Business blogs

Take the Easy Route: Blog for Business

Thursday, July 2, 2009 by Allison Bowen

It's amazing how much the marketplace has changed in just a few short years. Take for example, a September 19, 2005, Wall Street Journal article describing the crazy adventures of two men attempting to get their new product to market.

"The pair had finally scored a coveted 8 a.m. appointment with a Wal-Mart buyer -- giving them a chance to get their ergonomic pen, the PenAgain, in from of the world's largest retailer. But with only 10 minutes so spare, that chance was slipping away as the entreprenuers sat, panicked, still a mile and a half away."

I wonder what that pair would do now if I told them it's not nearly that hard to get a new product to market. They can simply blog for business! That's right, a blog can help you in many ways.

Say for instance, PenAgain knew that much of their target market spends many hours a day online. If someone were to search for an inventive writing product, he or she may Google "creative writing pen". What if the first organic search result that appeared was for a PenAgain blog? Clearly many sales would develop from those that click through to the blog and saw all that the company had to offer.

This is where Compendium Blogware comes in. Compendium provides the best blogging software that will get companies search engine optimization results. It's not just about blogging in order to relate to your customers anymore. While that is certainly still a great reason to blog, there is more that can be accomplished. Using basic blog software from Compendium, any company can increase their SEO and thus drive more potential clients to their website.

Had PenAgain been launching their product today, I would have suggested they done so online first rather than take it directly to Wal-Mart with no evidenece that the product would sell. Why go through all the trouble when there is an easy route to success? As a start-up company, PenAgain would not be able to afford pricey PPC. Instead, it could choose an affordable blogging software and be well on its way.

Blogging for business is simple. It doesn't involve a lot of money or a scramble to Wal-Mart's headquarters. Instead, it involves a committment to writing blogs and a call to Compendium today. Why not save yourself some trouble and give it a try?

Blogging with the search engine

Wednesday, July 1, 2009 by Brian Millis

In many of my conversations with marketers from all different kinds of companies, I often hear the misnomer that there are two separate ways to blog for your business; blogging for good content and blogging for search engines.

Why do these have to seem like two different categories? In my opinion they are one in the same. When a business employs strong blog marketing, the content is good because it addresses what the target audience is searching. Those people are searching it because it matters to them. Therefore, good content revolves around the important search terms for that business. Using authentic, helpful content is only great when people find it. So I say good content includes blogging WITH the search engine (and searcher) in mind.

This applies to all business, B2C, B2B, B2D2C, etc. Search engines do not discriminate. They simply want to provide the most relevant, frequently and recently updated web pages to the searcher. One of our clients, Brian LeCount, said it best in a recent blog post of his own. Here are the brilliant 10 points that he wrote:

   1. I blog about the things I think and do.
   2. I try to blog a lot.
   3. I use the search marketing keywords that I know people search on.
   4. I use a platform that automatically positions my content for maximum search
       engine love.
   5. I get ranked in Google for terms like Cincinnati Marketing (#3 in local results)
       Cincinnati Marketing Firm (#1), Cincinnati Advertising Agency (#10), Social Media
       Marketing Cincinnati (#10), and about 45 others.
   6. People search using these search marketing keywords b/c that's what the
       research tells me.
   7. They find my blog.
   8. They read and click on a call to action.
   9. They get some value, and we have a great marketing strategy conversation.
10. Some of those people choose to engage us and help them build their business.

Hi #4 point is what we provide here at Compendium Blogware. I enjoy talking with any interested business who wants to have a strategy behind the company blog and yield the best SEO results possible from the good content. Feel free to reach out to me if you would like to see how our corporate blogging software could make it easy for your online marketing as well.

$65 Billion to be spent on Corporate web sites....not on traditional media

Wednesday, July 1, 2009 by Chris Baggott

Here is a quote that should grab your attention:

"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.

10 Ways to Promote Your Corporate Blog

Tuesday, June 30, 2009 by Douglas Karr

Online marketing and search marketing requires some off-site promotion as well as on-site promotion.

Promote your corporate blog on your website. A link is great, aggregating your feed is even better!
Promote your corporate blog in your email signatures.
Promote your corporate blog in your business cards.
Promote your corporate blog posts via Twitter using HootSuite.
Publish your corporate blog on Facebook using Simplaris Blogcast or the Blog RSS Reader.
Promote your corporate blog posts along with other industry-specific posts using StumbleUpon.
Save your corporate blog posts with specific keyword-driven tags to Delicious. I recommend the Delicious Firefox add-on to make this easier!
Comment on other industry blogs and be sure to use your corporate blog address in the URL field of the comments, not your website url. People like to follow a blog from a great content!
Offer other industry bloggers a trade to guest post on each others' blog. This will expose your readers to their readers... and their readers to you!
Mention industry thought leaders in your corporate blog posts. Folks in the industry pay attention to who is talking about them. If you write a post worthy of mentioning, you'll get their attention, their audience, and if they link - some great authority.

Don't just leave it up to search engines only to find your content - promoting your content can drive traffic and backlinks to your blog. When you grow backlinks to your blog, search engine traffic will increase, too!

Would Kings Island Tickets Motivate You?

Tuesday, June 30, 2009 by Jess Wehner

Looking for a fun way to motivate your bloggers? We recently had a contest here at Compendium - the person with the most blog posts in one week received two tickets to Kings Island and a $25 gift card to buy food/goodies at the park. I'm not quit sure how many additional posts this produced, but you can be sure the competition was fierce - the winner produced 14 posts in 1 week! I'm ashamed to admit this, but that's more than most of our clients produce during a whole month.

Blogging for business should be easy and fun! I'm sure if you asked Mitch Burk, winner of the Kings Island prize package, he would tell you that he spent less than an hour a day producing blog posts that week, and he was rewarded with $75+ in prizes. I always like to remind all of our marketing admins out there that your bloggers aren't just going to blog on their own. Sure, you may have the occasional employee that just happens to love to write, but chances are your bloggers are busy and "don't have time" to spare on writing a blog post.

Here's something to try: offer a $50 gift certificate to the person that blogs the most in one week - see how many of your bloggers that "don't have time" all of the sudden free up to post that week! (and then see your search engine results climb!)

Let us know the results, and if you have a contest that works- please share so we can recommend it to our other clients.

Links: Why they matter to your blog program

Tuesday, June 30, 2009 by Jess Wehner

As a Client Success Manager, one of my main goals is to ensure that the clients that are putting effort towards their business blog program are getting search marketing results (and those that aren't putting effort in - start to!). Every once in a while our team will come across a client that has been writing frequent, relevant content but is not seeing the search engine results they would expect. While there are many areas we trouble shoot and look through in order to understand what's happening, one area that always seems to stand out is having links.

No matter how much great content your business blog might have, if you don't have any links pointing back to your site, it's hard for Google to recognize your site as an authority and consequently rank it. Links can happen naturally, for example, as you write better and better people will begin to link to you naturally. But in order maximize your search marketing efforts you can build links too. Here are a couple easy ways to get links out to your blog.

Put a link to your blog...
1. On your website
2. On your social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn)
3. On your partner's websites

Additionally, SEOBook has a list of 101 ways to build links - starting with having good content that people naturally want to link.

Let's Chat - Marketer to Marketer

Tuesday, June 30, 2009 by meghan peters

Would you like to learn how marketers are producing blogging ROI in just 10 minutes a day?
If so, then our upcoming Webinar will be perfect for you.

Now more than ever it’s important that marketers chat with their peers and share success stories to help businesses grow and generate demand during these hard economic times.

During this Webinar, you'll not only learn how we run a successful blogging strategy in just 10 minutes a day, but we'll also cover:

1. How our marketing team allocates time and resources to blogging.
2. How we’re able to generate over 185 posts each month.
3. How we consistently maintain a 9% click-through rate.
4. How we acquire new business through our blogs.

Make sure to register for this Webinar soon - there's a limited number of spots available!

You have to target everybody

Monday, June 29, 2009 by Chris Baggott

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....

Ad age article on segment marketing advertising

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.

What Billy Mays can teach us about blogging

Monday, June 29, 2009 by Ali Sales Roach

In very sad news, Billy Mays passed away over the weekend. I am not ashamed to admit that I have three bottles of OxyClean in my basement, and my ears couldn't help but perk up when hearing about most of the products linked to his name.

Even though Billy Mays didn't give me or anyone else personal advice about blogging best practices, his sales tactics can be applied to just about any sales and marketing activity, including your business blogging program.

There were three key components when it came to Billy Mays' pitches:

1. He made it obvious that he understood your problem
2. He made it clear that he had something that could help you
3. He made it clear that he was really excited about his product and how it could help you

I know, very deep stuff. It seems so obvious! As a marketer managing a corporate blogging strategy, why wouldn't you want to apply these tactics? After all, we know from the staggering sales of products like OxyClean that they work.

When it comes to blog marketing, you can make it easy on your visitors and make Mr. Mays proud at the same time - make it obvious that you understand your audience's problems, make it obvious that you have something that can help them, and deliver your message in the most human, optimistic way possible.

Brilliant Blogs

Sunday, June 28, 2009 by Mitch Burk

Blogs.

I could end right there and this entry would be summing up what we're about here at Compendium... Being a web-based blogging platform, we are able to reach out to multiple different businesses and companies in order to help them see the powerful effectiveness that blogs could provide to their business.

The best thing about blogs is the "real" feeling behind them. They can stay up to date, relevant, and provide what readers want to hear. When you have your employees blogging about your product, consumers can hear about what is happening with the production department, the marketing department, and executive team. When using blog marketing within your business, your customers won't feel so left out in the dark and will know where to find you when they are searching for your product.

Today's blog is brought to you by the letter "A"

Sunday, June 28, 2009 by Mitch Burk

Acquiring new customers is one of the ultimate goals of our software here at Compendium.

When you blog, consumers can find you, and when people find you they find your product, and when they find your product, they can purchase it. We have seen some of our clients with customer conversion rates above 10%! This means that over 10% of the people who found this business blog through search became customers and purchased products!

When using Compendium's blog software as an acquisition tool, you will be finding that consumers are not just finding you, but converting into customers.

Learn How Compendium Blogware uses our own tool!

Thursday, June 25, 2009 by Chris Baggott

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.

Register now for the Compendium Blogware Marketing Team's Webinar and learn the steps to manage your own business blogging program.

How to start a business blog...

Thursday, June 25, 2009 by Mitch Burk

How to start a business blog is a common concern of many business owners looking at diving into the world of blog marketing. And lucky for you, here at Compendium, we make it quick and convenient for you by providing you with a talented team of IT support members, client success managers, product developers, and many more people! We also help to provide you with plenty of information right on our website that makes starting a business blog easy!

Look around our website and you'll find:

Whitepapers outlining many of the specifics about the blogging world and how your company can use blogs to win search.

Case Studies discussing the recent success of many of Compendium's currently clients and how they are capitalizing on blog marketing to create business.

Articles to prove to you that we're not the only ones talking about corporate blogging theses days.

And conveniently enough... all three of these things can be found in our new ROI Toolkit containing all of the above mentioned, as well as a getting started to help the process of starting a business blog go quick and easy for your company!

Are Press Releases Relevant?

Tuesday, June 23, 2009 by Chris Baggott

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.

To Blog or Not to Blog - WSJ

Monday, June 22, 2009 by Jenni Edwards

Anything with the word "blog" inside of my favorite newspaper, The WSJ catches my eye...so even if this is a little bit of a "personal blogger" article -- there are a few good points made and it's always important to see what non-industry folks are reading/hearing because well, most of our clients are non-industry folks.

Here are a couple of highlights...

Blogging allows you to set your own agenda and your own schedule. This is true in the business blogging space as well. No more waiting for a paper to pick up your article and hopes it is seen. You can be your own media.
Focus. Without it - your authority is diluted and readers are distracted without it. In simple corporate blogging terms - "talk about your business" --- no one cares what you think of Obama, they didn't come to you for that (there are plenty of cable news shows for that)

Blog Marketing Tip #3 - do your research

Monday, June 22, 2009 by Brett Fritz

Some great tips for helping you market your blog for business. Tip #3 - do your research.

When companies set up a blog for business, many times one of the goals they have is to become known as a resource site for expert analysis and insight. A business blog is a great way to achieve this goal but you have to do your research.

Make sure that you keep up with all the current news and updates in the industry that you are talking about. Feel free to reference other new sources but remember what you were taught in high school English class... REFERENCE your work! If you take a snippet of a news article posted on a major news website, be sure to reference where you got that information from. The same holds true for other blogs. If you you like reading someones blog and one of their topics relates to your current blog post, mention the authors name. Link your post to his blog.

Doing your research will help your audience build that sense of trust that you really do have the expert knowledge in your industry. Build that trust but continually give good results back!

Blog Marketing Tip #3 - do your research

Blog Marketing Tip #2 - customize your skin

Monday, June 22, 2009 by Brett Fritz

Some great tips on helping you market your blog for business. Tip #2 - customize your skin.

You have worked long and hard for people to recognize your branding for your business. You have a great logo, your colors are remembered, people know who your online presence is. Great! Now you have decided that you want to incorporate a blog for business on your site to help you drive leads and become known as an expert in your field. Awesome!

One problem... you have a host website that is completely branded with your logo and corporate colors which is blue. Now your blog for business is up and running and it does not have your logo and the color of or business blog is red. This is a problem.

From the viewpoint of your audience, how do I know that the blog is the same company as the host website? Can I trust this blog? Can I trust these links or this content?

Having a skin on your blog that is the same as the skin on your website will help keep your audience knowing that your business blogs are from the same company as your host website. This will help your audience keep the trust that you have already helped them establish from your corporate branding.

Blog Marketing Tip #2 - customize your skin

Blog Marketing Tip #1 - your domain name

Monday, June 22, 2009 by Brett Fritz

Some great tips on helping you market your blog for business. Tip #1 - your domain name.

Think of your domain name like the title of a book. Your title should match the content that is written in your book. When writing a business blog your domain name, or URL, should be treated the same way.

Try to stay away from hosting sites that do not let you pick your domain name. Setting up your blog as a sub domain to your host web domain name is a great way to keep your audience in uniform with what is going on. If you set up a blog for business like this, be sure to include the keyword your blog is talking about in the domain name as well.

Example:

www.mywebsitename.com is my host site

blog.mywebsitename.com/keyword is my sub domain blog talking about a keyword.

Having a good domain name will help in online search and it will also help your audience know what this story is all about!

Tip #1 - your domain name

What is the best online marketing tool available?

Monday, June 22, 2009 by Brett Fritz

If you ask a marketing company what they think is the best online marketing tool available is you will probably get varied results. Most might just keep their answers generic and talk about the differences between paid search and organic search or SEO. Some companies might even go out and push a certain software they use or a company they have a relationship with.

When asking Compendium Blogware what they best online marketing tool is you will get a simple answer....look at our clients and you tell us what you think is the best way to market via online search.

Our clients are being found in thousands of related keyword search terms. Our clients are growing their business. Our clients are seeing more and more relevant leads come in their door month over month because of the content that they are writing on the Compendium corporate blogging software.

So, you could ask us what we think but of coarse you will get a biased answer. Better yet, why don't you ask our clients. The overwhelming answer you will get is the best online marketing tool is utilizing a blog for business.

Give us a call today!

Why is there so much bad Corporate Blogging Advice!??

Friday, June 19, 2009 by Chris Baggott

I saw a blog today, quoting a well-known social media expert talking about best practices in business blogging. According to the author the expert said:

“For example, airline mergers, fuel surcharges and the fate of low-cost carriers in recessionary times have all been newsworthy topics in the travel industry over the past 12 months, and this is what a company in the sector would have focused on to attract readers."

"On the other hand, it is advisable for companies in the real estate sector to use their blog as an opportunity to offer tips on how to overcome challenges such as falling property prices, or how to take advantage of historically low interest rates when applying for mortgages. These are useful tips that go far beyond simply advertising a product and can help companies build a loyal client base, as they offer valuable information to readers free of charge.”

Uggh! Contrast that with the simple and logical advice of the master: Seth Godin…..

“If you own a lot of acres but just have a few bags of seed, you might be tempted to spread out what you've got and cover as much territory as you can. Farmers tell me that this is wasteful and time consuming. You end up with less yield and more work.”

This is fantastic corporate blogging advice….Focus Focus Focus.

First of all, it's a myth that corporate blogs have regular readers. Most corporate blogs have 80-95% of their traffic coming from first time visitors. This puts the idea that you should be talking about big picture industry issues out the window. Even big time A-list business blogs have most of their traffic coming from first time visitors... And most of your corporate blog traffic is coming from search.   If you are in the travel business should you be talking about the macro-effects of fuel prices on the travel economy? (a few seeds on a big field) Of course not.

Great corporate blog topics start with knowing the keywords your traffic is using to find you...and talking about that. For every 10 people who care about fuel prices there are 10 million looking for info on trips to Florida. The only thing that a business should be blogging about is what their customers are interested in....those customers express their interest by the use of keywords in search engines or search boxes on your site.

Think again about the real estate example in this light. What gain can a single real estate agent get from blogging with advice on mortgage rates? Last month there were nearly 10,000 searches on '2 bedroom condo, chicago'   If I'm selling a two bedroom condo in Chicago, I should be blogging all day long about my condo's countertops, bathrooms, views, coffee shops nearby etc... My traffic wants me to help them solve their 2 bedroom condo problem, not the mortgage crisis.

Make sense?

Relevant content to based on what your prospects are searching for is what should drive your blogging goals.   Engagement comes from telling compelling stories about how you solve problems for the people who find you....finally, business bloggers need to focus on converting that traffic.   Win the search, win the credibility and win the conversion...That's what makes great corporate blogging.