As they say, when you’ve got lemons, make lemonade. When blog marketing novices first begin blogging they are concerned that they will not get any comments, simultaneous to being concerned that the comments will be negative.It seems that everyone has heard wild and crazy stories about “trolls”. Trolls are simple - they go away when not fed with attention. By the same token, “lemon” comments can be transformed into something very sweet in the end.

Not All Negative Comments are Trolls

But not all negative remarks are trolls. When you first started blogging, one objective was to get customer feedback. You didn’t imagine that it would be all good, did you? You also were likely told many times that transparency is highly valued by consumers. So, if indeed an unhappy customer comments negatively with a valid concern, this is your time to show your stuff. You made a mistake, admit it and resolve it. Isn’t that what you always do when a customer is upset? Just keep doing as you always have.

Most blog site platforms allow for moderated commenting. Comments can be held pending approval or you can receive an email when comments first arrive. Either way, you can deal with a negative quickly if you keep an eye on your comment feeds.

The worst thing you can do is turn comments off. Comments are where the community you are striving to build begins. Relevant, well written posts will bring you readers and engaging content will bring you responses. However, no matter how good your content is, denying your readers the ability to comment can turn them off. Don’t miss the rich conversations and opportunites that you’ll enjoy with comments.

Comment Wisdom

TechForward distills the common wisdom on comments over here. Below is a synopsis.

• Get real…..But by and large, 98% of the comments you get will not be from people who have nothing better to do than trash your brand.
• Use moderated comments. …
• Create a Terms of Use page….. Essentially, it’s a page on your blog that tells visitors what they can and can’t say and what the repercussions are for ignoring the rules….
• Never edit a comment…. this changes your legal status from blogger to publisher and you open a whole other can of worms. Either reject the comment outright or ask the commenter to edit it and resubmit it. Never, ever edit a comment.
• . Carpe diem. Again, if you do get a negative comment - one that is constructive - don’t balk or give ‘tude to the person writing it. See this as your opportunity to show just how committed to customer service your company is, address the issue through the blog, quickly and thoroughly and above all else, treat the person with respect…..

Little things count for a lot, especially in business blogging. Titles can be one of those little things that make the difference between the reader clicking through to your post or ignoring it. The question becomes, how can you create a title that serves both optimization and catches your reader’s attention?

When keeping search engine visibility in mind, you have the added dilemma of trying to create a catchy title that also has within it an optimized keyword. Rule of thumb, especially once you are getting up in your search engine rankings, is to not sacrifice the headline for the keyword. In the beginning you may wish to do so, but if your blog marketing plan is hitting on all cylinders, more creative license is allowed.

But, there are still further nuances to consider when brainstorming your titles (also applicable to email as well), a partial list of which follows.

• Clearly explain what the article (or email) is about in terms that relate to the user. Microcontent should be an ultra-short abstract of its associated macrocontent.
• Written in plain language: no puns, no “cute” or “clever” headlines.
• No teasers that try to entice people to click to find out what the story is about. Users have been burned too often on the Web to have time to wait for a page to download unless they have clear expectations for what they will get. In print, curiosity can get people to turn the page or start reading an article. Online, it’s simply too painful for people to do so.
• Skip leading articles like “the” and “a” in email subjects and page titles (but do include them in headlines that are embedded within a page). Shorter microcontent is more scannable, and since lists are often alphabetized, you don’t want your content to be listed under “T” in a confused mess with many other pages starting with “the”.
• Make the first word an important, information-carrying one. Results in better position in alphabetized lists and facilitates scanning. For example, start with the name of the company, person, or concept discussed in an article.
• Do not make all page titles start with the same word: they will be hard to differentiate when scanning a list. Move common markers toward the end of the line. For example, the title of this page is Microcontent: Headlines and Subject Lines (Alertbox).

(Source)

The small business blogger is rightfully concerned about maintaining a constant flow of fresh content. Many start out enthusiastically and then quickly realize the time that it takes to research and write to their blog daily. What are the solutions for the small businessman who wants to keep his SEM and blog content in-house?

SEM: In-house or Out?

Ideally, you will have someone on staff as your head blogger. This person should obviously be enthusiastic about your product and mission, have a thorough knowledge of the workings of your organization and have a good read on your customers. Hopefully, you have a candidate already on staff.

Writing skills are not so much a factor as you might imagine. Business blogging allows for a type of informality that will carry an authentic voice. Sloppy, grammatically incorrect prose is unacceptable. but you aren’t looking for a Hemingway.

You then should enroll your blogger in a blog training course to get the basics of blog optimization as well as, perhaps, require that he or she familiarize themselves with XML/RSS and basic CSS.

Should you also expect this person to handle the analytics, manage your PPC, and search engine optimization? Not really, not if you want your ROI healthy, not to mention your head blogger.

Personnel for In-House SEM

Here is the bottom line, according to a piece in ProfMarketing.com:

“Effective campaigns require a broad range of skills, far more than one single person can offer (although many might say they can). You will need the following personnel:

1. SEO specialist
2. Copywriter to draft effective content
3. PPC specialist to optimally manage your bids
4. Web stats analyst to monitor and analyze web traffic patterns
5. Usability professional to ensure your campaign is engaging the user and increasing conversion rates
6. Web designer to ensure the site landing pages are laid out in an attractive fashion
7. Web programmer to code the site
8. Network administrator to ensure the site remains up and running
9. Project manager to ensure everyone’s efforts are coordinated and to remain on budget and within the timeline.”
(Source)

Blog training touches only peripherally on aesthetics, that usually being the domain of your web designer. But, that being said, your approach to site design needs to be more holistic in approach, a thorough evaluation of every element that appears on your home page or landing page - and that includes the often overlooked consideration of color.

Color Can Trump Content

Have you ever clicked on to a site only to be defeated by the colors or distracting design and quickly moved on?  When initiating a search, your customer has hundreds of choices and they will quickly click to the next option if displeased. Your content is central to your blog marketing efforts but not a word will be seen if your reader can’t get past your choice of colors.

“Another important psychological aspect of your website is the often over looked and definitely misunderstood marketing strategy of colors. The same as we use words and phrases to describe and express our intentions color can be used to convey similar messages in more subtle and concealed ways.”

Color triggers anticipation. A montage of citrus colors suggests cheer, a pleasant experience, something clean. Somber tones suggest formality or serious subject matter. Color used properly attracts our attention and can influence perception positively or negatively.

A financial advisor would be well advised to stick with shades of blue as it is associated with “trustworthiness, success, seriousness, calmness, power, professionalism.”

A natural foods retailer will include green, commonly associated with ” money, nature, animals, health, healing, life, harmony.”

Color Choices Should Support Your Message

Your color choices should be harmonized with your overall message, further encouraging your reader to absorb and act upon that message.

“It is important to identify your market and ensure the psychological message you are trying to get across with the rest of your site design… Often it can be wise to run samples of the same site with slightly differing colour schemes past a test audience and see which has the best impact or you can even run differing coloured sites to visitors and track conversions to your goals.”
(Source)

Blog training includes a thorough look at understanding the significance of the data that you retrieve from your analytics program. And just a reminder, Google completes it’s transition to it’s new interface on July 18th. That transition represents only one of the many permutations search engine marketing and analysis is constantly undergoing.

Blog Promotion Strategy Based on Analytics

One of the necessities of any blog promotion strategy is to study those analytics from many different perspectives. We have mentioned micro testing. Here are 3 other essential areas to study.

Bounce Rates

Bounce rates are a great way to measure how people like your website. A bounce is where someone clicks through a link to one of your pages then leaves without going to any other pages. In most analytic programs, this must happen in a set amount of time, like 10 seconds.

If you are getting free traffic from sites, blog comments or whatever, a 60% bounce rate can be normal. It’s free, so don’t panic. However, if you are paying for traffic and it has a bounce rate of over 30%, you need to take a critical look at the factors which effect bounces. Here are the most common:

• Unfocused Ads. Are you bidding on the right keywords? You can get lots of traffic from the words “Free videos”, but if that is not what you are offering, people will bounce.
• Bad page design. What is the first impression for the customer? If your page looks unprofessional, people won’t do business with you. Is your call to action clear and repeated a couple times?

Pages per Visitor

How many pages do your visitors look at on average? This can depend on your site structure etc, but if people are only looking at 1 or 2, this is generally a indicator of bad navigation. I like to see visitors looking at over 4 pages.

Conversions

Make sure you setup some goals on your site. This may be filling in and submitting a form, or purchasing goods etc. Any action which is important to your business is important to track.

Conversions are the ultimate guide to your advertising profitability. Why would you pay for something which has little effect. Be warned, some verticals may have a very long purchase process, so don’t shut off your ads too fast. However, don’t waste money on traffic streams which have no return.

(Source)

Blog optimization and achieving high search engine visibility is not a one shot proposition, as any company establishing their online presence can attest to. Many small businesses recognize the necessity and benefits of implementing a blog site platform to secure and advance their online presence through blog marketing, podcasting, etc. The question that ultimately arises is if they have the staff qualified to take on the responsibility of optimization, keyword research and content writing.

In-House Search Engine Marketing or Outsource?

Alan, a small midwest retailer catering to the outdoor sportsmen crowd expressed both delight and concern over his company’s recent series of successful blog marketing campaigns. He discovered that he enjoyed his emerging role as the regional ‘outdoors ambassador’ that he had developed by regularly posting to the company blog. He found the online “community” that had become his “brand enthusiasts” to be the best WOM that money could buy.

Alan’s concern was, given the fact that he wanted to continue his online growth, should he start training an in-house team or continue out sourcing all of his SEM and content writing. A savvy businessman, he understood it would take time to put together an in-house team and was weighing the cost effectiveness of growing his own department.

MarketingProf.com poses some questions that Alan - or any other small to medium size business - will want to investigate.

SEM Questions to Ask

• How many team members have Web writing experience? Have they written Web pages, PPC ads or both?
• If your team is Web-writing savvy, how many pages are they producing per week now?
• How has your company researched keyphrases in the past? What team member would maintain a seasonal and/or long-term keyphrase list and disseminate that information throughout the department?
• What team members have PPC bid management experience? Are they also familiar with PPC strategy, such as dayparting and ad testing?
• Who would be the main point of content for marketing-related SEO questions and deliverables?

(Source)

Blog training emphasizes the need to keep abreast of the rapidly changing technology that will go towards keeping your site at the top of search engine rankings.

Widgets Anyone?

Just as RSS publishing entirely changed your advertising models by distributing your content and brand to subscribers all over the net, widgets can turn all those subscriber sites into storefronts if they put your widget on their blog, website or home page.

What is a widget? Simply put, if you have seen a movie trailer on someone’s blog, you’ve seen the software that runs a widget.

Imagine that you own a small running shoe outlet. On your blog you offer a variety of widgets for your customers to keep up to date on all the latest marathons,local sporting events, and of course, any sales that you are running.If you have a thousand subscribers, you have increased your online storefronts by a thousand.

E-Commerce and Widgets

“.. widgets…can be storefront windows for selling products and services or digital billboards to which customized ads can be affixed…
The e-commerce implications are potentially huge. Instead of simply building a destination site where people come to shop, sellers can use widgets to bring the store to the buyers. Amazon and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT ) have toolbar widgets that enable surfers to search their Web stores while staying on their social network or other personal page.
[..]
Earlier this year, the National Basketball Assn. learned how explosive these little doodads can be. The NBA created hundreds of trading card-like widgets. The card displays a picture of your favorite player along with their updated statistics and links to news stories and videos about them, saving you a trip to NBA.com. Today, the NBA’s widgets have generated more than 100 million views from 175,000 locations. “We see it as taking little pieces of NBA.com and scattering them to the wind and using them to bring people back,” says Steve Grimes, vice-president of NBA Interactive.
(Source)

Whether you do your own in-house marketing or if you work with web marketing specialists, it is critical that you stay on top of the new technology available to assure your continued online success.

Blog Site Training comes in many forms-books, CDs, in-person, online.

And yes, we do know there are a number of Blog Site Training providers- but here at RSS Applied we’re especially proud of the Blog Site Training we offer you.

We cover the entire range of what you need to know to become a successful blogger for your business- or even as your business. This includes Search Engine Optimization (SEO), blog optimization, visual components of your blog, how to get index priority by blog search engines and standard search engines. We’ll show you how to do it all.

Our courses are conducted by top-rated business bloggers. Not have they “been there, done that,” but they are there and are doing that. And what’s even better, you don’t have to be what some people call a “code jock” to understand and master what we’ll teach you.

Here’s what’s covered in our Blog Site Training course:

1. Initial Walkthrough
   • Login process and URLS (login, blog, other)
   • When/How to contact support and where to find help documentation
   • The basic structure of a blog site: Blog, Admin Area, Weblogs/Channel List
   • Cover the glossary terms outlined in the glossary found in the documentation
2. Basic Functions
   • Adding, revising and removing posts
   • Adding, revising and removing comments
   • Viewing draft items, publishing them or removing them
   • Basic HTML formatting and linking to external sites and resources
   • Choosing and adding keywords to a post
   • Linking to items internally
3. Content Strategy
   • Hands on effective blog training
   • Overview of importance of keywords and content writing
   • Investigating keywords to be used in content writing and where to position these words in the headlines and text
   • Researching a niche’s particular problems, issues and interests and how a blog can help point to solutions and information
   • Various types of posts from short, quick references to longer essay-type posts
   • Enhancing blog networking by building blogrolls, commenting on similar blogs and highlighting other bloggers and companies (collaboration versus competition)

After you complete our course, you will possess the knowledge to successfully run your blog while enabling your online business to attain heightened popularity in minimum time.

Within the first 60 seconds after responding to a press release inviting me to visit a new business blog launch I was lost, irritated and disappointed.

I chose to go directly to the retail site first. Irritated by a musical greeting that I have to mute, I forgo looking at inventory and am amazed to find that there is no link referring to their blog. In one fell swoop they invited me to a launch, gave me bad directions to get there and had nothing for me when I finally arrived.

I was promised blog content that would provide - “unbiased reviews with competitive products, industry news, and online resource information…” -but was actually greeted by two meager introductory posts.

There are many lessons to be garnered by this example but a quick summation will suffice for now.

• Lesson #1.
  Integrate your blog platform with your website for seamless navigation. It is integral to you business site, not an extra appendage.
• Lesson #2.
  Do not launch a new blog until you are ready. Do a pre-launch. Have employees, associates, customers navigate your new site and make recommendations.
• Lesson #3
  This lesson can be summed up with this excerpt from our RSS Publishing Guide offered with our blog training course. Have a feast of content ready, not a few trays of hors d’oeuvres.

“Bloggers or visitors always look for mass and variety in content. It’s not sensible at all to publish your articles if you have just recently enabled your RSS feed. Don’t expect your potential readers to be happy with just one article to view. Active bloggers and potential link partners will not be attracted until they see a pipeline of relevant information. Imagine searching on Google for the word “car” and one result pops up. This is a clear example of why you should not publish until you have written and archived at least a dozen articles.

You can download a PDF of our RSS Publishing Guide here.

In a few short years blogging has grown so huge that one can actually find job positions designated as “blogger” or “content writer”. Companies who integrate a blog platform into their website need to be taught how to gain maximum value from their investment. Blog training has evolved out of pure necessity.

If a business decides to keep their blogging in-house as opposed to taking advantage of existing blog writing services, they are going to need a blueprint for their blog and a basic blogging manual of guidelines.

If you pop the hood on a blog optimized web site, the engine compartment will contain a content management system (CMS). These are more commonly referred to as a blog or blogging tool. There are a variety of CMS applications on the market, some free, some requiring a license fee. Word Press, Movable Type, And Blogger are a few of the most recognizable names.

Just as a driver can manage his car via the dashboard instrument panel, the blogger is presented with a dashboard of instruments with which to drive or write in his blog. This is also known as the back office or a control panel and a future post will break down the basic instruments that you will have on your “dashboard panel”. Some of the instrument training a blogging “student” will undergo will cover basic HTML formatting, uploading and downloading images, drafting posts, handling comments, etc.

After learning how to drive their blog, the student then gets to learn how to take advantage of the bells and whistles such as RSS feeds, proper keyword placement, indexing, optimization and linking. The most vital component of a blog engine is the content that fuels it. Blog training will instruct in the development of potent and effective content strategies.

Just as drivers learn to master the complicated power of an automobile, blog training will teach a company how to harness the power of the blog. Stay tuned for more on blog training.