The world of business blogging exploits the full global-reach marketability of your company. Savvy blogging draws new and existing customers into a conversation that will increase site-traffic, generate exposure, and potentially increase your customer-base and future sales.
But get it wrong, and your business blog can turn from an asset to a liability.
Mistake #1 – Irregular Blogging
Blogging compliments your business, and like any part of your business, it needs to be current and regularly maintained. Irregular blogging can lower your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) content, dropping your business page rank, and effectively minimizing potential customers. Consistent, interesting and relevant posting will build your reader-base, and show commitment to your business and your customers.
Mistake #2 – Inconsistent Voice
Unless your business blog is specifically designed to individualize your bloggers, then the tone and style of your blog’s voice needs to remain consistent. Encourage originality from your writers to set your business blogging apart, but set parameters to maintain your blog’s focus and identity. Widely differing voices in your blog posts may cause reader confusion to your business directive, and come across as more of a personal, blog than a collaborative business blog.
Mistake #3 – Personalize Does Not Mean Personal
A conversational tone is the best way for your business blog to connect with your customers. It should should be engaging and have personality. While a blog allows for creativity, it must be relevant to your business. Personalizing your business experience will invoke a sense of community; telling your potential customer-base you have the mother of all hangovers, will drive them away in droves.
Mistake #4 – We Blog, That’s Enough
Business blogging is just one slice of the social media pizza – to achieve optimal effectiveness, your business needs to gorge. By utilizing multiple facets of the social media spectrum, such as Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin, and by adding an RSS feed, your business maximizes its global-reach and growth potential.
Mistake #5 – Separate URL
Your blog contains keyword-rich content that increases the visibility of your site with search engines – the higher your business ‘page rank’, the more traffic you’re likely to receive. Maintaining your business blog on a separate URL means you have more work to do to build up that new “website” which is how Google will see it. This does little in the short term to increase the power of your company’s website. Instead of using a wholly separate URL or (even worse) using a blog platform URL such as company.blogspot.com, try company.com/blog. If you use a more robust blogging platform like Innoblogs or Compendium, you can use a subdomain such as blog.company.com. By keeping your business blogging on your primary URL, search engines will reward you for both your website and your blog.
Image credit to Wisdom of We
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If your online marketing strategy includes corporate blogging, then I have one challenge for you concerning your blog. Remember from my last article, we are supposed to remember to internalize the idea that our corporate blogs are to gain leads. On that note, I have a word I want you to concentrate on (a phrase really) that makes marketers drool: inbound marketing.
Content Makes Your Blog a Foundation for Inbound Marketing
Seriously? Yes. Seriously. But you have to use it the right way. And that comes down to the content. I have read so many blog articles and books about the importance of content, and I agree with them. Content should be informative, helpful, funny, inspire awe, and yes, content is king. I get it. But there are so many blogs and websites out there that it seems like all the good content has been taken up. It can be a little discouraging. At times, it can even be daunting. But the truth is, in order for your blog to be a foundation for inbound marketing, in order for people to want to share it with others, your content needs to be really, really good. So good, in fact, that people will want to share it. And that takes time.
An Inbound Marketing Challenge for You and Your Blog
Now, before I scare you anymore, I have an answer for this so it doesn’t seem so daunting. It’s based on the writings of one of my favorite bloggers, Leo Babauta, who blogs over at Zen Habits. After reading his blog for several years, it’s clear to me that we need to apply one of his mantras about creating healthy habits to this whole blogging thing: just do one thing at a time. So I’m going to give you a challenge for your business blog: plan ONE really cool piece of content.
One really cool piece of content can help make your blog THE foundation for inbound marketing that it can be. My biggest piece of advice about this one really cool piece of content, is that you make it embeddable (implicitly shareable) content. What happens with embeddable content is that people reuse it! When they do that, that content gets pointed back to your blog or website!
Share and Make Shareable
Consider this really cool piece of content an artifact. It is an artifact of your business. So treat it like gold. Here are some things you are going to want to do with that artifact during its “life”time:
- Make sure to create the metadata (tags) for it
- Support it yourself by posting it to sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Ask your friends, followers, and fans to share it, tweet it, repost it for you
- Make sure you have your social sharing buttons enabled in the post in which it belongs
Slow down for a minute and realize the importance of REALLY good SHAREABLE content. Stop writing and rehashing the stuff you’ve already seen online. Take the time this week, this month (however long it takes depending on how much time you have) to create a really shareable piece of content, a piece of content that you can place in your blog post as say, an image, an infographic, a video, a PDF – and be sure you include credit to your website in a way that is not easily removed from the content. A piece of content that really, truly is a help in some way to your customers. Then come back and let us know what you did, and how it worked for you.
You can do it! I know you can!
Thanks to Funchye at Flickr for the great sharing photo
Tagged as:
blogging,
Challenge,
Content,
Inbound marketing,
shareable content
The world of business blogging exploits the full global-reach marketability of your company. Savvy blogging draws new and existing customers into a conversation that will increase site-traffic, generate exposure, and potentially increase your customer-base and future sales.