Ideas for Business

Ambar Shrivastava of MediaPost’s SearchInsider wrote a great article on company blogging for small- to mid-size companies who don’t want to invest thousands of dollars into SEO. The alternative, he says, is blogging. And even more striking, he says that blogging offers a more affordable way to reach audiences with the speed of pay per click advertising.

He’s 100% correct. You can set up a blog in just a couple of hours and be blogging to it in no time. The process is really simple and the blog software that I recommend is free so there are no upfront costs - unless, of course, you hire a ghostwriter to write the blog for you. Even if you hired a full-time blog manager to manage your blogging for you, you’d spend less money overall than you would by hiring that same person to manage a PPC campaign.

In his article, Ambar Shrivastava says:

Blogging may not be the long-term solution for fixing a broken site, but it will get your foot in the door for SEO, deliver results in the short term, and facilitate the process of getting buy-in for full-scale, long-term SEO projects for the rest of your Web site.

While his insights are true for the most part, I’d add that you can use blogging as a long-term SEO strategy as long as you don’t rely on it alone. You’d want to some other things as well to supplement blogging, or use blogging to supplement your other initiatives. But you can start the blogging first and get quicker results in the short term while working toward your long term goals. And you can do this for much less than you can through pay per click advertising or managing a full-scale SEO campaign.

With over 100 million blogs tracked by Technorati, there is a tremendous amount of momentum and motivation for businesses to take advantage of all the marketing, PR, support and revenue opportunities that business blogs can bring.

Sometimes it seems there are more “blog consultants” than there are business blogs due to the ease of using free blog software like Blogger or Wordpress.com/Wordpress.org. What’s easy to get into is also easy to get out of and many business blog efforts that started out with optimism have petered out like a car out of gas.

Dying corporate blogs (hat tip mykl) are completely avoidable, especially if you understand why they often fail and plan accordingly. Here are 5 of the top reasons why business blogs never make it.

• No clear objectives. With all the buzz and promise of increased search engine visibility, improved customer communications and PR, many companies task their IT group to “set up a blog” without ever planning exactly what the key objectives are. A few weeks later, you’ll often hear, “OK, we have the blog installed and a few posts made, where’s all the traffic? What do we do now?”There are many reasons to start a business blog ranging from PR goals like building thought leadership and better connecting to customers to serving as part of a SEO program by archiving newsletters, FAQs and “link bait” content. The key is to identify the objectives for the corporate blog, get key metrics identified and create a content creation and promotion plan consistent with reaching those goals.

• Unrealistic expectations and resource allocation. Blogging is work, no doubt about it. Not everyone is a natural blog writer and community builder. A successful business blog puts a personality on the company and both listens and responds to the community. Expecting a blog to be a silver bullet purely based on the SEO friendliness of blog software for example, is as shortsighted as expecting on-page SEO alone to solve a web site’s search engine ranking problems.Successful business blogs require a forecast of resources (people, process and technology) so there are no surprises and so the blog doesn’t “run out of gas”. Setting short and long term goals along with mechanisms for reporting them is key. It’s also important to implement measures of accountability for those involved. If a company is going to start a blog, they should plan for success rather than treating it like a crapshoot. Commit or go home.

• Not sourcing content for the long term. One of the most common reasons business blogs lack content or posting frequency is a combination of not participating in the blogging community conversation and not identifying content sources. Keyword researched blog categories can serve as a sort of editorial guide on what to write about as well as identifying a mix of post types to be written on a regular basis. For example, we run polls, review SEO blogs, cover conferences, write about common client marketing issues, invite guest posts, review books, list “top 10 resources” and interview well known people in our industry. That list makes up our editorial guide so we don’t “run out”.Companies would also do well to identify multiple people to write for the company blog so no one person is tasked with too much. Businesses can also tap into the knowledege and idea streams that come from front line interactions in their organization such as those between customer service and clients as well as sales and prospects. Aggregating common issues from those interactions provides excellent content sources for a business blog.

• No feedback mechanisms. Comments and trackbacks are a big part of why blogs are different than web sites. However, many business blogs don’t allow comments because they fear the time/expense of staffing required to handle them. They also fear what readers might say. My opinion is that a blog without comments isn’t really a blog. Comments are a goal not a liability. Feedback from readers, good and bad creates a conversation that includes the company. The conversation is already happening elsewhere, why not have it in your own backyard?The second part of the feedback mechanism is analytics. Web visitor analytics, RSS feed analytics, on-site search, social media monitoring, inbound links and comments on other blogs all provide abundant opportunities to measure the effect of a business blog and its reach. This kind of feedback can motivate the right mix of resources to evolve the blog as a key component of the organizations PR and marketing program just like any other marketing effort.

• Do it yourself syndrome. Companies can setup blogs themselves quite easily, but judging by the number of “dead” blogs out there, it’s a very different thing to setup a blog than to start a blog and be successful with it. As with any potentially complicated and lucrative venture, anticipating all the contingencies and dependencies is near impossible unless it’s been done before.We encourage companies to start their own internal blogs and see what’s involved. That way they can appreciate the challenges of developing a successful blog. Substantial time, money and effort can be saved by having the right consultant provide strategic and tactical insight. For the same reasons people hire guides on jungle, mountain or desert excursions, businesses can realize the benefits of blogging more efficiently and cost effectively when working with a capable consultant. Avoiding major risks due to uninformed decision making is also a benefit of working with a consultant either periodically or on an ongoing basis.

Many readers of Online Marketing Blog are bloggers themselves and I’m curious about others’ experiences with business blogs that have either failed to meet expectations/goals or that were simply abandoned. Equally as interesting are stories of blogs that have been successful and why.

Sponsored By: Start a Career in Search Marketing Announcing the best online SEM courses from SEMPO Institute.

Nathan Linnell wrote a great blog post at Marketing Pilgrim on the working relationship between SEO and PPC. The bottom line is neither are more important, but they are both necessary for successful internet marketing. While SEO is great at long-range success, PPC is the short-term thinker.

This is a good analogy and it helps to think about it in those terms. Small businesses that have a small marketing budget would do well to start with SEO. You won’t meet with instant success, but get your SEO right and drive traffic to your well optimized web pages through blogging, social media, and articles before you do any PPC. Then, after you are confident you have web pages that will convert, then you can start your PPC campaign. It will do you no good to drive traffic to any landing page through PPC if the landing page won’t convert. You might as well just take your hard-earned money and throw it out the window. So make sure the optimization and conversion rates are where you want them before you try PPC.

Need help with SEO?

There are companies out there trying to sell their “keyword sniping” services as a cure-all for SEO diseases and headaches. But is it really all that?

First, let’s define what keyword sniping is. This is the practice of taking low-traffic keywords and and keyword phrases and targeting them in an SEO effort to achieve high rankings with them in a short period of time. Does it work?

Well, that depends on what you mean by “work”. These companies may be able to get you high rankings for those keyword phrases in a short period of time, but will it really benefit your business? Playing off of what has been called “the long tail,” keyword snipers focus narrowly on a keyword phrases that might not get you much traffic. Sure, it will get you some, but you won’t be swamped with new visitors to your site overnight.

One keyword sniper said your should search for phrases that are searched for a minimum of 200 times per month and have less than 1,000,000 competitors. Obviously, this sounds wise. The key to success in SEO is to use keyword phrases that have a high search volume but low competition. But 200 searches per day? That’s only 6,000 searches per month. That’s pretty low.

Assume you are able to hit No. 1 on Google for that keyword phrase. Of 6,000 searches, how many of those do you think will click on your link and visit your website? Let’s assume all of them do (they won’t) and you have 6,000 unique visitors to your website in the first month after ranking No. 1 for that cool phrase. If you do nothing else to that website you will likely fall from that No. 1 ranking almost as fast as you rose to it because the search engines look for fresh content on your website and if they don’t find it then they won’t go back and crawl it often. Other people doing SEO for the same keyword phrase will be able to rank well for the term as well.

A Healthy Alternative To Keyword Sniping
While you might get lucky and achieve short-term results for your keyword sniping efforts, you’ll do much better if you get a blog and post to it every day. A 10-page static website that ranks well for a low-traffic keyword search term will never do as well as a blog that hones in on a broader search term over a period of time. After 365 days of daily blogging you now have a website with 365 pages on it - that’s 365 different ways that a searcher can find you - and if you optimize each blog post around a specific keyword phrase then you have multiple chances of getting found, not just one. After a period of time as you target your broad keyword phrase along with all of your competitors, you stand a much better chance of ranking well for your broad keyword phrase and tapping into the broader market of searchers looking for information about your niche. Instead of having access to 6,000 searchers in a short period of time, you’ll have access to millions of searchers over a longer period of time.

This is where an illustration might help. Take a look at the following table and you can see the numbers in action:

        Keyword Sniping                             Blog
        6,000 searchers                             1,000,000 searchers
        10 pages = 10 chances to be found           365 pages = 365 chances
        A couple of months duration                 Long-term benefits
        10% conversion = 600 sales                  10% conversion = 100,000 sales
        Wait time = a week or so                    Wait time = 1 year or so

Can you wait 1 year to get better results?

These numbers do not represent a guarantee of results. They are meant merely to illustrate realistic possibilities. Conversions, whether you use keyword sniping techniques or traditional blogging, depend on how well your landing pages are written. Even the best SEO in the world can return 0 conversions if your landing page isn’t written to close sales. But even during the 1 year that it takes (sometimes less and sometimes longer) to rank well for your broad keyword phrase, you could rank well for long tail phrases with individual blog posts, so you are actually inadvertently “sniping” with your keywords as you blog daily. Keep blogging daily over a long period of time, however, and you stand a much better chance of success than by focusing on narrow phrases for short term results. Don’t be suckered by the sales pitch.

Get the scoop on daily blogging services through Small Business Mavericks.

Holly Buchanan wrote a humorous piece on Groddotcom about staying in hotels. Once you get through the chitter chatter about mouthwash as shampoo and shampoo as shaving cream, there’s some real meat in this little post.

The gist? Be clear.

Yeah, she’s talking about being cute. As in, don’t. Or, at least, don’t let it affect your clarity.

Online, people don’t have the benefit of hearing your tone of voice or seeing your body language. All they have are words on a screen. That increases your chances of miscommunication. So when you write about things online it is always best to go for clarity more than humor or cuteness. It’s a good point and Holly Buchanan makes it well, even cutely.

Learn more about Maverick Copywriting Services.