I saw this great post by Tom Hallett Campaign Delivery Manager of Vertical Leap. Tom does a great job of explaining how you should be using PPC tactics in your Search Marketing efforts. Business Blog Software of course does all this for you...
Here are 3 strengths of PPC and how you can use them in your organic SEO program:
PPC strength 1: Choose the page that visitors land on
Use in SEO: Don’t try to optimize your home page for all of your keyword variations. Instead, ensure you have a relevant landing page for each of your target keywords so visitors find what they want as soon as they land on your site.
This gets to the core of the Compendium Blogware solution. The very idea of a "Compended Blog" is to create organic landing pages...one for each targeted keywords. A lot of people think of Blog in the singular...this strategy radically pushes that to 'Blogs' (form many to perhaps thousands)
PPC strength 2: Customized targeted link titles and descriptions
Use in SEO: Think of your title tag as your ad link text as that’s what will usually be the link that appears in the search engines. Ensure it’s descriptive enough to encourage users to click on it when it appears in the SERP's. And ensure you have a good meta-description too – this will appear in the search results if the search engine thinks it’s relevant. So use it to convince users to click on the link.
The very definition of an organic landing page starts with the title. Don't name blogs something whimsical, title them with the keywords that you are targeting. Look at the title of this blog as an example.
PPC strength 3: Quick results
Use in SEO: Encourage the search engines to crawl your site more often by adding fresh content like blogs regularly. This, coupled with a good long term SEO strategy, will mean any new pages or products you add to your site will be indexed and ranked by the search engines quickly.
This is the final peice of the puzzle. but instead of 'like blogs' make your organic landing pages actual blogs. What you get from targeting business blogging is a giant boost to your online marketing efforts by following these three steps: A blog for each keyword as a landing page, title your blogs with the targeted keywords and update frequently. Simple advice from accross the pond...Thanks Tom.
It’s important to know what the stages of the Gartner Hype Cycle mean:
According to Gartner "Each Hype Cycle drills down into the five key phases of a technology’s life cycle."
Technology Trigger: A potential technology breakthrough kicks things off. Early proof-of-concept stories and media interest trigger significant publicity. Often no usable products exist and commercial viability is unproven.
Peak of Inflated Expectations: Early publicity produces a number of success stories—often accompanied by scores of failures. Some companies take action; many do not.
Trough of Disillusionment: Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver. Producers of the technology shake out or fail. Investments continue only if the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters.
Slope of Enlightenment: More instances of how the technology can benefit the enterprise start to crystallize and become more widely understood. Second- and third-generation products appear from technology providers. More enterprises fund pilots; conservative companies remain cautious.
Plateau of Productivity: Mainstream adoption starts to take off. Criteria for assessing provider viability are more clearly defined. The technology’s broad market applicability and relevance are clearly paying off.
How does this play between WordPress and Compendium Blogware? Open Source and blogging began with the Technology Trigger and went up the Peak of Inflated Expectations right?
The past two years blogging for business has waned because there was no ROI and the tools required technology people to run them coupled with the lack of security from the requirement of 'plug-in's' made them inappropriate for achieving meaningful business goals.
Why is Corporate Blogging now screaming up the ‘Slope of Enlightenment’? Because the benefits have begun to crystallize and become widely understood. This is about search and conversion. Engagement means happy customers, not happy “readers”....and Second & Third Generation products appear.... Wordpress is 1st generation. Compendium Blogware is Third Generation.
I'm working on a post based on yesterdays webinar drawing the comparison between the early days of email marketing and blogging and the evolution of data.
Social Media marketing is in a similar place to where we were as email marketers back in the turn of the Century. We were doing newsletters! Simple information sharing. No real measurement or ROI expectations....just old fashioned off-line activity put online. Blast out my ‘news’ once a month....
Here at the end of the decade and we are using data, measuring ROI, driving relevant messages to the right people at the right time and selling our products and services to a mostly receptive and appreciative audience.
And think about the email newsletter haters back then. “Isn’t all commercial email SPAM?” “Junk email” “Evil” “Businesses have no right to email” How many conversations did we have at Cocktail parties that didn’t end in “oh...your a spammer”. (usually followed by a loud guffaw)
Sounds familiar to the conversation we have today about the role of business in Social Media doesn’t it?
So how should business be thinking about Blog Marketing? First of all, we need to think about the goal, ultimately the people who want to talk to you are searching. Doesn't this make perfect sense?
The vast amount of traffic coming to a corporate blog is driven by first time visitors. These are not 'readers' or 'subscribers' these are people who are looking for specific information in an attempt to solve a problem.
This is what search marketing is all about and what makes it perhaps the greatest marketing tool of all time. What could be more human than providing content that helps another person solve a problem? Should this be a concern that perhaps that solution might cost money? Please read Seth Godin's post from this weekend where he says:
"When two people trade, both win. No one buys a bar a soap unless the money they’re spending for the soap is worth less to them than the soap itself."
The exchange of goods and services is what makes the world function. And Marketing is a significant part of what makes the engine work. As Seth says however:
"Yes, I will give my attention to an ad, but only if it's anticipated, personal and relevant. We still give permission to marketers that earn it, but so few marketers do."
Search is permission marketing as long as we deliver relevance. Blog Marketing is good when the content is organized to be relevant, it's not good when it doesn't help anyone.
How do you know if your Business' Blog Content is helpful? Look at your data. What are your bounce rates? What are your read times? What is your click through rate?
Low bounce rates and high click throughs are the the primary metrics that tell you if your business blogging is providing any value.
Just like old fashioned newsletters, we saw high bounce rates, low opens and pitiful clicks....because what we were sending provided so little value. When we started providing data (intelligence) guess what? Exactly; people responded a lot more positively. Same thing for Corporate Blogging.
I get a lot of questions about our tools. Is this really an effective online marketing strategy? The real question is: Can a Business actually both participate in social media legitimately and still recognize value to the effort. This is code for ROI.
Gartner just came out with a new report on their Technology Hype Cycle for 2009 which shows that Corporate Blogging is rapidly moving up the slope of enlightenment. What's that actually mean?
Really what this is saying is that Businesses like yours are adopting business blog software more rapidly than just about any other marketing tools.
There are two important factors powering this trend. The first is the simple fact that the world is telling you that to be successful you need to be more human. Simple. Your clients are tired of "branding", Tired of Institutions...what they want is to deal with people. This technology empowers your employees and constituents to tell your story.
This is the greatest acquisition tool of all time. It helps you win search. The more you participate, the more people are able to find you. The more stories you tell, the greater chance to have those stories found....and most importantly, have those stories found by people who have problems that you can solve.
I read a blog post that made the following statement about Corporate Blogging:
"Social media in general, and blogs in particular are about attraction, not promotion."
Exactly right. Except it overlooks that the vast majority of that attraction comes through search engines. Embracing that reality and you begin to recognize that you really don't have 'readers' you have 'seekers'. Seeking what? Seeking a solution to whatever they were searching for.
So how does that reality adjust your content strategy? Well it should get corporate bloggers focused on the problems of the customers and the solutions you provide. Does this sound promotional or helpful? If I'm asking a vendor for help (what I'm doing when I search) I'm going to be disappointed if they are not talking about their products or services or similar situations where they helped people like me. Does this sound too promotional? Let the data tell you. Too much of this Social Media conversation is taking place based on opinion not data.
Additionally, I'm going to be disappointed if there is no clear call to action. When someone is trying to solve a problem, they want to get to the solution and move on. They are not looking to subscribe or become regular readers...this is a myth. Focus on attraction and conversion. The visitor will be happy and your business will be happy.
Focus on three metrics: first time visitor %, Bounce Rates and Click Through rates. These are the three things that will tell you if you are a successful business blogger.
So one quick disclaimer: I like Smashing Magazine...but this is just so wrong I really am kind of stunned.
Here is the opening quote of this article:
"A successful blog has a regular readership that is being constantly reminded of your brand and products. And yes, of course, building up a readership takes time."
From a Corporate Blogging standpoint, subscribers or regular readers is the most debunked myth in the business. I've posted on this several times with the data to back it up.
Most blog traffic in business comes from first time visitors. That's the metric we should be focusing on. We work with hundreds of business bloggers and I've been exposed to thousands. I have yet to see even one that doesn't drive a least 65% of their traffic from first time visitors and most have a number somewhere in the mid-80's.
This is a good thing. The hardest job in marketing is to begin a new relationship. In that, the focus of your blogging efforts absolutely should be about acquisition....of helping new prospects find you when they have a problem. This is what make search so powerful...it's puts marketers in a position to be helpful instead of being interrupters.
Once you have that first contact, there are lots of ways to engage for the long term. Remember email or catalogs or stores or salespeople or the telephone? Social media? Sure it works too. But remember, nothing happens until you are found. The biggest benefit of Corporate Blogging has always been and remains introducing yourself.
Some of you may have noticed that I have started a blog network to act as an eCommerce site to sell Toasters. It's called Global Toaster and it launched this week.
I've long held the feeling that what is wrong with the web is the way it all resembles paper in it's design and monitzation. Think about it a Website is built just like a magazine or catalog: Cover, table of contents, stuff I have to navigate to. Why are websites like this? Because the first people online started this way as a leap from what they were familiar with. So we get Homepage, nav bar and click click click to get to what we are really looking for.
What Compendium Blogware does for Online Marketing is leverage the web in the way it really works. People don't want homepages, they don't want to navigate. What they want is to make a search query and land on exaclty the page they want..right away.
From a marketing standpoint that means best practices is to go horizontal. Forget the pyramid and focus on a flat line populated with hundreds or thousands of targeted pages (or blogs) focused on specifically what the searcher is telling you they want.
So check out Global Toaster and my blog marketing efforts and follow along as we work this out.
In an AdWeek story with the headline "55 percent of marketers said they shifted funds from traditional media to execute social media campagins" the real story is in the details.
Around all the breathless excitement for Twitter & Facebook, three important facts jump out of this research into Online Marketing and Social Media use by business:
The top concerns for marketers when considering newer media platforms are the inability to prove ROI
Search engine marketing was cited as the most effective new-media platform by 65 percent of respondents
In the next year, blogs are expected to be the hottest new marketing channel
So what can we gather from this? How about the truth.
The truth about social media is that although interesting and perhaps valuable, Social Media marketing really means Blog Marketing and the primary benefit is Search. 90% of all marketing dollars are spent (and have always been spent) on new customer acquisition. New customer acquisition in this decade is driven by showing up when a prospect uses a search engine to try and solve a problem.
By leveraging Business Blog Software you address all three issues outlined above. Actually #3 gets you the other two. Search is not only achievable through blog software, it's easy to measure. There is no ambiguity whatsoever as it relates to ROI.
So don't make this complicated. Use blogs to target your keywords, drive relevant traffic, engage with good content and convert to new customers. Easy as 1-2-3.
I get a lot of questions from B2B marketers especially from old line companies who wonder if their customers use search. A meeting I attended a couple of days ago featured a room full of these people. "We sell precision drill parts for manufacturing....guessing our prospects and customers don't use search. (this is usually where they sit back and cross their arms)
Here is the thing. First of all, never forget these people are really smart. They know their businesniess forwards and backwards. They understand their products and services and the needs of their customers (actually this is one of the reasons B2B salespeople make such great business blog authors)
But of course before you can become great at blog marketing and SEO, you have to accept the reality that your customers and prospects actually use search.... a lot. But of course you have to prove it and that's where Keyword research comes in.
My point is that you don't need to even discuss this, it's not a debate when you have irefutable facts in front of you. Like the gentleman in the precision drill parts business, I asked for the name of one item "Collet" (whatever that is) Go to Adwords and type it in..
"Huh....what do you think of that Bob?" 246,000 monthly searches just on that one term. There are thousands of other terms that include the term collet and would be relevant and valuable for this company to show up. Suddenly the idea of Business Blog Software makes a lot more sense...
....Here is the Social Media Myth....repeat engagement (readers and followers) This is especially true with Corporate blogging. The vast majority of visitors to corporate blogs are 'first time visitors' And most of those come in from search.
What's funny is how many company bloggers resist this truth. If they embrace it...put engaging CTA's on their blogs, use twitter and facebook to drive traffic back to their blogs, suddenly there is a really easy and obvious path to Social Media ROI....it's called conversion.
I wanted to point out the great article that highlighted ExactTarget's use of Compendium Blogware. ExactTarget leverages their corporate blogging not only for the typical thought leadership aspects (where they excel) but as a primary means to engage their employees and as a B2B lead generation tool. Thanks to Jessica Tsai for a really educational piece. Keep in mind also that ET uses Compendium to power hundreds of blogs. This really is thought leadership and demand generation at it's finest.
A Blog Takes Aim at an Exact Target
With Compendium Blogware, email marketing software provider ExactTarget has turned its blog into a robust marketing strategy.
When ExactTarget began its corporate blog, the company started out using TypePad, the popular blogging software from Six Apart. At the time, only four people—the chief executive officer, two vice presidents, and a director—were regular contributors, But ExactTarget envisioned a greater role for its blog, and eventually looked to Compendium Blogware.
The software now organizes blogposts into “pages” based on content rather than author, explains Chris Baggott, Compendium’s cofounder and chief executive officer. What’s more, the title of each “page” matches a specific keyword phrase that improves search engine results. Since implementing Compendium in June 2008, ExactTarget’s keyword-focused blogs have increased blog traffic tenfold—and the number of unique visitors between mid-March and mid-April 2009 topped 8,000, according to Jeffrey K. Rohrs, ExactTarget’s vice president of marketing. The original quartet of corporate bloggers has expanded to more than 25 employees, and the designers, developers, and marketers involved have made the blog a place where, as Rohrs puts it, the “strategic and tactical, promotional and practical commingle.” And because bloggers write in their own styles, the blog matches real-world consumer phraseology. For instance, bloggers may use “email” or “e-mail,” which reflects searchers’ own inconsistencies.
Internally, the blog has generated a stronger corporate spirit as more employees get involved in creating relevant and useful content. “We’re actually seeing blogger-employees become more self-assured and assertive within the organization,” Rohrs says. In elevating these formerly “untapped voices,” he says, ExactTarget anticipates continued growth from a content and marketing perspective, with additional plans to enhance the look and feel of the blog and to bring in Web analytics to better mine the data.
I had a good talk with Kyle Lacey yesterday who turned me on to this post by Olivier Blanchard on Social Media ROI. It's still suprising to me that this needs to be spelled out to some of the Social Media Glitterati.....ROI means Return on Investment.
Investment is the time and money that goes into something....return = the Dollars that come out. Olivier has a nice diagram shown here:
Now as you can see, lots of things may happen in between the Investment and the return, and some of those things may be good....but not as good as money!
When you accept this, then you can really start to frame your Corporate Blogging Strategy around a focus towards what really drives your return. Search Marketing brings the biggest return for your social media efforts. Starting with targeted keyword blogs full of relevant content. Remember relevance is in the eyes of the searcher....so use the keywords because those are their words....
This shouldn't be so much of a mystery. Talk about what the new visitors want to talk about....they are telling you exactly what they care about by their use of specific language.
Make sure that your blogs have strong calls to action and test them frequently. The goal is much more about conversion than conversation. You will have plenty of time and various methods once you take the first step in the relationship...get them to click through: the online marketing equivalent of raising their hand.
To protect the innocent, I've altered this question a little to disguise the firm:
"I need to convince management that social media is worth investing in, but they're concerned about tracking results of such activities when today's focus is very much on proving ROI through reporting."
My suggestion is to focus your Social Media efforts where they will do the most good. It's not true that you cannot accurately report ROI from Social Media efforts.
Start with blogging as the hub of all your SM activity. Blogs (multiple based on topics or keywords) will hit the biggest target out there first, and that is Search....for every Twitter follower, there will be hundreds of people searching to solve problems that will find your blogs.
For most companies, 65% to 90% of all traffic is coming from first time visitors. With Corporate Blogging as the hub of your strategy, use a sharing tool like Share This (built into Compendium Blogware) to share your content with your social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn Groups. Time Magazine very accurately defined Twitter as an excellent "pointing" device.
The idea is to use your social media to drive traffic back to your blogs, and then using CTA's on the blogs, convert that traffic into leads.
I've seen this strategy work wonderfully for hundreds of our clients. The measurements you need to focus on are: Bounce Rates, Time on site and most importantly....click through rates. Ultimatly the goal of any marketing effort is to build relationships that turn into business, so like all Online Marketing these efforts should be tracked all the way to revenue.
Anyone who says that social media can't hold up to ROI scrutiny is stuck in Social Media 1.0.
"In 2009: $65 billion will be spent on enterprises’ own sites, dollars NOT spent on TV, magazines, newspapers, billboards, etc. To scale that, compare 2009 total U.S. TV ad revenue (cable + broadcast) at $66 billion, and total 2009 U.S. Newspaper ad revenue at $42 billion. So corporations spending marketing dollars on their own sites is equivalent to (a) wiping out all TV ad revenue or (b) wiping out one and one-half newspaper industries!"
Hello! Thanks to Outsell for this great new report, but what does it mean to advertising? Why is this happening?
Simple answer is that Advertising relies on middlemen to deliver a corporate message. With Online Marketing (Search Marketing), business can now leverage their own site, Corporate Blogging software and email marketing to control and develop a direct relationship with their prospects and customers.
Emarketer already told us that the three biggest growth areas in marketing are Search, Email and Social Media (Business Blogging covers both SEO and Social Media). What is transforming the marketing world it the capacity for organizations to have direct relationships with the people who drive their business. Marketing departments from organizations large and small are rethinking their investments and strategies and going direct...to the detrement of the old model that required a middleman to deliver your message.
iMedia ran an article I wrote highlighting 5 great corporate blog marketing programs. The key is to have measurable goals. What I love about Online Marketing, and Search Marketing specifically is that there should be no ambiguity. There can be no mystery as far as determining what is adding value and what isn't.
"Corporate blogging is a great marketing tool -- but not one that should be launched lightly. Like other marketing initiatives, a company's blog is an investment that should produce a measurable return. Thus, as I illustrated in an earlier iMedia article, much thought should be given to ways in which companies can enhance the value of these programs for both their consumers and their own bottom lines."
For fast food, my family of six always chooses Burger King.....this is in spite of the advertising and their much lauded web 2.0 efforts. In fact, evidence is beginning to pop us that like a lot of advertising that's really creative and entertaining, it's not actually helping....
As you can see from this chart provided by AdAge, Burger King is actually declining over the past year at a pretty rapid pace. Why? Well...I would blame the old fashioned focus on a mythical segment. In this case the "18 to 24/male". (same people that Taco Bell is targeting, Hardee's, Carl's Jr., Rally's etc....)
To me, what's broken is the idea that customers can be categorized into giant homogeneous groups and aiming a giant expensive missile at them will generate enough mass to make the Advertising efforts worthwhile and compensate for the incredible cost.
The problem is, you can't win with big attacks any more. My Suburban pulling up to the drive through represents 6 individuals all influenced by something different. The driver is my wife..she like BK because of the ice (go figure?), a couple of the kids like that they have Lemonade and the burgers are better. Dr. Pepper and the chicken fingers wins my older son over.
My point here is that for any business today, you have to sell to individuals, not to segments. For many businesses blogging and focus on organic search marketing is the best way to get in front of potential customers when they have a problem they need solving. Can't say this will help the fast food giants, although there are a couple million searches a month around the term "fast food". Clearly these people are searching for something?
For the vast majority of companies blogs will make a big difference as it realates to both getting found on the search engines, and as a platform to tell lots of stories to lots of different segments.
Thanks to the folks at MLT Creative for sharing this on their B2B Buzz Corporate Blog. MLT is a great partner of Compendium Blogware and really gets Online Marketing and the abilty to leverage data to build real relationship....even when focused on Search Marketing.
I guess what I love about this is how well it articulates the risks that organizations face when they continue to marketing like it's still 1999. No question the world has changed. People want to be delt with on a human level, not shouted at by brands. Have fun with this one, and pass it on....
So it just dawned on us that our own Compendium Blogware marketing team are probably the best qualified group in the world leveraging Corporate Blogging as part of an overall Search Marketing strategy. So we are putting on a webinar today at 2pm est where they will teach you exactly the steps and processes they use every day to increase leads by 90%. Blogging is an effective tool for both B2B as well as B2C demand generation not only because it's so effective, but also because it's really easy to execute.
If you are not investing time monitoring your business and industry in the social networks, you are missing a great opportunity to not only generate leads, but also to get in front of what others might be saying as it relates to your livelihood.
For example, this came up from one of my LinkedIn groups today:
"We are looking for a source to distribute press releases. Do you have one or two to recommend? Thanks for your consideration."
I replied:
Just to be a contrary.....why?
If it's for SEO, you are better off with leveraging blog marketing that feeds content out to social networks (twitter, facebook, linkedin) Press Release distribution was popular a couple of years ago as a way to goose SEO through backlinks and people finding the releases through their own searches and hopefully navigating back to the home site.
This is not nearly as effective as it once was and can't compete with the benefits of managing your own content through your businesses blogs.
For one thing you will drive a lot more search marketing traffic and secondly, you will get a lot higher engagement. We, as well as journalists, are pretty trained to tune out traditional looking press releases in favor of simple authentic stories about your business, products or services and most importantly customer use cases.
My point to everyone is that Press Releases are just another form of Online Marketing. The problem is that it's expensive and becoming less effective. Business that manage their own blogs, focus on search and produce content a lot more frequently will get significantly better results.
Sorry to shout in the title, but I really want to drive this point home. Lets begin with this graph up top...
A new study from SEM firm xplusone reports that most marketers are not happy with their ability to optimize landing pages when targeting large numbers of keywords.
This is where widespread blog marketing comes in. (i.e. using your own corporate blogs to control your own search) If you follow the advice I keep talking about here and create blogs that use your keywords as titles and use your employees and constituents to tell the stories of your products and services you in effect create organic landing pages. Not only do these blogs help your search marketing efforts, they convert at much higher rates than traditional web pages.
When blogs target keywords, a lot of good things happen. First of all and most importantly is your searchers are really happy. They land on a page that matches their inquiry. That page has content that is not only written by humans who really understand what they are talking about, it matches what the searcher is looking for. If you follow good web marketing tactics regarding CTA's and testing, you will find that this is a lot easier than a traditional landing page strategy as well as much more effective in converting searcher to leads.
Hosted by Richard Cunningham, VP Marketing of Right On Interactive and Chris Baggott Co-founder, CEO of Compendium Blogware. Thursday, December 3rd 2009. Sign up here »
The other day I posted this graph showing the latest of the Gartner Hype Cycle's and the 
Some of you may have noticed that I have started a blog network to act as an eCommerce site to sell Toasters. It's called Global Toaster and it launched this week.
I get a lot of questions from B2B marketers especially from old line companies who wonder if their customers use search. A meeting I attended a couple of days ago featured a room full of these people. "We sell precision drill parts for manufacturing....guessing our prospects and customers don't use search. (this is usually where they sit back and cross their arms)
"In 2009: $65 billion will be spent on enterprises’ own sites, dollars NOT spent on TV, magazines, newspapers, billboards, etc. To scale that, compare 2009 total U.S. TV ad revenue (cable + broadcast) at $66 billion, and total 2009 U.S. Newspaper ad revenue at $42 billion. So corporations spending marketing dollars on their own sites is equivalent to (a) wiping out all TV ad revenue or (b) wiping out one and one-half newspaper industries!"
As you can see from this chart provided by 
