 Tips”) and creating an infographic.

Link Building Tips for Personal Blogs by SEOmoz

Links are SEO fuel, and in this post SEO guru Rand Fishkin helpfully advises bloggers on which link-building tactics to avoid (generic directories, link buying) as well as dozen technigues to use such as niche blog listing sites, answering questions in online forums and social sharing in order to improve your blog’s rank in search.

And Finally…

90 Tips To Make Your Blog Rock by Jeff Bullas

And as if all of ideas above aren’t enough to keep you busy for the next year, Jeff Bullas offers 90 more including writing about industry trends, highlighting customer successes, writing a series of “how to” posts and then turning those into short videos, turn the results of surveys or polls into blog posts and more.

Related Posts

Best Business Blogging Tips and Guides of 2010 (So Far), Part 1

Best Business Blogging Tips and Guides of 2010 (So Far), Part 2

Tags: Adam Singer, Ann Smarty, Bianca Male, bizchickblogs, blog SEO, BloggerLuv, blogging for business, Business Blogging, business blogs, Cameron Chapman, ClickZ, corporate blogging, Daily Blog Tips, Erika Napletano, Future Buzz, guest posting, HubSpot, IMAutomater, Jeff Bullas, Jim Lodico, Joe Pulizzi. J-P De Clerck, Jonathan Beebe, Josh Wade, Joshua Lyons, Junta42, Kipp Bodnar, KISSmetrics, Mark Evans, Mark Jackson, MarketingSherpa, Martine Hunter, MLT Creative, Pamela Wilson, Pat Flynn, Peter Schram, Rand Fishkin, Sarah Hofstetter, Sean Donahue, Shareaholic, Sysomos, Timm Gunn, Twitter hashtags, Wayne Howard, writing a business blog
Posted in Business Blogging, Social Media Marketing | 5 Comments »

Five Benefits of Blogging for Business

Monday, June 21st, 2010

Blogging provides business executives and marketers with opportunities beyond and distinct from a typical company website. Because they are less formal, more interactive, and  focused on industry issues—as opposed to just the company’s offerings—they provide a forum that is viewed much differently by readers than a vendor website. Blogs are seen as key sources of information rather than just promotion. Blogs are also core to a successful social media marketing strategy.

Here are five key benefits of blogging for businesses.

Establish expertise and credibility. Winning the business, particularly in the b2b world, is usually about doing the best job of solving the customer’s problem. Your website is about your product or service, and the benefits it provides to buyers. Your blog is about something related but much larger: your expertise. If your offering is unique, your blog provides a platform for demonstrating your industry understanding and insights that led to your approach. Even more importantly, if your product or service is difficult to differentiate, a blog gives you a way to create differentiation via your knowledge. Expertise is a powerful differentiator; in commoditized markets, it may even be your only effective one.

Become a resource. Following from the first benefit, establishing a position of expertise makes you a resource for industry influencers such as the media and other bloggers. You’re no longer just a source of information about your specific product / service / company, but also about bigger industry issues, trends and developments. This leads to coverage and quotes in a broader array of media, further enhancing the reputation of your blog and the image of your company as an industry leader.

Create a dialogue. Websites are one-way communication, a broadcast medium. I write about my stuff, you read it. Blogs in contrast are interactive: I take a position on an industry issue, you leave a comment, I respond, another reader chimes in with a follow-on comment, etc. Each post can potentially become a conversation, not just a monologue. That creates reader engagement, a deeper level of relationship than just passive information consumption.

Develop new relationships. Becoming an industry expert and resource, and creating dialogs, enables you to establish relationships with prospective customers, potential partners and other industry influencers that likely wouldn’t have happened otherwise. A blog lets you attract readers with your knowledge, interests, opinions and observations in a way your website can’t, expanding your circle of influence and business relationships.

Search engine visibility. Blogs are very powerful in terms of SEO for four reasons:

• • Thought leadership: due to the difference in the nature of blog content versus vendor websites (thought leadership vs. promotional), search engines often give more authority to blogs.
• • Blog-specific directories: while blogs are eligible for most of the same types of links as standard websites (e.g. directories, social bookmarketing sites, news sites, articles), blogs also have their own unique link opportunities through blog-specific directories and RSS feed syndication sites.
• • Recency: blog content is typically updated much more frequently than commercial website content, providing an advantage in increasingly real-time search results.
• • Link bait: again due to the informational rather than promotion nature of the content, blog posts are more likely to draw natural links (e.g. from news stories, articles and other blogs) than website content.

A blog isn’t right for every company (more about that idea in an upcoming post), but where feasible, they provide a powerful complement to standard websites with unique strengths for building a brand’s online presence and impact.

In Minnesota? Don’t miss the SCORE Social Media and Internet Marketing Boot Camp, Thursday, June 24 in Bloomington.

Tags: blogging for business, Business Blogging, business blogs, key influencers, link bait, SEO, thought leadership
Posted in Business Blogging | 8 Comments »

Social Media Marketing Strategies for 2010

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Marketing Sherpa last week released its 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark report. Though the full report runs $400, much interesting data can be gleaned from the free executive summary. The report’s authors begin by noting that:

“An important transition in the use of social media for marketing purposes is taking place. A rapidly increasing segment of marketers are gaining the experience required to advance from novice to competent practitioner capable of achieving social marketing objectives and proving ROI…In the past year, marketers have been captivated by the ample hype about Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other social media platforms…(but) they jumped into this new medium thinking tactically about the latest social media platforms they could add to the mix rather than thinking strategically about the objectives they needed to achieve. In the year ahead, we see social marketing maturing to the point where a majority of organizations will be in transition from the trial phase to the strategic phase of the learning curve.”

Among the key findings from the report:

Despite the lingering economic malaise, companies across virtually all industries plan to increase budgets for social media marketing in 2010. Such plans are most nearly universal in retail and ecommerce, where 79% of survey respondents plan to increase budgets, with only 1% planning budget reductions for social media. In computer hardware and software, 55% of firms plan budget increases while 5% say they will cut budgets. In business and consumer services, the figures are 54% increase, 1% decrease.

When asked which objectives they planned to target and measure, 88% of “strategic” social media marketers (those who have reached the highest level of social media marketing maturity) answered “increase website traffic” while 75% said “lead generation.” Interestingly, PR-type measures—such as improving brand or product awareness and reputation—scored in the middle of the pack of 10 possible objectives, with just over half of marketers indicating they would target and measure these objectives. Note that these are some of the most effective uses of social media, and arguably much more important from a strategic standpoint than simply increasing web traffic—but they are also much more difficult to measure with any precision. Somewhat surprisingly, increasing customer support quality and decreasing support costs were identified as the least important objectives, with only about a third of companies in the MarketingSherpa benchmarking study planning to target and measure these goals.

This key chart compares the difficulty and effectiveness of various social media tactics, as well as their level of usage. Note that the four most popular tactics are microblogging such as  Twitter ( highly effective with low effort); blogging (highly effective but high effort); social networking (moderately effective, low effort); and multimedia content sharing such as images, video and presentations (low effectiveness, moderate effort). Fewer marketers are focusing efforts on blogger relations, which is viewed as being the most effective tactic but also the one requiring the most effort. That result seems somewhat counterintuitive, as companies that actively use tactics like blogging and Twitter will find blogger relations less taxing than will firms who rely primarily on “pitching” bloggers to obtain coverage.

From the buyer standpoint, the two most popular uses of social media (with roughly 60% each) in the commercial realm are to “learn about new products / features / services” and to “learn about specials and sales.” What is critical for marketers to understand is that buyers are talking about two distinctly different sets of products and services here. Buyers are most interested in price for items like a popular model of flat screen TV, common office supplies or today’s lunch; but they are seeking thought leadership when considering hardware, software or services to solve a vexing business problem. They don’t care about the technical details behind today’s lunch special or a thought leadership white paper on “Solving Your Mid-Day Hunger Issues,” and are likely to be skeptical of a coupon for a 5% discount on outsourcing a critical IT project or purchasing a key piece of enterprise software.

Finally, when using social media for research purposes, buyers are most interested in hearing from independent third parties, with blogs, boards and forums being the most popular tools. Secondarily, they want to read about results from peers and colleagues, with blogs and Twitter being the most popular media. However, close behind, vendors are the third-most sought source of information; blogs and Twitter are again the preferred platform, with wikis being the least popular. The lessons? It’s critical to get key influencers and customers talking about your products and services, and if you’re not currently writing a blog or optimizing your use of Twitter, you need to.

Again, you can purchase the full report or download the free executive summary of this social media benchmarking report from MarketingSherpa here.

Tags: 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report, business blogs, increase website traffic, MarketingSherpa, microblogging, social media strategy, Twitter
Posted in Social Media Marketing | 10 Comments »