You have made the decision that business blog marketing is an important marketing strategy. Now, what should you be writing about?
Focus is very important in selecting your blog topic. One reason for blogging is to be considered an authority on your subject. A narrow tightly focused definition can produce more traffic and better SEO results than a broad set of subjects. General all purpose discussions confuse the search engines and won’t do as well.
There are 4 steps in selecting your blog topic
- What interests your customers? It should be closely related to your business and catch prospects while they are making their buying decision. As an example, if you sell baby furniture, blog about choosing a baby name. People generally choose a name before they buy furniture.
- What are you passionate about? Writing a blog takes dedication and commitment. It is much easier to write about something that interests you and that you are excited about.
- Narrow your niche. Nowadays even a blog specifically about Home Decorating is too broad. A blog about Window Treatments would be more focused. You will more likely be seen as an expert in this narrowed topic area.
- Research keywords and traffic. Use one of the keyword research tools available to make sure there is sufficient traffic. Select the phrases you should be using as you write.
If you want more traffic and you want to do better with the search engines a very narrowly defined blogging topic is always better. You just want to make sure you have enough content to be able to keep the blog going.
Before you begin blogging, you need to build your own blog marketing strategy. You should begin by answering some questions about what you want to accomplish.
Set Objectives
What is the most important thing to accomplish? This can include building up your company brand, building up traffic to the blog, reaching new potential clients, open communication with current customers, etc. You may want to create a list and then choose the most important.
List two more objectives that are important to you. This will give you a total of three objectives. More than three objectives total are too difficult to focus on. Most of the activity should be on accomplishing the most important objective.
Visitors
Who would want to read your blog? This is your targeted audience. This should be the same as your targeted customer if one of your objectives is to increase sales.
How much time can you commit? To reach your objectives you will need to commit writing resources. This will either mean your time or one of your employees.
How much money have you budgeted? Set up a marketing budget for site design, videos, ghost writers, etc. I know that ghost blog writing is controversial, but many times small business owners are much better being interviewed and recorded. A ghost writer then puts this into a blog format for final editing and publishing by the owner.
Example
Objective: Build blog traffic to 500 unique visitors each day.
Strategies/Tactics
- Write new and original content about…
- Engage readers emotionally in each post.
- Commenting on at least 5 industry and local blogs.
Podcasting is online audio or video content that is delivered via an RSS feed. This technology gives listeners and viewers content on-demand. It works much the same way as syndication of other blog content.
The consumer finds topics that interest them and subscribes. They use a type of software known as an aggregator, sometimes called a podcatcher to manage these feeds. This works very much like a blog feed reader.
These can be downloaded to a mobile player or viewed directly on the computer. In 2006 it was estimated that 80% of podcasts were viewed or listened to directly on the PC where they were downloaded and never transferred to a mobile player.
In a 2007 survey, approximately 13% of all people have listened to one or more podcasts and this number is growing. The survey found more listeners 55+ than in the 18-24 age group. Podcast users are twice as likely to have incomes over 100K and nearly twice as likely to have incomes between 75K and 100K.
Owners of small businesses are finding that podcasts are an effective way to access or present information in a cost effective manner. 2007 forecasted sales for MP3 players are 120 million and 200 million for MP3 enabled cell phones. The potential market for podcasts continues to grow at a strong pace. Podcast marketing works well in combination with business blog marketing.
Podcast marketing is a form of broadcast marketing and this type of strategy reaches a wider audience. Podcasts can be both Audio & Video and reaches viewers who are looking for an alternative to reading web pages for information.
Readers of blogs are a different breed. They expect a certain easy to read style. This is important in business blog marketing. Your audience expects writing to have personality. Nothing turns off a blog reader faster than a condescending or harsh writing style.
- Topic: Are you suffering from writer’s block? Maybe you are just not passionate about the subject you are writing about. Write about something you know well, something specific. Avoid general and wide sweeping subjects.
- Audience: If you don’t have a clear understanding of your audience, you won’t know what messages will excite them. What does the reader want to know?” In writing, use terms and phrases they will recognize and identify with.
- Original Content: New and original content will get your reader’s attention. Simply quoting others and echoing other people’s content is boring. Blogging is about experimenting and discovering what works for you and your audience.
- Action Words: These are verbs like “make”, “do”, “write”, “take”, and “build.” When people are searching, they like to be told “what to do”. Tell them.
- Spelling and Grammar: Mistakes distract people from the content they are reading. Even though blogs may be less formal.
- Be Entertaining: Come up with an entertaining angle and use interesting language to be a hit with your readers.
- Call to Action: A clear call to action at the end of a posting, will increase the likelihood readers will act.
“The secrets of telling a story well are three: How to end… Where to begin… What to leave out.”– Roy H. Williams
Even as Web 2.0 is becoming accepted, the debates are raging over what Web 3.0 will be. More importantly, how Web 3.0 will impact both consumers and businesses on the web? If Web 2.0 is taken as the “read-write” web, then Web 3.0 will be the “data” web.
It is important to remember that changes in the web are evolutionary not revolutionary. Past trends will continue and new technologies will become available at an even faster rate.
So what is the vision for Web 3.0? Information access will be easier the “Semantic Web” being developed. Web software agents will find, share and integrate information for searches and according to user profiles. Data will be made available from multiple sources simultaneously and applications will speak to each other directly, and for broader searches for information.
This means you may be able to search for all the hard to find ingredients for a recipe and locate the closest store that carries all of them. You will be able look at available fashions from multiple stores just in your size.
Other visions for Web 3.0 include 10 megabits of bandwidth all the time. This would make video available all the time. This would create the “video web.”
Social networking in the form of blogging is expected to continue growth and be very important to both consumers and business marketing. Web 3.0 is certain to bring more information together faster for consumers. Businesses will need to be evolving and changing if they expect to be leaders in their market.
In business blog marketing, writing a blog posting is different then writing an article or a book. Blog readers have short attention spans; they need to be able to scan through your content quickly and easily. Blog postings are short, easily scanned and quick to read.
- Can be scanned: Your reader should be able to quickly glance through your posting and pick up the main points. Use lists, images, tables, sub-headlines, examples, indented notes, indented quotes, icons, colors, bold and italics to break up your article and make it easier to scan.
- Short posting: A typical blog posting should be about 250 words and be written in a simple format. The longer a post goes, the more people skim, and the less likely they are to get the information they really want.
- Short paragraphs: Blog writing is best using shorter sentences and paragraphs for easier reading. Readers want information fast and in small digestible chunks. Use paragraphs of about 50 to 100 words or roughly 3 sentences long and break them up with bold subheadings.
- Keep it simple: Simple means getting rid of extra words. Simple writing is persuasive. A writer’s ability to edit himself is probably the most important blog writing technique
- Use Easy to read fonts: Unusual font choices and other poor formatting choices can make something visually difficult to read.
“A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences.” – Writing Tip from Scott Adam (Creator of Dilbert)
The simplest form of video blogging, or vlogging, means putting a video file online, linking to it from your blog. These are blogs that primarily feature video shorts instead of text. Just like blogs, vlogging started as a video version of a diary.
Vlogging has evolved into a short video format that could include anything from comedy sketches, to fictional drama to video opinions. Any subject that can be blogged about can be put into a video version and become a vlog.
Blog Marketing: The fact is that there are over 70 millions of blogs now, but only a tiny percentage of those use video as a means to further market their businesses or themselves. Just as it has become common for a business to have a blog, using video to promote their brand or educate will become common.
History: Video blogging started its move forward in 2004 when Jay Dedman started the Yahoo! Videoblogging Group. Vlogging saw a strong increase in popularity beginning in the year 2005 when the videoblogger conference was held in New York City. YouTube, popular video sharing website was created in early 2005.
Still in its infancy, the number of vlogs was recorded at just 23,000 in early 2007.
Video Podcasting: For video podcasting, you must publish your vlog in either the FLV (Flash Video) or SWF (Shockwave Flash) file formats. You can get your “vlog” accepted by Apple’s iTunes so their subscribers can find and subscribe to your vlog (which gives you access to 19 million users at last count).
When A Business Should NOT Blog
Business blogging is not for everyone. There are businesses that shouldn’t be blogging. There are people within a business that shouldn’t be writing. There are topics that should never be part of the business’s weblog.
Businesses that shouldn’t blog
Companies who are unwilling to commit the time and resources to regular blog postings shouldn’t even start up a blog. A blog started and abandoned can do more harm than good.
Some companies are heavily government-regulated such as those selling Securities. All of their public communications must go through rigorous review by legal teams. Companies working on military technology could also prove to be a life-and-death issue should any unfortunate leaks of information occur.
People who shouldn’t blog
Companies should carefully select their spokesmen. They should stay away from people who are terrible writers, those in sensitive positions and those that lack the judgment on what they can and should be writing about.
Some people lack any form of coherent writing skills. Keep these types of people far away from your company blog. Some executives may not be comfortable publicly expressing their views. Others have difficulty writing in such an informal style.
Blogging Topics to Avoid
Finally, there are specific topics that I believe you shouldn’t blog about. These are things that are confidential or at least should be. These include blogging about personnel issues, company or trade secrets, legal suits that your company may be involved in, sensitive financial information and individual medical information.
Have a strong political view? This should stay far, far away from any sort of business blog.
Businesses are turning to blogging as a marketing tool. Why? Because it gets results and gets results faster that traditional Internet marketing. Business blogging is a way to boost their online brand, to increase their importance with the search engines, to reach new potential clients, to communicate with current customers and to publicize information about their company.
Blogs are the new marketing tool that we can add to our bag of traditional marketing strategies. Blogs allow us to reach our targeted marketing niche. In the past few years, blogging has moved from the early adopters to the mainstream in business.
Blogs are now the most trusted media source for useful information according to a Blogads survey of over 35,000 readers. Value was compared against newspaper, radio, television, direct mail and magazines. It is estimated that in the US 27% of the people read blogs on a regular basis.
Blogs are powerful influencers. “More than half (52%) of Europeans polled said that they were more likely to purchase a product if they had read positive comments from private individuals on the internet.” This is according to a Hotwire Ipsos MORI survey.
Blogs distribute information very quickly and efficiently. Because blog feeds are similar to news feeds, Information spreads very quickly. Blogs are a great place to kick-start marketing of new products and services.
So what do businesses expect from their blogging efforts?
- Competitive differentiation
- Brand building
- Improve search engine rankings
- Increase targeted website traffic
- Direct communications
- Connect with new customers
- Positioned as an expert
- Differentiation from competition
- Media and public relations
- Relational marketing
75% of Ads in the Sunday newspaper are skipped because they don’t grab the reader’s attention. A powerfully titled blog article will draw visitors in from their feed readers. Your headline must capture attention for blog marketing to work. Your headline should make it seem as though getting the information in your article is vital to the reader’s very existence.
There are two goals in writing an effective title. First is to catch the reader’s attention and draw them in. Second is to get listed on the search engines so searchers will find you.
Your keyword phrase MUST be in your title! This is what you want the search engines to notice. As you write your blog, try to write titles that match what you would search for if you were looking on a search engine.
What kinds of titles work? Try these to get attention.
- Please Skip This [subject]. No, no. I told you to skip this and… Curiosity is overpowering and most people can’t resist. This is an similar to “I Shouldn’t Blog About This But…”
- Little Known Ways to [how to]. An intriguing way of getting the readers attention similar to “The Secret of…” headline.
- Myth: [seemingly true statement]. People love myths… or there wouldn’t be a show called Mythbusters.
- Here’s a Quick Way to [solve a problem]. People love quick and easy solutions.
- 5 Things that will ruin … This uses two things that grab attention. Fear and people love to read lists.
Make titles that are descriptive, clever, and clear. You are writing titles for two audiences: readers and search engines. Choose your words carefully and focus on action if possible.
