Archive for Blogging Strategy
March 6, 2007 by The Blog Coach |
Filed under Blogging Strategy, Corporate Blogging, Business Blogging
Business blogs are an excellent business marketing tool for professional services companies. In fact, organisations such as consultants, lawyers and accountants are some of the best placed groups of professionals to capitalise on the key marketing and business development benefits that blogs can offer.
Since business blogs can be both quickly and easily updated, and because they are inherently interactive, they provide the perfect medium both to display expertise and to help to start a relationship with clients. The additional benefits such as a more prominent profile with Search Engines is a clearly a plus but the ability to clearly demonstrate what you can do and the knowledge and experience that you can bring to a client’s situation are critical.
Looking at it from an overall business perspective, some of the main benefits that can be achieved through business blogs are:
- Differentiate your business: help to break down the impersonal corporate wall that can surround professional services companies and provide a personal face to what you do. The knowledge and expertise that you bring is of course, but who you are and your personality are also key to a successful commercial relationship, as well as being critical branding elements and business tools - so USE them!
- Educational Marketing approach: use the developing content of your blog to show your potential customers what you can do. This is a much more powerful approach than traditional direct selling methods and it will help to build better relationships with your marketplace. It will also help you to become a “partner” rather than simply a “supplier”.
- Demonstrate your Expertise: as you offer a specialist service, then gaining recognition as an expert in a certain field and being able to demonstrate real credibility is hugely beneficial. A blog can act as a shop window to these skills and is doubly effective if it is THE place to go for information in a specific niche. Using the internet for research, potential customers will certainly find the information they are looking for - so make sure that they find it on YOUR blog!
- Interact with your marketplace: open up the services that you offer and the benefits they provide by letting people interact with you by commenting on your articles, case studies or news releases. When your service offering is strong, then the more that people know about you and have the chance to talk with you, the better your situation will be.
- Knowledge Leadership: when people are interested in what you are writing about, they will want to hear more and will recommend you to others. By expressing your ideas and thoughts openly you will encourage this and help position yourself as a leading exponent in your field. But to be considered a leading light in your area, first you need to communicate your ideas with others.
There is still a reticence on the part of companies and individuals alike to open up and share more about what they can do - they prefer to keep that under wraps until a contract is signed or reveal parts only behind closed doors.
In today’s environment where information is readily available, the likelihood is that there will be many others in the marketplace offering similar services to you. To ensure that customers find you first, it is critical to broadcast the knowledge you have - the greater the level of quality information that you share, the greater the chance of being found and your services being demanded.
Your blog can help you to achieve just that.
If you found this useful, then please share this post:
Tags: Professional Services, Accountants Blogs, Blawgs, Legal Blogs, Consultant Blogs, Small Business Blogs, Business Blogging, Marketing with Blogs
Some related posts you should also find interesting:
About The Blog CoachThe Blog Coach and why hire a Blogging ConsultantSpotlight on UK Blogs - 16 February 2007
February 21, 2007 by The Blog Coach |
Filed under Setting up your Blog, Marketing your Blog, Business Blog Design, UK Business Blogs, Blogging Strategy, Corporate Blogging, Business Blogging
Well, I am very pleased to say that two of the blogs which have made the short list for Best Business Blog in the Irish Blog Awards 2007 come from organisations which The Blog Coach has been working with over recent months.
Two very different sites as well and it’s nice to see that they have been so well received after all the hard work put in by Krishna De and Ann Greene who write and run them.
A traditional blog in terms of format, though one that is absolutely full of information for a business looking for ideas and new information about anything and everything to do with developing business and building a brand online and offline. Podcasts, webinars and offline seminars as well as the blog itself and yet that is still only scratching the surface of what Krishna offers.
In March, we’ll be looking in a little more detail at the thought processes that went on in terms of the modifications and the implementation of the final result that you see now. However, as you read the posts, you will see that all that this does is complement the great content that Krishna provides. A blog which just cries out to be in your RSS reader!
This is a full Blogsite (that’s to say a complete website including a blog which is all built using Blog software) which has given Ann Greene, who runs Allagi Consulting, total control over the whole of the site in terms of being able to add and change content as she requires, as well as the ability to add pages and so grow the site when she needs to - with little to no intervention from anyone, including me.
The site also incorporates the Allagi Blog which Ann uses to great effect to look at her specialist area of expertise of team building and team development. Although it’s still in its infancy, the blog was already considered worthy of a place in the shortlist and you can’t say fairer that that!
Do check out both blogs and I wish them both the best of luck in the final which will be announced at the Awards Dinner on March 3rd. In the meantime, so as you don’t miss any, I will be listing the nominees in the main categories in a special version of Spotlight on UK Blogs (in this case Spotlight on Irish Award Blogs) this Friday.
If you found this useful, then please share this post:
Tags: Business Blog Design, Irish Blog Awards, Krishna De, Biz Growth News, Allagi Consulting, Ann Greene
Some related posts you should also find interesting:
Spotlight on Irish Blogs: Irish Blog Awards finalistsBlogging in the News - w/e 25 February 2007Have I disappeared?
February 20, 2007 by The Blog Coach |
Filed under Writing your Blog, Business Blog Design, Blogging Strategy, Corporate Blogging, Business Blogging
It seems that no matter what new online communication tools we come up with, there are going to be those who want to abuse them. We are all aware of the way in which Email has revolutionised how we communicate (and the genuine commercial opportunities it offers) but also the way in which it has been blighted over recent years by email spam.
Likewise, blogs are open to abuse from individuals looking to exploit them at the expense of others, the preferred ways being Spam Blogs and Comment Spam. So let’s see why Comment Spam exists and how we can go about stopping it on our blogs.
What is Comment Spam?
Comment Spam is where a spammer leaves comments on blog posts that have nothing to do with the post itself but merely contain multiple links back to the spammer’s commercial website. Most Comment Spam is now carried out automatically rather than by individuals and its goal is generally just to create links back to a target site (and so improve its Search Engine ranking), though it may also attract a small amount of traffic as well.
If my Comment Spam filter is at all representative, then the subject matter will be familiar to all of us using email, since the same types of subjects and messages tend to crop up in both.
How do we stop Comment Spam on our own blog?
So what are our options when it comes to avoiding having comment spam swamping our blogs, other than turning off comments all together of course - and that’s something I’m certainly not advocating!
- Comment Moderation
The most time consuming way is simply to moderate out all of the spam comments - that is to say, you look at each comment which has been left and allow genuine ones to appear on your blog while deleting the spam comments. This can become very time consuming (not to mention frustrating!) because once you are “found” by the spam commenters, you are going to be receiving a lot of these. Rule of thumb - the more successful you are, the easier you are to find and the more you will receive - I imagine with such a high profile blog, Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger suffers more than most, as he comments here.
- CAPTCHA methods
CAPTCHA is actually an acronym (ok, since you asked - Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart - there, now wasn’t that interesting!) but you’ll know it as a distorted series of letters and numbers which appear on the page and that you have to type in. This is designed to prove that you are a human and not an automated visitor - or, in this case, spammer. Typed in correctly, it allows you to submit your comment, but will stop most forms of automated comment spam getting through.
- Specialist Software Intervention
Just like with email, there are also providers of specialist software which can help us and here, in my opinion, the leader in this respect is called Akismet. Here, the software identifies the comments that it believes are spam and impounds them - it’s also provided free of charge, except for commercial use, which is an additional bonus. Although it was developed by the company involved with Wordpress, it has been modified to work with many other types of blog software so it’s worth checking out. Another plug-in for Wordpress is Spam Karma which also comes highly recommended.
- Getting commenters to log-in
You can of course elect to only accept comments from people that have already logged in to a registration system which you run on your blog - this way you can be fairly sure that they will be leaving real comments because you have effectively “pre-vetted” them.
Which method is the best?
All of the methods above work well from a functional level and will help to avoid the vast majority of comment spam from arriving in your posts. Therefore, when deciding which method to use, I was personally swayed by the impact that it would have on readers wanting to leave genuine comments. Basically, I wanted to make sure that it was as easy as possible for them to do so.
Therefore, I elected to go down the specialist software route which has no impact on readers leaving comments and nothing additional for them to do - I therefore use Akismet on my blogs and those that I set-up for the businesses and individuals I work with. The results? Well, so far so good. It stops 95% of spam and also learns from all the blogs using it, so keeps up with (if not stays ahead of) the comment spammers and their methods. Overall, a big thumbs up from me.
BTW - to make sure that you have all the information at your finger tips to make your own decision, no matter which blog platform you use, I’ll be doing a second post on the subject of comment spam next week where I will try to lay out the different options available for each platform. In the meantime, any thoughts you’d like to share on what has worked for you, then please leave a comment - a real one preferably! 
If you found this useful, then please share this post:
Tags: Comment Spam, Splogs, Spam Blogs, Business Blogs, Problogger, Comment Moderation, Spam Software, Akismet, Spam Karma,
Some related posts you should also find interesting:
Blogging in the News - w/e 11 FebruaryFinding a Domain name for your BlogComments: encourage, accept and reply
February 15, 2007 by The Blog Coach |
Filed under Writing your Blog, Blogging Strategy, Blog Marketing Tips, Business Blogging
Linking is part and parcel of blogging … and it’s an important part of it as well. The blogosphere thrives on links & connections and those blogs which create those outbound links will tend to thrive with it.
Put simply, linking out is good – good for your blog and good for your business.
As you link to others, you strengthen your own position. Partly because you are validating and supporting the content of your posts but also because you are developing a repository of information which will benefit the readers who are attracted to your blog.
In fact, there are lots of positive reasons for linking to other blogs and sites which I tend to categorise as follows:
Informing your readers and Supporting your posts
Links are probably the sincerest way of recommending other blogs as valuable sources of information - you are effectively giving them a big thumbs up. Equally, they are an important way of providing reference sources to support and corroborate the arguments or assertions you are making in your own posts.
Business & Blog Promotion
By linking out, you will also be spreading the word about your own blog. If you use trackbacks to the sites you link to, then you’ll appear in the comments section of the post you’re referring to, giving more people the chance to find your blog. Owners of blogs are also generally interested in who’s referencing them, so you’ll often get a visit from them, and hopefully they’ll like what they find!
Developing Reputation and Creating Value
You will get more readers using your blog as the start point for their research, primarily because they trust the information and the links that you provide – effectively, in your area of specialism, you act as their online directory and general resource. For them, you become THE person to go to.
Creating Community & Networking
By linking to other sources, you are creating a mini resource in your area of expertise – this in turn can start to generate a community or network of readers using it with you and your blog at its centre. The links you provide help your readers to learn more about the subject and direct them to discussions going on elsewhere. Essentially your blog becomes the place where your readers know they can get up to date information on issues that they consider to be important.
Two good posts on the subject and, just to prove that it works, I found one through a link posted in the other:
Kevin Keefe writing on Lexblog gives a clear example and some no nonsense commentary of why linking to competitors is smart from his perspective in the Legal blogging arena. However, the lessons he outlines are equally relevant in any business sector.
Brian Clark at Copyblogger picks up on this in Why Linking to other blogs is essential and extends the argument slightly further. I tend to prefer Brian’s use of the word “essential” rather than just “smart” to describe linking (though both are valid) but either way the message is the same. Linking out is good for your blog and good for your business.
If you found this useful, then please share this post:
Tags: Business Blogs, Blog marketing, Linking Blogs, Blogosphere, CopyBlogger, LexBlog, Blawg, Corporate Blogs
Some related posts you should also find interesting:
Professional Services Companies: blog well and prosperBusiness Blog Design: Navigation & using your ContentBlog Set-Up
February 6, 2007 by The Blog Coach |
Filed under Setting up your Blog, Writing your Blog, Blogging Strategy
In a post at the end of last year, Des Walsh on his excellent new B5 Media blog, Business and Blogging, picked out a post by Ben Yoskovitz which focused on the argument that business blogging is not a sales pitch but rather a meaningful conversation.
You’ll get no argument from me on the “Sales pitch” front. There are lots of excellent direct marketing and sales tools available to businesses but a business blog is not one of them. You’re quite simply not playing to its strengths if you try to use it in that way.
However, a conversation (meaningful or otherwise) is only useful, from a business perspective, if it leads somewhere. The conversation shouldn’t try to lead straight to an attempted sale – in fact it mustn’t, you’re back to direct selling again there. Nevertheless, to be properly effective, it should have a direction and be taking you towards your desired outcome, whether that is developing the relationship, encouraging a news feed sign up, setting up a face to face meeting etc.
Ben also makes the point that:
“It’s not about telling people why you’re great and why they should do business with you.”
Agreed. But if you shift the emphasis slightly then you get a concept which is much more valid for blogs. For me:
“It’s about demonstrating to people why you’re great (or helping people find out why you’re great) and why they should do business with you.”
Don’t tell them, but do make it easy for them to find out through what you write and the way that you write it. For me this comes down to the distinction between selling to someone (an individual or a business) and helping them to decide that they want to buy from you.
Selling vs Helping to buy
Direct (Interruption) Marketing vs Educational Marketing
Successful business blogs sit very firmly in the second category.
If you do this well, then hopefully you’ll find that you don’t need to go and tell people why you are great because you’ll have others doing that on your behalf, either in their own blogs, on their sites or face to face. And that’s probably the clearest sign that you are running a valuable and well focused business blog.
If you found this useful, then please share this post:
Tags: Blogging for business, Blogging conversations, Des Walsh, Educational Marketing, Interruption Marketing, Direct Marketing, Selling vs Buying
Some related posts you should also find interesting:
No related posts
