Corporate Blogging Tips – Part 3

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

Corporate blogging Tips (7-10).

This is the third and final part in a three part series on my top 10 corporate blogging tips.

Corporate Blogging Tip 7 (Fully Utilize the Advanced Features of Your Blogging Platform)

There are a lot of blogging platforms and each had its pros and cons. I’m a Wordpress.org fan, but the other blogging platforms are also very good. The point is to select a platform and learn it. In Wordpress.org, the version of Wordpress that you download and host yourself, there are several useful plugins including pretty permalinks and the all in one SEO pack. There are many more, but as I mentioned in Corporate Blogging Tip 5, I need to stay on message.

Pretty premalinks create a static URL for each post and place the words in your post title in the URL. This is great for SEO. Depending on when you read this post you may notice that we are not using pretty premalinks. This is a limitation of our current host and one that we are in the process of resolving.

The all in on SEO pack allows you to edit the title (the title within the <head> of your document, not the blog post title), meta description, and meta keyword tags. Only the title currently impacts ranking. However, the description often appears on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and can influence searchers to click on your listing. Adding meta keywords is just a good practice.

Corporate Blogging Tip 8 (Publish Frequently)

You should post at least once a week. This is easier said than done. Your efforts will be rewarded if you post regularly.

Corporate Blogging Tip 9 (Distribute/Re-purpose Blog Content)

One of the benefits corporations get from blogging is that they can leverage their investment in the creation of blog posts over and over again. Corporate blog posts can be the subject of white papers, presentations (as this post will be), seminars, and webinars (which this post is).

Social media is an important aspect of corporate blogging. Twitter, LinkedIn, facebook, YouTube, podcasts and social bookmarking are great ways to distribute posts and develop a following.

Twitter – Tweet blog titles and include a link back your post. I use bit.ly to shorten my URLs.
LinkedIn
- Use the LinkedIn Wordpress application (or similar application if you are not using Wordpress) to integrate snippets from your blog posts into your profile.
- Join LinkedIn groups that are interesting to your customers. When on the main page of a group, you can start a discussion by clicking on the “start a discussion” link and adding the title, an excerpt, and a link to your post (again use a shortener like bit.ly). If you post compelling titles and good content, you will earn the right to engage with group members.
Facebook – Similar to LinkedIn.
YouTube/Podcasts – Film/Record someone “presenting” your post and publish your this content to YouTube/iTunes and other video and podcast sites.
Social Bookmarking – Encourage readers to bookmark your posts by integrating one of the many bookmarking icons/tools in your blog.

Corporate Blogging Tip 10 (Create Buzz by Posting Comments on Other blogs)

Go to Google Blog search and search for your selected keywords. In the case of this post, I would search for corporate blogging and corporate blogging tips. Post a minimum of three comments per post. For really important (competitive keywords) posts add as many as 20 comments to popular blogs. Don’t spam other bloggers. Take the time to leave valuable comments. You don’t have to agree with the other blogger, just be genuine.

Use Google Blog Search to find related blogs and post comments and links back to your post.

Use Google Blog Search to find related blogs. Post meaningful comments and link back to your post. If you provide value, other bloggers will start to comment on your posts.

This concludes part three. Click on one of the below links to view Business Blogging Tips – Part 1, or the Blogging for Business Tips – Part 2.

Tags: Blogging, Social Media
Posted in B2B, B2C, Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media | 4 Comments »

Blogging for Business Tips – Part 2

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

Blogging for Business Tips (4-6)

This post is part two of a three part series on my top 10 blogging for business tips.

Blogging for Business Tip 4 (Selecting Keywords)

Develop blog posts with the intent of driving traffic to your website. The best way to do that is to get your post to rank on the first page of Google, Yahoo!, or bing for a specific keyword phrase. To find keywords with high search frequency (popular keywords), use Google’s external keyword tool. Don’t forget to change the “Match Type” to “Exact”.

Business Blogging Tip 1 - Use a keyword research tool to select popular and non-competitive keywords.

Identify popular but non-competitive keywords. Google’s external keyword tool contains a bar graph in the column titled “Advertiser Competition”. The further the green bar extends to the right, the more competitive the keyword and the less likely your post will rank in Google. While this indicator applies to advertiser (pay per click) competitiveness, it is a good clue as to natural or organic search competitiveness.

As another indicator of keyword competitiveness, conduct a Google search, placing your keyword in quotes. The lower the number of search results the less competitive the keyword and the better the chance your blog post will rank for your selected term. Referring to the below image, I elected to write the Business Blogging Tips Part 1 post about “Business Blogging” for three reasons.

It exactly relates exactly to my subject.
It has 50% greater local search volume (2,400 for business blogging, vs. 1,600 for corporate blogging).
With only 467,000 pages in Google’s index for this term, I believe that I have a decent chance of ranking for this term.

I opted to wirte this series of posts about business blogging tips. While business blogging was slightly more compeitive, the local (US, English) search volume was 50% greater. Alrernatively, I could have written one post about corporate blogging and another about business blogging.

Blogging for business success revolves around writing great posts and getting your posts to rank in the search engines. Selecting keywords is critical. If you select keywords that are too competitive, you won't rank. If you choose keywords that are never searched, you might rank on the first page, but no one will ever see your post. You should understand how powerful your site is and target keywords appropriately. Start with easy/non-competitive keywords and gradually adjust your targets based on your successes and failures.

This begs the question “How competitive can my keywords be, without jeopardizing the likelihood that my blog post will rank?” This is the subject of an entirely different post and has to do with many factors. If you’d like to discuss this feel free to give me a call (315)732-9281 x11.

Finally, you may ask why I added the word “tips” to my selected keyword phrase. I’m hoping that even if my part one post does not rank for business blogging, it will have a chance to rank for business blogging tips.

Blogging for Business Tip 5 (Blog Post Title)

Writing a compelling post title is one of the most important steps in business blogging. A compelling blog post title encourages readers to spend the next 3-10 minutes of their life reading your post. Make sure to incorporate your keywords into your post title. This will support your search engine optimization effort.

Lists make great titles. The title of the part 1 post is “Business Blogging Tips – All Time Top 10“. I could have titled this post “Top 10 Business Blogging Tips”, but I wanted the words “business blogging tips” to be the first words readers see.

Blogging for Business Tip 6 (Blog Content)

Business blog posts are best if they are short. In general you want readers to be able to completely read your post in five minutes or less. This post ended up being too long so I broke it up into 3 parts.

Add images and other media (YouTube videos, PowerPoint presentations, …) to clarify your point and make your post visually appealing.

flickr is a great source of images. Be use to use the advanced search feature and select creative commons-licensed content available for commercial use.

Select images using Flicr advanced search creative commons option.

Select images using flickr's advanced search creative commons option.

Visually break up longer blog posts with larger bold text headers to make them easier for readers to scan. Using heading 1, heading 2 and heading 3 formatted text options will help your search engine ranking and make it easier for your readers.

Stay on theme. If you find yourself drifting off subject, create the additional content and place it in a separate post. Then link to that post to make your slightly off-subject point.

For search engine optimization purposes you want your selected keywords to appear in your blog post frequently, but not to the point that your post sounds spammy.

That’s it for part two. Click below for Business Blogging Tips – Part 1 or Corporate Blogging Tips – Part 3.

Tags: b2b promotion, B2C, Blogging, Social Media
Posted in B2B, B2C, Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media | 2 Comments »

Business Blogging Tips – All Time Top 10

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

Business blogging tips.

After four months of studying business blogging and testing various blogging tips, I’m ready to share my top 10 business blogging tips. These 10 little gems, will be broken up into three separate posts.

What did I do over my summer vacation? Why study business blogging of course! I was asked to speak on a panel about business blogging at the Product Development and Management Association’s 33rd Annual Conference in Anaheim, CA. See my related post – PDMA 2009 – Got Blog – The Perfect Storm. So with the primary goal of not embarrassing myself and the secondary goal delivering value to the audience (just being honest – survival instinct kicked in), I set out to learn all there is to know about business blogging. While it would be arrogant to think that I actually did learn everything, I have managed to put together these top 10 actionable business bogging tips. Hope you find them useful.

Top 10 Business Blogging Tips

Business Blogging Tip 1 (Finding Subjects to Blog About)

The first step in successful business blogging is to find the conversation online. You need to know where and what is being said about the subjects you and your customers care about. Google alerts and Google reader are great ways to start.

Google alerts notifies you every one of the terms you listed appears in Google’s index. You can add your company name, the names of employees, product names, or even the names of your children. My college age daughters love the last one.

Google alerts notifies you everytime one of the keywords you enter is found in Google's index.

Create a Google alerts accounts and enter important words or phrases. Use quotes to reduce the amount of unrelated email you receive. Also, adjust the "how often" column to place greater emphasis on more important phrases.

Google reader allows you to subscribe to different sites related to interesting subjects.

With Google reader you can monitor your favorite sites.

Create a Google reader account, click "add a subscription" and search for the phrases that interests you. Next, simply click the "subscribe" button that appears under the listing. The next time you view your Google reader account it will be populated with all of the updates for the sites you selected.

Business Blogging Tip 2 (Stay Organized)

Let’s face it we all have too much to do already. Business blogging is one of those extra duties that can easily be pushed to the back burner. Did you ever notice that what separates good from great companies has less to do with having a great idea and more to do with doing the right thing day in and day out? Well blogging is one of those day to day tasks, that if done regularly, will really pay off.

Below, I described my approach to managing this extra duty, this pain in the neck task, this beast we call business blogging. My approach isn’t perfect, but it works for me and maybe it will work for you. If you have suggestions, I would appreciate a comment.

The first step is to develop a method to collect and organize blog post ideas. I suggest that you use Instapaper. Instapaper offers a Firefox extension that places a “read later” button in your Firefox tool bar. When browsing Google reader or any web page, simply click “read later” and the page you are on will be saved to your Instapaper account. Within Instapaper, you can organize web pages into folders. I have folders for SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (pay per click), social media, and blogging. When I come across an interesting article, I simply save it to Instapaper. Later, when I have time, I read the article and decide if it deserves further attention.

Here’ my favorite part. There’s a iPhone app that syncs with Instapaper. This give me the flexibility to review the pages I’ve selected at my convenience. How cool! The iPhone app isn’t free ($5) but it was well worth the few dollars.

With Instapaper and the Instapaper iPhone app you can save, organize and read important web content at your convenience.

Create an Instapaper account. Next, download the Instapaper Firefox extension and install the "read later" button. If you have an iPhone, I suggest you buy the mobile app to sync and access your stored articles on your phone.

Business Blogging Tip 3 (Use your Todo List to Collect Post Ideas)

Many times, I’ll be sitting at my desk reading an online article or just daydreaming when suddenly, POW!, I come up with the mother of all blog post ideas. Of course this only happens when I don’t have the time to whip out a post. To avoid losing track of the Idea, I use my todo list to capture thoughts and document links to reference material. Then later, when I have about an hour of quite time, I’ll review list of post ideas and start writing. There are a lot of great todo list choices, but I like Things. Things is a Mac application from Cultured Code. It won the Macworld Best of Show 2009 award. The desktop app costs $50, and the iPhone app isn’t cheap either at $10. For me it was worth the money.

Use your todo list to organize blog post ideas. I use Things and the Things iPhone app.

Document post ideas in your todo list. I use Things which allows me to record ideas and store notes including links and my thoughts about a subject. Then later, when I have time to write, I scan my list of post ideas, select one and start typing.

I hoped you enjoyed Business Blogging Tips part 1. Click a link below for Blogging for Business Tips – Part 2, and Corporate Blogging Tips – Part 3.

Tags: Blogging, search engine optimization, Social Media
Posted in B2B, B2C, Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media | No Comments »