Most of us are familiar with what makes an email look like “spam.”

Typically, there are a lot of CAPITILIZED LETTERS and several exclamation points!!!!! Not to mention the over-the-top formatting, such as underlining, highlighting, excessive bolding, and font colors.  Of course, the intention of the sender is to grab your attention with ALL THAT FANCY STUFF!!! But the truth is, if a company has to work that hard to make its content look enticing, then the content is probably not all that valuable to begin with.

You should consider these email spam triggers when thinking about the content of your blogging program. Search engines dislike spam just as much as the ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) do, and if they sniff out something that feels “spammy,” they will be less inclined to serve it as result.

Our advice at Compendium is to keep your blog content formatting clean, simple, and consistent. Of course images, hyperlinks, and some bolding here and there to call out some key points are all just fine. But if you spend more time formatting your content than you spend writing your content, it may be a red flag.

A search engine marketing firm, Slingshot SEO, got me thinking about bounce rates a few weeks ago. Sure, we've all heard that traffic, clicks, and conversion are all good ways to measure our marketing and corporate blogging efforts, but how many of us are paying attention to bounce rate? What sort of research are we doing in comparing bounce rates of our blogs vs. our landing pages vs. our website?

Slingshot believes that Google will one day (if they are not already doing so) take bounce rates into consideration when determining how to rank landing pages. It makes a lot of sense -- if 99% of the people who hit your page leave as quickly as they're able to, something isn't clicking. Getting those kinds of stats aren't difficult - it's making sense of them. "What" leads to bounce rate? The same things that apply to a website definitely apply to business blogs. The problem may be general design flaws, outdated content, irrelevant content, "boring" content, etc., etc. etc.

Now that I'm paying attention to the bounce rate on Compendium's own blogs, it's also interesting to see how various search terms impact bounce rate and read time. For example, "business blogging software" is one of our best terms, with people spending an average of 3 minutes on our blogs, and very few of them are bouncing off right away. The bounce rate for "business blogging software" on our website is higher, and the read time isn't as long.

What this tells me is that it would do Compendium a lot of good to be the #1 result in Google for this term. Clearly, it's attracting the right kind of attention, and higher search engine placement would likely mean more visibility. When it comes to your blogging program, as a first step, I recommend taking a look at your website stats, because then you'll have something to benchmark against. Thanks to Slingshot for getting me in the "bounce" frame of mind.

Yesterday I had a chance to be on an e-marketing panel hosted by the Society for Marketing Professional Services (SMPS), which is geared toward marketing people from architecture firms, engineering, or construction firms.

The first question to kick-off the panel was something to the effect of, "Why should organizations in our industries try to embrace new e-marketing mediums (blogs, email marketing, etc.).”  I know it sounds basic, but in my opinion, the first place to start when answering this question is by thinking about what you want to accomplish at the very highest level. The truth is, as creative as we marketing folks would like to think we are, the goal of our efforts really hasn't changed much in several, several years.

The goal is to build better relationships, whether it be starting new relationships, or nurturing current relationships, and the fruits of our labor are more business and repeat business for our companies. (For those of you who have read Email Marketing by the Numbers, you’ll recognize this as the same goal mentioned there). The simple truth is that new e-marketing mediums will help your organization accomplish the goal of better relationships.

Of course I'm going to focus on blogging specifically here. And that means that I'm going to focus on building new relationships as blogging offers a lot as an acquisition tool (whereas email is a great retention tool). Here is exactly how to start a great relationship:

Make it easy for someone to find you. You know that saying, “Great marketing is being in the right place at the right time, when the right person is looking for you.” So as a first step, you have to be present.

Be friendly. Make conversation. That’s the very opposite tone that most of our websites take. Yes, of course you want to be professional, but at the same time, you need to be human. Once someone has found you, they need to feel like they are being welcomed by a real person, not by a marketing department.

Provide valuable insight. This all comes down to relevance. Your prospects are more intolerant than ever to irrelevant information, and they’ll quickly move on unless your conversation with them strikes the right chord.

Offer to further the conversation. You’ve got to give someone a way to get in touch with you in the future –or better yet, for you to get in touch with them. If they don’t have a clear way to do so, this beautiful relationship is going to stop just as it’s getting started.

Okay, I told you this was basic stuff. So how, exactly, does blogging help with each step in starting a great relationship? You’ll have to read the next post, which will focus on blogging for search engine optimization and how easy to use blogging software like Compendium make it possible to quickly get those new relationships started and off on the right foot.

Yes. A lot of people ask me about blog research and trends, with readership being a related item. Most people interpret blog readership more as "subscribing." In other words, they think that "reading" a blog is all about coming back and reading over and over again. At one point, blogging best practices led blog writers to believe that a consistent, steady flow of returning traffic was a key indicator of success. (Reason being, returning visitors leads to predictable impressions and the opportunity to monetize a blog through advertising).

To clarify, there are two ways that I think about blog readership: new and returning visitors.

There's a lot of value in both. New visitors may show up, read the blog, and then take the next step depending on what kind of conversion is offered to them. Returning visitors may show up over and over again and never take a next step (perhaps there isn't a clear call-to-action on the blog!). I'm not sure what the general stats are when it comes to new or returning visitors, but I'm sure there are a lot of new blog visitors (readers) who show up, digest a blog, and have no idea at all that it's a blog they're reading. Why? Because a blog may look just like a website or any other web page!

I point this out because this blogging information recently came to my attention: 

According to 2006 survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 39 percent of Internet users, or about 57 million American adults, said they read blogs, up from 27 percent in 2004, or 32 million.

I think those numbers are really low even though it's a big jump from 2004. I'm trying to find 2007 numbers but not having much luck. Just remember that when people throw out stats like this, there is probably a very large group of people who read blogs and don't know it. This isn't necessarily a bad thing -- what will make your organization's blog successful isn't that people know it's a blog. It's how they use it to gather the information and education and ultimately, start a relationship with you.

Okay, so my blogging bright and early every morning pledge didn't hold for a few days this week, but I'm back on the wagon and ready to talk about content frequency again.

I was in a meeting last week with our PR firm, who has decided to start blogging with Compendium. The owner of the PR firm (Chris Dittoe) had a great idea that came up with a pretty darn good idea of having a rotation schedule for content creation. Every single person in his organization will be blogging (wohoo!) which is a great mentality. Some clients have indicated that they're going to set aside 15-20 minutes at the beginning of each day to have their employees write, but Chris suggested a rotation schedule so that employees have certain days where they should plan on writing.

I think this is a great idea and makes for better blogging because a) people won't tire of content creation b) there is a guideline as to what's expected from those participating and c) by spreading the content contribution around to several people, he's going to get a lot of different perspectives and insights that just wouldn't be possible if it were only Chris blogging (not that we wouldn't enjoy reading his blog...).

So my point here is to find what works for your organization. Try the rotation schedule, the top 'o the morning approach, and more. It's funny how the same themes that run throughout marketing also apply to blogging (marketers are supposed to test, track, and adjust, right?). Well, no surprise...it's the same thing here.