I posted this reply:
I wanted to thank you both for a great session last week. Your questions were insightful and I really appreciate your open-mindedness for some of these new concepts.
A successful relationship requires direct communication. To get the right to build a relationship with a customer or prospect you have to first be found, second build credibility that a relationship with you will add value to the prospect or customer.
Blogging is spectacular for this stage of the relationship. From that point however 99% of the time that relationship is going to evolve to leverage some other medium...which might include face-to-face, email, telephone or even paper based things like catalogs.
You guys are a perfect case to show that a successful blogging program shouldn't be measured by the number of comments...but from the amount of traffic and conversions.Thanks again,
Chris Baggott, CEO
Compendium Blogware
Advanced Business Blogging Strategy, requires that your employee and constituent content should be mostly about your business. Blog about your solutions, your customers, your aspirations as it relates to your products & services. This is what people are searching for...great blog information that helps them and builds trust
Posted by: Jonathan on Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Chris. What you refer to here as "...Blog about your solutions, your customers, your aspirations as it relates to your products & services..." is we at Blue Tent Marketing refer to as Blog Food.Check it out. We are constantly pushing the marketing leaders & business owners to engage their visitors through the company blog. I often hear similar comments or emails from clients who are consistently soft on content, but they haven't even began to tap into surplus of topics that may attract business. Once they become comfortable generating fresh content - how do you suggest pushing that content throughout the web? Do you find that business blogs benefit from sharing with social media sites or do you think promoting the content from within the site or enewsletters is more attractive? Jonathan
Posted by: Chris Baggott on Thursday, August 7, 2008
I love the idea and phrase "Blog Food" Jonathan. Two things about the strategy you outline that I'd like to address. The first is who writes. Historically, blogging has been a top down activity. The problem is that some execs or Small Business Owners are good at it and prolific, but most are not. The Compendium Blogware strategy is to open this up to everyone...all of your employees. Rather than "you are a blogger" make it "Who wants to blog!". Some of your best content will come from the most unexpected places. And by spreading the load, you will generate a lot more great content and achieve a much higher engagement. The idea of pushing that content out to the web is really what drives the Concept of Compendiing. A Compendium is a collection of similar writing. The search engines are looking for relevant pages/content. They determine that by things like titles, keywords, frequency, recency, page one vs. page #..... We took a different take with Compendium in that rather than having blog posts organized around the authors, we organize blog pages around topics or keywords. The result for a business is that they can now populate many keyword specific blogs with their content and great increase both the reach of that content in the search engines and the engagement of the searcher. The searcher is thrilled to find content that directly matches their keyword intent written by passionate people and of course the marketer is happy to have the introduction :-) A real win win.
Posted by: chris baggott on Thursday, August 7, 2008
One other great source of content comes through email. I know you folks at Blue Tent are masters of triggered and data driven email and one of the best practices we have seen is to add a blog post request as part of a follow up email. Imagine I'm a guest at a hotel or just completed a white water rafting trip. I get an email thanking me for my trip and saying something like: "We loved having you and your family this weekend in Vail". "I'm not sure if you knew we have a great blog program and would love to have your story" Perhaps you put 5 questions and ask them to write a paragraph or two that includes all the answers....maybe even throw in some pictures. I can imagine that you would have a 10% or greater response rate... think...10 out 100 emails. I posted a couple weeks ago a similar program I proposed for Frontgate and Catalog Retailer. http://blogging.compendiumblog.com/blog/blogging-best-practices/0/0/search-marketing-and-the-catalog-industry
Posted by: Busby SEO Challenge on Saturday, August 30, 2008
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