February 23, 2009

Time to Start Blogging?

Why should you blog?

  • To drive traffic to our website and improve our search engine ranking on the web

  • To promote our company and its products

  • To raise profile and to be seen as industry experts, or though leaders

  • To tell our story and educate the marketplace in turn

  • To become part of the community within our industry, market, or segment


What objectives should you have?

  • Extent our reach in terms of market coverage

  • Stickiness - interact with people more often and for longer

  • Number of comments, subscribers, references to post and links to post (referral quality)


What tips should you follow?

  • Don’t’ say anything unless you have something interesting to say… we want to feed the conversation

  • Avoid profanity

  • Always link to others….Create a voice and a sense of humor

  • “Don’t diss” – most influential bloggers “practice an almost parliamentary civility” Paul Gillin pg. 22…. balance being timely and opinionated and being controversial

  • Be transparent – don’t revise posts. unless you label update Posts Means we need to think carefully before we post

  • Comment on other blogs (it invites direct interaction with that blogger)

  • Before commenting make sure we have read the blogs posted over a three day period. Make sure we understand what motivates the blogger and what he/she likes to talk about…. Don’t just jump in

  • Keep the blogs concise (ensure they have meaning). Length depends on topic

  • Be responsive and track responses to posts and comments (comment tracking is important as posters are likely waiting a response – how this is managed later will depend on the number of comments)

  • Point to other players who maybe competitors – history shows people will come back to us (need to include those with opinions on the topic)

  • Tie RSS into our blogs (looking to tie separate RSS for each topic)

  • Use content sharing tools: (e.g. tie in Social bookmarks to your posts)

  • Register blogs with indexers

  • Post tips and alerts we have set-up (acts like a FAQ and ‘How-to’. Also makes for a good blog post)

  • Recognise other peoples alerts (this will be very important for us – need to acknowledge those who have put effort into their alerts)

  • Write the posts so they don’t draw a conclusion…. Feed the conversation don’t kill it!

  • Write with skimming in mind

    • Short sentences

    • Hook readers

    • Headings and bold where you want to draw in reader (Top-headings do well. Lists make great posts)

  • Use keywords so Google can get the context of blog content 

  • Find the blog carnival that covers topics of interest


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