How often should you post? How long should your posts be? Many factors play into those answers but I like Content Blog’s Amrit Hallan’s treatment of the subject.

“These days it is advised — rightly so — that you should write less, write well, and promote a lot.”

Write less. A good rule of thumb. Being one who has a problem with brevity, I end up cutting a good deal of fat from my posts before they see the light of day. Stick to the point of your posts. No matter how witty a particular paragraph may be, if it doesn’t speak to the subject matter, chop it out.

Write well. Does that mean you need a degree in journalism? No, it means that you communicate your expertise to your target market clearly. You wouldn’t be in business if that were a skill that you lacked. Business blogging is just another method for you to deliver your brand’s message.

Promote a lot. Very critical and something many bloggers do not take the time to do. You have to become visible in the community that you market to.

“…more than writing your blog posts you should visit other blogs and online forums and interact there. You should also write as many guest posts as possible. Traffic is as important as your blog posts so set your blogging frequency keeping that in mind.”

And once you develop your posting rhythm, maintain it. Your readers will come to have certain expectations based on the pattern that you establish.

“Whatever frequency you select for yourself just stick to a routine. For instance if you blog readers expect a post on Wednesday that give them a post on Wednesday.”

Looking at this recent report about online car buyers brings back memories of my father who sold cars for a living. Dad would have been a huge fan of blog marketing.

• One in five in-market consumers surveyed - approximately 20 percent - said they would likely to buy a vehicle over the internet if such a service were available
• Search engines, automotive blogs and web forums have become key information sources for vehicle buyers who are turning to user-generated websites to obtain a more objective view.

(source)

(Image Source:Marketing Vox)

Word of Mouth and Cheesy Commercials

Years ago my father managed a car dealership. This is back in the 1950s when car salesmen were even more poorly regarded than today, so if you had a reputation for honesty, which Dad did, you ended up creating a type of niche, word of mouth market.

You had limited advertising options back in the fifties. Whatever gimmick could be packed into a classified ad was about your only option, except for those cheesy car commercials.

And boy oh boy, did Dad ever know how to ham it up. I might look up at the TV and see him in front of some big finned Buick Electra talking about all of it’s options while dismounting from an elephant. You see, my Dad worked for Marge Schott of Reds’ fame, and her notorious love of animals began long before her days as a Red’s owner.

I don’t remember why Marge had an elephant, but she did, and between the two of them, my dad and Marge produced some hilarious print ads as well as commercials. Today, those commercials would be on YouTube.

Word of Mouth and Engaging Consumer Attention

That’s why I know, that if either will still alive, they would have jumped on business blogging and video casting with a vengeance.

Marge would have really appreciated blog marketing’s ROI. Blog posts would have become my Dad’s repository for all the folksy wisdom that customers loved him for. His reputation for honesty would have provided the natural transparency that blogging demands and, via videos, he no doubt would have included lions, tigers and bears along with Marge’s elephant - if it sold a car.

Though the methods of delivery are far different than the 1950’s, the basic marketing principles of word of mouth and engaging the customers attention are the same as they have ever been. It is just far easier, and cheaper, to accomplish online  today - with or without an elephant.

When people use search engines, what are they mainly looking for? Is it products to buy, people to meet, or what? Yes, people look for all of those things, but what most people are looking for when they use search engines is information. And if you are not using the power of business blogging to increase the amount of information out there about your business, you are missing out on a great opportunity.

Many businesses out there consider the blogosphere to be full of worthless content. And honestly, for much of the blogosphere they are absolutely correct. On the other hand, blogs and blogging are a great way to get the word out about your business and also to increase search engine visibility.

Although many businesses are still unsure of if getting involved in blogging is even a good idea, other companies are moving in and reaping the benefits. Even as far back as two years ago, you could find many examples of companies that were taking advantage of business blogging. If you want some examples, read this article from Business Week: Blogs Will Change Your Business.

So should you be involved in blogging for your business? In the end the decision is up to you, but there are definite benefits that you will miss out on if you don’t.

Niche marketing is not new but it’s application via business blogging opens a myriad of opportunities to cultivate your target market.

We posted on aspects of niche marketing here and here. The objective in developing your niche market online is to establish yourself as a thought leader or expert in your given field. This can be achieved via podcast marketing, videos, e-books but it is also accomplished via interaction on various online forums. DamnDomainer offers the following observation:

“Let’s face it. Yahoo sucks. I get only a light trickle of traffic from them compared to the avalanche of traffic I get from Google.

BUT, one thing I’ve discovered is that Yahoo Answers actually delivers more visitors AND higher quality traffic (low bounce rates).”

Are you an employment counselor, a financial advisor, a life coach? Are you a jewelry expert, a tax consultant or a travel agent? Then your market is looking for your specific expertise. The idea is to position yourself where they are searching.

“This kind of tactic… floods in the traffic. I only answer 2-4 questions twice a day…. This unique traffic gaining tip doesn’t only give the webmaster traffic, this also promotes the webmasters site inside of the Yahoo Search Engine. With twenty six backlinks per post, and great traffic there is no reason not to use this technique. This is not qualified as spamming, and Yahoo Answers is perfectly fine with this.”

Niche marketing online is a matter of taking your message to where your target market congregates. Part of your market is out there looking for your expertise. Becoming visible on sites like Yahoo Answers makes it much easier to find you.

A word of caution. Do not pursue this route, or any strategy to draw in traffic, unless you have a feast of relevant content ready for them to consume. You may even want to develop a landing page specifically for the traffic that you draw via Yahoo Answers, or like sites, that will clearly lay out who you are and what you offer.

If you have dedicated yourself to business blogging for the past few years you will have accumulated archives that are rich in relevant content. Does a post only serve it’s purpose at the time it is written? What about the wealth of information that you have preserved in your archives? And how does Google view those older posts?

“A webmaster/blogger who pays attention to their blog content, updating and fixing old posts, is one who cares about their blog and their blog’s content. Google’s PageRank algorithm tests to see how often a web page is updated and the length of time between changes in a blog post’s content.”

So what do you do to make that old content continue to serve you? No doubt you know a great deal more about keywords and search engine visibility now than a few years ago. Use that knowledge to correct the “freshman” mistakes that you made when you were first blogging. Rewrite your blog titles, add keywords and put alt tags on those images.

Revisit old posts that received a good response when they were first written. Some bloggers feature “an oldie but goodie” post that appears on a regular basis. A category named accordingly can become an easily accessed route to your best work.Go through your old posts and weed out the dead links on those articles that you linked to that have since been moved or are actually gone.

Blog Herald offers several suggestions on how to make sure that your archived posts continue to benefit you and your readers.

• Create Your Own Top 10 List: Write a blog post featuring your top 10, 25, or 50 blog posts, honoring them as your favorites, most popular subject matter, or most popular for the year or month, creating a list directing readers to the old posts.
• Use Related Posts: Through a Related Posts WordPress Plugin or manually, add a list of related posts to the bottom of your blog posts, pointing readers to your old posts for more information and reference.
• Change The Title: If the post content is good but the title stinks, not attracting the attention you think it should, change it. You need to make another decision on whether or not to change the post slug, the URL permalink of the post, to match the new title. Few change the post slug, but do change the post title to make it really describe what the post is about and it may start attracting more traffic.

(source)

Unlike a print or radio ad campaign where, once verbiage and images have been signed off on you are done, business blogging and social media marketing is almost a living thing, requiring your attention on a daily basis. But unlike that print or TV ad that fades from your customer’s memory as soon as it is expired - if they see it all - your business blog keeps getting - and keeping - your customer’s attention.

Search engine visibility is likely to always be a necessity and just like you must always deal with maintaining the utilities that serve your brick and mortar, SEO is likely to be an ongoing utility that you must maintain for your site.

But if any of your blog training has sunk in at all, you understand very well it is strong, engaging and relevant content that is going to guarantee your reader base.

And that is what is going to give you those inbound links. People link to the blogger that consistently has the value that they are searching for and that is where your work is cut out for you.

Google had the correct response to a business blogger who was exasperated by the efforts he was making to get his site noticed and linked to.

“How do any businesses in the real world get noticed?
Elbow grease. I respectfully recommend that you take place in conversations around the net that pertain to subjects addressed by your site. Write articles on your site that are informative and thus garner links because people find them to be interesting or useful. It may be slightly time consuming, it may be frustrating, but that’s also the case in the real world with new businesses; a new Chinese restaurant (especially here in San Francisco) does not get instant newspaper mentions or customer traffic just be existing. It has to do something to stand out.”
(source)

A lot of businesses wonder why they should even get involved in business blogging in the first place. Whenever I talk to people about this concept I get a question like this, “Aren’t blogs just written by people that have nothing better to do?” As you can see, blogs and blogging in general can be very misunderstood.

Back when people first started blogging, they were not really a big deal. Most blogs were just being written by people that wanted to share some thoughts and opinions. But over the last one to two years blogs have started to make a huge mark on the web, and in people’s minds in general.

These days there are a lot of bloggers that have become the gurus or the place to go for information on certain topics. People have come to trust blogs and the people behind them. You will even hear about blogs on the news and talk shows these days, which never would have happened a couple of years ago.

So is business blogging worth it? Yes, because it gets you involved in the new medium that more and more people are coming to trust. Here is a list of some other benefits as well:

• Blogging can help create a community
• Blogging can add a personal side to your business
• Blogging can help with SEO tactics, which will help with search engine rankings
• Blogging helps to create exposure with more people than you are reaching now

In short, business blogging is well worth your time. If you haven’t started doing it yet, you should definitely consider it for your business.

If you would like an example of business blogging done right, you need not look any further than Southwest Airlines. Not shy to dip into the technology, they offered their customers a widget back in 2005. (We talk about widgets here and here). You may have had experience with it. Placed on your desktop, it dings when special internet-only flight rates were available.

“In its first two years, the Ding application was downloaded by about 2 million consumers and generated more than $150 million in ticket sales, said Kevin Krone, vice president of marketing….The ratio of referred [Ding] installers to total installers is very high, which tells us that people who download the program often convince their friends to do it as well…”

Which is something to take note of if you have been considering a widget. Fast on the heels on their widget success, they introduced their corporate blog.

“..the blog generates a decisive response from Southwest loyalists. In July 2007, the blog attracted more than 100,000 total visits and more than 40,000 unique visitors…
Over the last 12 months, the blog has featured 260 posts, and has received about 6,200 comments, or about 20 per day…”
(source)

More importantly, not resting on their laurels, they did their analytics homework, resulting in their simplifying the widget so that it was less confusing. They also came to understand the need for transparency in their blog.

“If there is something that customers demand and you can’t change it, it is best to be transparent,” said Krone.As a McKinsey report states it:

“Blogs, in particular, “help engage prospects and detractors in a positive and productive discussion,” thus helping brands manage their reputations…”

Southwest will now share the blogosphere with Delta who just announced the introduction of their Delta ‘Under the Wing‘ blog. It will be interesting to see how Delta, who has a whole city of disgruntled customers in Cincinnati, responds to the inevitable complaints from that region. While that challenge still looms, they may want to take note of a blog that also recently debuted going by the name “DeltaisEvil”, created by an unhappy Delta customer and rapidly gaining steam.

Delta’s new blog will be flying into some head winds. If they emulate Southwest, however, they should be able to ride the turbulence.

The Chartered Institute of Marketing in the U.K recently said that businesses need to invest in SEO if they want to survive online. They go on to say how most people “Google” a word to find a business. If you are a real estate broker in Denver, Colorado and someone Googles “real estate broker in Denver” will they find your business? Or will they find your competition’s web site? This is  how most people will find you. If you don’t invest in optimizing for search engines, your sales will suffer.

I always try to explain this to those who are new to SEO or search engine optimization - you can have a great web site that is graphically or technically savvy. But without SEO, you will not be found. The fastest way to get results in search engines are by starting a business blog.  Blogs make it much easier for businesses to add new information to search engines about their business. A blog is engineered to automatically submit new content to search engines. Each time your business blog gets a new entry or post, you just increased your chances of being found. Pretty soon Google will index your web site within hours or days instead of weeks or months.

The problem with most business blogs is they aren’t blogging strategically or consistently. When there was less businesses blogging, it wasn’t as difficult to get search engine rankings. Today, you need to do it right. Your writing must not only be relevant but it must also include the keywords your potential customers are typing in Google - or other search engines. Your blog must also be set up correctly and it will power your web site.

Many businesses want to blog but lack expertise to start. Others start but after a few weeks it becomes less of a priority. They let their blog “go dark.” As a blogger and internet marketer, I know where my limits are technologically. I know enough to know when someone gets it right. I also know the types of blogging styles. RSSApplied focuses our efforts on maximizing search engine rankings for businesses. We either teach your staff or our trained bloggers will ghostwrite for you.

Businesses who ignor SEO because they don’t understand it are missing a huge opportunity. Those who have search engine rankings must be concerned with maintaining and growing them. Business blogs are an ideal way to accomplish both.

Really, with terms like “wiki” and “business blogging” and “podcast marketing“, it can be kind of hard to take the Web 2.0 world all too seriously. Especially if you are a CEO and the only thing you associate social media with are bratty teens on MySpace. But, as is the norm with online marketing, the landscape is constantly changing and business blogging and social media are taking on a decidedly more professional demeanor.

The Wall Street Journal has taken note.

“When radiation oncologist Michael Tomblyn recently saw a 21-year-old patient whose eye was protruding from its socket, he turned to his fellow physicians for help… eventually steering him toward the correct answer: rhabdomyosarcoma, a fast-growing cancer most often observed in young children
The diagnosis didn’t take place in a doctor’s lounge. It happened on Sermo.com, a social-networking site for licensed physicians, which Dr. Tomblyn and 25,000 doctors like him visit regularly to consult…”

Of course, Ford and General Motors have had their blogs in the mix for quite awhile, as has P&G, J&J, and Marriott.
Last August, online brokerage firm TradeKing ventured forth.

“Don Montanaro, the company’s president and CEO, likes to say that social networking “has grown up” at TradeKing because the company can link increased trades to those customers who use the social network.

Almost 10% of the company’s customers interact with one another online — creating profiles, blogging about strategies and publishing the trades they make. In July, when the market experienced some volatility, TradeKing found that its social networking community members actually traded more than during times with more stability, “indicating perhaps an added comfort-factor social networking provides during times of fluctuation…”

In a July survey of 3,000 of its clients..noted that they read blogs daily … In addition, 25 % of options traders and 17 % of equity traders noted that they listen to podcasts daily …”

The inevitably of blog marketing and the rapidly evolving realm of social media marketing is confirmed by such reports. But hopefully you are past the stage of doubting the medium and well on your way to dominating your niche in it.
(Image Source/WSJ Research)