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Links for 2009-06-11

Friday, June 12, 2009 by Blake Matheny

Links for 2009-06-11

Home - Common Tag - Common Tag is an open tagging format developed to make content more connected, discoverable and engaging. Unlike free-text tags, Common Tags are references to unique, well-defined concepts, complete with metadata and their own URLs. With Common Tag, site owners can more easily create topic hubs, cross-promote their content, and enrich their pages with free data, images and widgets.
Why “I’d just Google it” is not an acceptable interview answer « Software++ - I have often been lectured about, if not criticized for, my interview practices. In particular, I happen to have high expectations. We make very few offers and the ones we do make are generally for very smart, senior people. I was reading this blog post and there was a particular sentence that summed up my feelings on interviews, and specifically why we ask some of the tough questions that we do. The author said, "A job interview is a competition, not a pass-fail test." and that's very true. Sure, you might not be able to tell me the difference between a hash table and a binary tree in terms of runtime complexity but another candidate can and I'm going to prefer that candidate for the job.

This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-06-11

Can you skim your posts?

Tuesday, June 9, 2009 by Compendium Client Marketing

Most of your blog's traffic will be coming from search. Searchers expect to find answers to their question quickly and easily when they land on your post.

It's important that what you post about is relevant to the keywords that searchers are finding you for. If you stay on topic and use your keywords, you'll be delivering the answers they're looking for. There is a way to really stand out though! Good formatting.

The four things you can do today to improve your formatting:

Keep your paragraphs short and leave space between them. Make sure you leave space around your images. This is called whitespace.
Numbered and ordered lists stand out and are simple to digest, use them often!
Keep your posts pithy by talking about a single point in each post. If you have multiple points, use multiple posts!
Emphasize important elements of the post. Use bold, italics, and highlights. Bolded text stands out for search engines as well.

Post Idea:
Write a post using a bulleted list. Perhaps the top 3 customer compliments that your company gets. Or the top 5 reasons why prospects use your product or service.

Questions from this week's Compendium Blogware webinar #3

Friday, June 5, 2009 by Chris Baggott

Q: What is the best way to educate my employees about blogging - if they all don’t completely understand the benefits?

Wow what a great question.   What makes it great is that you are totally thinking about your blogging goals right up front. Blogging Best Practices start with widespread employee participation.   Employees are 5 times more credible than CEO's as corporate bloggers according to Richard Edelman, and that only makes sense.   Who better to tell the stories about your products and services in the context of your customer success?    If your goal is to convert your blog traffic into meaningful relationships then the best content is focused on the customers problems and how your business can solve them.

So how do you get the employees interested?   First of all, you have to open up blogging to everyone. If you let people talk on the phone then you should empower them to blog. You never know where your best bloggers are going to come from. And this is not something that can be necessarily appointed.   Bloggers are born not made.

Secondly you have to share your metrics with them. Since you are doing this with clear ROI objectives, you should be very public internally about how it's going and who's helping. Making hero's of the people who are doing a good job is the best way to get others to join the bandwagon.

For the most part people want to feel empowered and important. Marketing's job is to continually reinforce the importance and appreciation of those that participate.

Here at Compendium Blogware, we often have little contests. Small weekly prizes and a public recognition monthly for those that generate the most readers, are the most prolific bloggers. We also have funny Dunce caps for the three least productive bloggers. It's all fun and good natured but at the same time reinforces that this is an important part of being on the team.

The benefits are not only search engine optimization, but also conversion.   Call this out. We chart our monthly metrics in real obvious places so no one can miss that this activity is important to the success of the entire company. Blogging is our number one demand generation activity.

Why Brad Brenner is Wrong about Others being Wrong about PR

Monday, June 1, 2009 by PJ Hinton

Brad Brenner has a blog post claiming that public relations professionals are all the more relevant in this day and age. Quoting from the text of the article:

Doomsayers don’t get it. They think PR is all about writing a press release or getting a story in a magazine. Now that print media is in decline, they say PR is on it’s way out as well. They never understood that press releases and published articles are just means to an end. The core of PR has always been about communication skills and strategies - the ability to evaluate the competitive landscape, identify the right messages and succinctly and effectively communicate those messages to the right audience -wherever they may be.

Brenner's claim is that the scope of PR's function transcends traditional press release pitching and because of this, PR takes on a strategic role:

The fact is, marketing today is more complicated and more multi-faceted than ever before. Creating, managing and maximizing the success of a marketing program in the digital age requires a real pro - and today, more than ever, that pro is a public relations expert.

What Brenner fails to address in his rebuttal is that power of public relations professionals to shape the message is shrinking. Brenner would like you to think that PR professionals are uniquely qualified to compose and convey that message. An inconvenient reality that I have mentioned in a prior post puts that assumption to question:

... your reputation is controlled by a marketplace where your message competes with that of those who don't agree with your message.

There are too many PR professionals who think that some creatively spun copy will tidy up and protect a brand that is self-destructing because of product or service issues. It doesn't work that way anymore.

Carl Morris has a great post on his blog from this past January that chronicles how badly PR people screwed things up for Chrysler and Target. And let's not forget the feud between TechCruch and Lois Whitman.

Consumer sentiment toward corporate America ranges from skeptical to cynical. Quoting an excerpt from an April 28 story from Reuters about a Harris poll:

"What was surprising in this year's study was the very clear total loss of trust in corporate America," said Robert Fronk, senior vice president at Harris. "The focus on individual rewards, the focus on greed all really added up to this incredible drop."

Respondents said the brutal recession has darkened their view of corporate America, with 75 percent reporting their opinion of corporations was lower due to the downturn. They saw little hope for economic improvement, with 43 percent expecting conditions to get worse over the next six to 12 months.

Good PR professionals who understand how the playing field has changed can help a client from making gaffes, but they can no longer repair the damage that bad behavior leaves behind.

The companies that will succeed in the future are those who straighten up and act in a way such that their operations align with the ideals they set forth in their literature. Letting the employees, rather than paid professionals, write the posts will go a long way towards meeting that goal.

Prioritizing Social Media Strategies.

Friday, May 29, 2009 by Lindsey Bailey

Often in my conversations with prospects investigating new means of acquiring more customers online, I hear day after day "well, we really want to get into social media". I simply ask, "why"? This is what's interesting...I think it's a classic case of Keeping up with the Jones'. Social Media can be great, you can have conversations, forums, discussions, etc with people interested in what you do. But honestly, how are you measuring it? What is it really doing for your bottom line? If you can answer that question, I'll be a monkey's uncle...er, aunt.

Twitter and Facebook are especially popular destinations with the folks I come into contact with. Listen when I tell you: Blog First, Then Twitter. I'm not going to reinvent the Corporate Blogging wheel, so I want you to check out what our CEO Chris Baggott had to say about it:

"your strategy needs to start with Corporate Blogging. Blogs are the place where you tell the stories of your organization, the problems you solve for your customers and share your thoughts. Twitter is perfect for helping you expose those thoughts with a catchy blurb and a link back.

Without the foundation of the blog, what exactly do you think you can accomplish as a company? How would you measure it? A Tweet that leads to your blogs, also leads to conversions on your CTA's. That's how you build reltionships...my moving the relationship forward to the next step."

Exactly. What is a 140 character Tweet going to tell me about your business? It can lead me somewhere, an "about us" landing page, a business blog, but that 140 characters is not the place to even begin to tell me who you are, and what you do. I like the analogy of the text message/email. I'll text my friend to tell her to "meet me at the mall at 5:30"...but I'm certainly not going to text her a novel about my day. That's better suited for a more appropriate platform. Each of these platforms does in fact have its place in your arsenal, but know where to start. Get some great content up on your business blog, make it searchable, THEN drive qualified leads there with your Facebook and Twitter.

Improve your keyword usage

Friday, May 22, 2009 by Compendium Client Marketing

When blogging for search engine optimization it is important that you lead the effort, as a blogger, by using the keywords targeted by your organization.

Keywords for you to focus on when writing your blog posts can be found in the Important Keywords Tool on the right side of your user dashboard next to the text editor. Use one or more of these phrases in your blog post to help improve search engine results.

Including keywords in every blog post:

Keeps the content focused and on topic
Maximizes the opportunity for content to get distributed to keyword blogs
Plays a key role in fueling the keyword blogs with the content necessary for SEO and visitor traffic

Post Idea:
Select 2 to 3 related keywords or phrases and write your post now.

Knowledge Networks: Social Media and Marketing...not much Intent

Wednesday, May 20, 2009 by Chris Baggott

OK so before I go into this new study from Knowledge Networks that was reported by MediaPost today, I have to rant just a little bit. You cannot use the terms "Social Media" and "Social Network" interchangeably. Through a collaboration with some others in the 'Social' space, we are working on a whitepaper on this subject as we speak along with an article for MultiChannel Merchant...stay tuned. I just wanted to make clear that this report is dealing with Social Network but using the term Social Media...

Meanwhile....

Naturally a report like this is going to cause a lot of controversy. There is plenty of passion around the entire social scene. What I found most germane is the idea of Intent that is depicted in the data below:

Social Media Marketing, Social Network, Corporate Blog, blogging

From a marketing standpoint, if you are in a social network thinking you are going to get in front of someone who is specifically there to get information on "X" then you are probably going to be disappointed.

Again, this is why we get so excited about the idea of Business Blogging as a tool for SEO. A blogging best practice is to be human in the first place. That's what makes this a social media strategy vs. a social network strategy. Wikipedia defines ‘Social’ as: the attitudes, orientations or behaviors, which take the interests, intentions or needs of people into account.

Where do people best express their intentions, needs or interests? Search Engines. If you are in any of the categories outlined in this table above, (or any other industry) and focused on marketing then your best strategy is to learn how to tell the stories of your products and services in a context of how you help your customers every day and organize that content to best target the search terms and phrases that your prospects use when they express their interests, intentions or needs.

For every 10 people who might be using a social network to help plan a trip, there are another 10,000,000 who are specifically expressing this need and intent into a search engine.

Tips for proper image formatting

Wednesday, May 13, 2009 by Compendium Client Marketing

Adding images is easy. It's only a three step process:

Select a location in your post and then click on the image icon
Insert the image by uploading it or using a url
Format the image

Here are some quick tips for properly formatting images:

Width & Height: Make sure that the ratio proportions are locked to ensure the image resizes proportionally. Also, note that images are resized to a lower resolution to speed up load times
Padding: Add a small amount of padding around every image to ensure that there is separation between your images and your content.
Align: Adjust the image in relation to the text to ensure that it is easier for a blog reader to follow the content of the post and catches their eyes.
Description: This isn't really a formatting field. This is a field for search engines. Make sure you label the image with a description that is relevant to the image and the content in your post. If relevant include a keyword rich phrase.

If you have any questions about how to integrate images into your blog post contact our product support team and we'll be more than happy to walk you through it.

Login and Smile

Monday, May 11, 2009 by Douglas Karr

Sometimes it simply takes an email to motivate someone in their corporate blogging strategy. We've had some luck with past emails that were soft on text but strong on image.

Today we're sending out a nice email announcing our next webinar and so I put together the following image to drive home the message:

How to Start a Business Blog?

Post relevant, compelling content every opportunity you get! Talk about your customers and how you solve their problems.

Links for 2009-05-10

Monday, May 11, 2009 by Blake Matheny

Links for 2009-05-10

Expert to Expert - Erik Meijer and Lars Bak: Inside V8 - A Javascript Virtual Machine | Going Deep | Channel 9 - Lars Bak is a virtual machine master. He and team have created a Javascript VM, V8, that takes Javascript syntax and produces optimized machine code directly. The result is very performant execution of Javascript. How does V8 work, exactly? What are the basic design decisions that have gone into it's construction? Why is it designed the way it is? How fast can Javascript really run, anyway? How challenging is it to take a language like Javascript and produce highly optimized machine code? Erik Meijer, language designer and fundamentalist functional high priest, discusses these questions and more with Lars. We also talk about the language to machine code translation versus having an intermediate step (like IL) that gets optimized further in runtime context by a JITer.

This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-05-10

Blog First, Then Twitter

Friday, May 8, 2009 by Chris Baggott

So my good friend Jeff Rohers sent included me on the following Tweet the other day:

jkrohrsRT @bschrader From @guykawasaki - For those new to online - twitter is step one, not blogging. #sbmg - @chrisbaggott your thoughts?

So I'm not exactly sure what Jeff is asking, but if it's "Where do you start our social media strategy?"   Of course you have to start with blogging. This is a perfect example right? What the heck is he talking about?   There is no context, no back story...I'm sure if I wanted to do the work I could click around and try and figure out what string this was attached to, but who's going to do this?

This is why there can be no question that your strategy needs to start with Corporate Blogging.   Blogs are the place where you tell the stories of your organization, the problems you solve for your customers and share your thoughts. Twitter is perfect for helping you expose those thoughts with a catchy blurb and a link back.

Without the foundation of the blog, what exactly do you think you can accomplish as a company? How would you measure it?   A Tweet that leads to your blogs, also leads to conversions on your CTA's.   That's how you build realtionships...my moving the realationship forward to the next step. Seth laid this out clearly 10 years ago in Permission Marketing.

A Doorway Page by any Other Name?

Sunday, May 3, 2009 by PJ Hinton

I read an article over at Search Engine Land, written by Michael Gray, that makes the case for using contests to boost organic search results. I found portions of the post to be of dubious merit.

Gray argues that the contest prize should inclue the keywords that you are trying to target.. People get word of the giveaway, they link to your contest landing page, and then you get a result boost for your target keywords.

This isn't a bad idea. However, I do believe that he goes off the deep end when he offers up advice for handling the page after the contest is over. Quoting from the text of the article (emphasis mine):

Another mistake a lot of people make is that after the contest ends they leave the page up with a notice the contest is over, or 301 the content to another page. A better solution is to leave the existing URL in place and just improve the page with different content. If you are concerned about usability, you can relocate the contest information to a new URL with a link at the bottom or even display a message based on incoming referral URL’s or referral keywords.

The portions I've italicized just happen to share the characteristics of a "doorway page", which is a big no-no in the world of legitimate SEO. Such pages are not an integral part of the website and serve as a sort of bait-and-switch to the visitor, forcing them to click on another link to get to the website.

There is no shortage of SEO advice on the web, but the web can be a misleading place. Any advice should be viewed with a critcal eye and weighed against current best practices.

Is this Customer Engagement or Customer Engulfment?

Wednesday, April 8, 2009 by PJ Hinton

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb uses the recent experience he had with a Twittering Comcast customer service rep to talk about how some companies are taking a proactive approach to reputation management.

Kirkpatrick cites as an example a partnership between WebTrends and Raidian 6 to provide a monitoring and reporting services that track online conversations about their products and services.

Moreover, the system gages the influence of those making the comments, ostensibly to give the company some means of deciding how much effort to put into remedying the situation, should it be something negative.

Further on down, Kirkpatrick lays it on the line about why he finds this rising business to be disturbing:

It looks like it's just you and them, but behind them there's a curtain covering a whole mess of cogs and pulleys, analyzing you in different ways. How many followers do you have? How did you respond the last time a company rep used your name publicly? Who's in charge of discussing your concerns with you on Twitter, on your blog, or elsewhere?

Add the fact that many of these positions are, or will someday be filled with sales people, have them view these conversations through a closed system of predetermined criteria, and set it all inside a big CRM database. What do you get? Is it a story of authentic connection in a democratized public conversation - or is it a charade?

Are Kirkpatrick's concerns well founded? Perhaps.

On one hand, engaging dissatisfied customers with a positive tone is way better than sending in the rapid response legal team armed with cease & desist letters and a collective snarl. I talked about my objections to that approach in a post a few weeks ago.

I think things start to go south when the metrics software goes so far as to rate the level of influence a customer has. If I had to guess, this metric was designed by a marketer, and as we discussed in this space about eight months ago, marketers can be pretty lousy estimators of influence.

If you have a large customer base, singling out the "influencers" for the lion's share of attention misses the whole point of being real with your customers. It shows that you're not committed to producing the best product or service you can. You're only committed to doing enough to make sure you look like you're doing that.

Take the cable company, for example. No amount of net celebrity pampering is going to change the perception of the majority of unhappy customers. Years of spiraling rates, over bloated packages that force customers to subsidize channels they don't want to watch, and lousy customer service have cemented that reputation.

A celebrity gushing over the great service they got from the cable company isn't going to fix things. For every celebrity blogger there is an army of angry nobodies who relate their experiences in comments online and to their friends in person.

With a growing number of shows being available online without a subscription the cable companies are fearing now that they may well go the way of the newspapers. Judging from the comments on that linked to post, I wouldn't be surprised if the demise is met with cheers.

I think at some level, software along the lines of Radian 6 has the potential to be a great tool for larger businesses. When you have so many customers interacting with so many different points of contact within your organization, objective data can help you see how you're being seen, much as anyone looks in the mirror when getting ready in the morning.

But like any tool, it can be used and misused. I think a good example of misuse is the idea of mining that data for potential sales leads and then pursuing them overzealously. Kirkpatrick's closing anecdote is a prime example:

One of my co-workers says that within minutes of his wife Tweeting about her art studio last night, she was friended by scads of art companies and salespeople. Who wants to have a conversation in that context?

To me that's no more of a relationship than a fox has with a hen. Rather than treating your potential customers as prey, why not treat them with a little respect and try letting them come to you via search. Blogging on a regular basis can help you achieve that goal.

Think of it as Customer Acquisition 3.0.

RSS? What & Why?

Monday, March 30, 2009 by Krystal Featherston

Lately, we've been getting a lot of questions about RSS feeds. What they are? Why are they important for blogging?

RSS is used to publish frequently updated work—such as blog entries. An RSS document includes full or summarized text. RSS benefit readers because it provides regular updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place.

RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based. The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed's URL into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.

Why are RSS feeds important to blogging?

RSS Feeds help writers generate content ideas by knowing what is going on it their industry at any moment.
Allows readers to receive frequent updates on content that is posted on any specific blog.

Still have questions? If so, click here to view a video.

REMEMBER: if you have a question you can search Compendium's Knowledgebase RIGHT NOW - or shoot us an email or fill out the online submission form.

Fired Up About Video SEO

Tuesday, March 24, 2009 by Jenni Edwards

Indexed video is 50 times more likely to rank on the first page of Google than textual results.

WHAT? Wow, this fact is amazing and shakes my world a bit. (I am saying fact as it is from Forrester who we have a huge amount of respect for here.)

Although I don't have access to the full study, there does appear to be a few pieces missing and some methodology questions as laid out in Reel SEO but I think the main takeaway is beset stated from the study itself:

“Best of all, so few interactive marketers focus on video optimization that most of the videos in Google’s index aren’t very well optimized — so if you optimize your videos well, your chances of success will increase even further.”

After getting a bit fired up about all of this (come on, textual results are a prime value proposition of blogging for search), I did take a step back and realize that the importance of video and the importance of blogging are not mutually exclusive for a business and that places all of your videos on YouTube and Google Video (if longer) and tagging your videos properly are always best practices. Compendium is all about casting a wide net not just with a blogging strategy, but on a broader scale of search as well.

Thanks Brennan over at Cantaloupe for pointing me in the direction of this study (via Twitter).

Google Voice is Awesome

Monday, March 23, 2009 by Blake Matheny

I was lucky enough to get a grand central number early on. Grand Central, which touted itself as, "one number for life", was a simple service which allowed you to give out your grand central number to people and based on their call group (coworkers, friends, family, etc) could be routed to one or multiple phone numbers, screened, get alternate voice greetings, etc. Purchased by Google back in 2007, the service seemed to stagnate and at one point Google even stopped allowing new people to join the service.

Yesterday I was finally migrated to Google Voice, and I can say that I am absolutely a convert. The number of new features that are available as well as the easier to use interface simply make this a must have service. Some service highlights for me:

Can receive text messages to your Google Voice number
Can reply to text messages and they show up from your Google number
Can initiate calls from your Google number, both from the web as well as from any phone
Voice transcription of voicemails can be emailed to you

All of this is in addition to what was already available from Grand Central and all of this is of course free. One thing that I find particularly interesting is what I assume is a basic phone number multiplexing scheme that Google must be using.

When someone sends your Google Voice number a text message, their phone number is included in the message body but the sender number is not the same, it is some Google number. If you reply to that phone number via a text message, or call that number, it connects you to the original number but shows as being from your Google number. When playing with this feature, I noticed that each person who texts my Google number is assigned their own unique Google number (with a 406 area code).

What I assume Google is doing here is creating a basic mapping between your phone number and people you interact with. So when you reply to a text message at one of these 406 numbers, Google says, "Okay, which contact have we assigned this to for this Google Voice user?" and knows not only which Google Voice user you are (based on your ANI) but which destination number you are trying to reach (based on what contact was assigned that number).

This also means that Google Voice can map an unlimited number of users to each number, each one having a distinct destination contact. Hopefully this service doesn't go the way of Google Notepad and some of the other services that Google has decided to ditch in the past few months. Obviously, if you're giving out your Google Voice number to people, you are like me and hoping Google doesn't discontinue the service.

Tips for First Time Bloggers

Friday, March 20, 2009 by Sarah Sedberry

Sometimes the toughest part about a business blog is just getting started. Like many things is all about taking that first step, and developing routines. I liken it to going to the gym. You know you need go, you want to go, but you have to develop the routine before you actually do go. Once the routine is there, you're happy and you actually feel out of sorts when you don't make it to they gym.

Same thing with blogging - you know you need to write a blog post today, you want to write a blog post today to drive more traffic and convert those searchers, but you keep finding excuses to make you feel better about why you didn't get that post out today.

Well, think of the Client Success Team here at Compendium as your Trainer. We're here to help encourage you to keep up post content, write keyword rich blog posts, and to help target your blog to drive conversions. So whats the first step? Keep it simple and just write!

Here are some quick tips to keep in mind when starting out:

KISS: Keep It Simple Silly - a blog post should be quick and easy, don't worry about writing some long, thought provoking post. That's what whitepapers are for.
Be Pithy: Think of writing a blog post as writing an email to a friend. You want to be casual and relaxed.
Be Engaging: No one wants to read a computer screen full of text. Break up your posts with lists (bullet or number), pictures, and links
Be Consistent: Searchers want to find relevant and recent information about what they are looking for. If they land on your page and its been 2 weeks since any content has been posted, they will not find you credible. Be sure to stay on top of your post frequency.

Hopefully with these first few tips you'll be able to get started. If you have further questions, always feel free to reach out to our Client Success Team at clientsuccess@compendiumblogware.com.

Happy Blogging!

To Tweet or Not To Tweet

Thursday, March 19, 2009 by Jess Wehner

I was watching the Today show this morning and they had a special on Twitter. Of course, it peaked my interest, given the industry I work in and I took down a couple notes on what they were saying.

So what is twitter you may be asking? In the words of the Today show Twitter is “a cross between texting and blogging” and it’s based on “what you are doing”. They also said to think of it as a “mass text” updating all the people who follow you. So now that you know what it is, the real question is:

To Tweet or not to tweet?

With all of the things to read on the internet: blogs, facebook, news, etc. do you really have time for Twitter? I think if you have the time and enjoy it, sure, Twitter can be a great way to connect with people and share your opinion with others. But, if your resources are limited and you need to choose one tool that will increase your search engine visibility, Compendium blogs are a great way to go.

If your number one goal is marketing your business and reaching out to potential customers, you need a tool that does this the best. Compendium blogs aren’t just a social media tool, they help organize your content in a way that is search engine and user friendly. We focus your content on the words people are searching on. So in the end, Twitter is not a bad thing at all, and from what they showed on the Today show it looks like a lot of fun. They showed how it can be a great tool for celebrities and thought leaders to get their opinions across. But for everyone else out there, with only 20 minutes a day to focus on marketing, there is a need to be a little choosier with where to spend resources. Maybe there just isn’t enough time in the day for twitter.

What is RSS?

Wednesday, March 18, 2009 by Compendium Client Marketing

According to Wikipedia:

“RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed" or "web feed" or "channel") contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text.”

Check out the video below for more great info on RSS and what it means to you!

Struggling with High Bounce Rates on Your Blog?

Tuesday, March 17, 2009 by Douglas Karr

Today I received an email from a client who was concerned about their bounce rates which ranged between 80% to 90%. No one wants to put in the effort on a blog and find that it's not sticky... so what's a blogger to do?

Before I even start to take action, one of the first things I compare is how the bounce rate is tracking from week to week - is it increasing, decreasing?

How is your bounce rate comparing to your search engine traffic? Typicallly, if you're reaching a larger percentage of search engine users, your bounce rate percentage will also increase. It's natural when you're casting a wider net, that many of the fish won't make the cut.

If bounce rates remain consistently high, I review the following:

Am I targeting keywords that are truly relevant to my business? At Compendium, for instance, we target a lot of blogging terms. Since we're a business blogging platform, it's natural that some of the audience isn't going to be relevant.
Am I writing relevant content? Bad content sucks and makes people jump fast. There's nothing worse than leaving a first impression with a bad blog post. Are you writing about your business? Your customers? That's why people are visiting you! Stay on target.
Do I write Post Titles that are truly relevant to the content within the post?
Am I writing content that gives back to my readers or wastes their time? If you want readers to engage and read more, you need to put some bait on the hook to get them to nibble. (Not that you guys are fish... I'm just using a simple metaphor).
Do I link to my other related posts within my content with informative anchor text?
Do I have previous posts from my blog listed in my sidebar?
Do I have engaging Calls To Action that make someone want to click through because the CTA is relevant to the content and leads the person to want additional information.

Lastly, of course... is the question no one likes to answer:

Do I suck at writing?

Some people really do suck. In that case, hand off the baton to someone else in the organization who keeps the readers engaged. You may be surprised by who the talented folks are within an organization when it comes to writing compelling content.

Don't give up if you're a young blogger, though. Sometimes it takes quite a bit of time to get into a rhythm and hit a few home runs.

I would not hesitate to contact ghost bloggers, as well. Great ghost bloggers can learn your business and write compelling content on behalf of your organization, or even better, interviewing and sharing stories about your customers.