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| How to Create an Effective Business Blog Blogs are not a traditional marketing medium. If you write your blog the way you probably write your brochures (in promotional language), it won't get read. It will be 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 recommends 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 blog hosting service such as Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress, Blog-City, Xanga or MSN Spaces. 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. 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, Marketing Sherpa 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. 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. 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. 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.) According to researcher Nielsen/NetRatings, more than 11% of blog readers (i.e. more than five million people in the U.S. alone) monitor RSS feeds for blog updates. Author Sharon Housley believes that “Ultimately, RSS will be a standard, like email addresses and websites are now a 'must' for businesses. RSS feeds will join their ranks.” Consumers will embrace RSS because of the control it gives them over the information they receive (and so far with no spam problem). Businesses will embrace it because the medium itself is free (though consumers can easily opt-out of low quality or excessively promotional content, so an investment will be required in generating good material), and because their prospects and customers will, eventually, expect it. A low-tech addition/alternative to RSS is simply to enable 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? That's somewhat of a judgment call. 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. On the other hand, if you're building a blog to promote your business, outside ads may be an unwelcome distraction. With a well-crafted blog in place, you can turn your attention to promoting your blog. Why Write a Blog for Business? Best Practices in Blog Marketing Additional resources:
Business Blog Consulting
Why Marketers Should Blog
Free Traffic Tips – The Blog
Painless Self Promotion |
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