Jetting Blogs

Setting and Measuring Goals for Business Blogging

Posted by under Blog Marketing, Pay-Per-Click

As companies that realize the value of online marketing understand the need to publish engaging content, one of the most common considerations is a company blog.  Blog software is fundamentally one of the easiest content management software systems to install and use. Of course the software isn’t magic. The content and ability to reach and engage with customers is a big part of what makes a business blog successful. For those companies that are thinking of starting a blog or reinvesting resources into a company blogging effort that has gone stale, some of the most important questions to ask are:  Have you identified specific goals for the blog? How will you measure success? In sports you can’t score if there isn’t a goal and it’s no different with business blogging.  There are a variety of reasons why publishing ongoing communications that allow readers to interact adds value to a business. Add to that the distribution via RSS that extends the reach of your message and  it’s easy to see why so many companies start blogging. The failure for many business blogs is centered around not making a connection between business goals, blog specific objectives and most importantly, how meeting customer needs leads to the first two. Here are three key questions to consider as you design your plan for business blogging success: Why start a business blog? What end goals or outcomes can you reasonably expect? There are many good reasons to start a blog. But are those reasons good enough to start and stay blogging for the long haul? Our survey on blogging and SEO showed 90% citing blogging as important, significantly important or a primary SEO tactic. 94% of bloggers reported seeing measurable SEO benefits from blogging within 12 months. Initiate and foster customer engagement Improve coverage by media and bloggers Improve search engine visibility Increase mentions on other blogs, social networking, news, bookmarking and media sites Build thought leadership Provide an informative communication channel Recognize employees, clients, marketing partners and especially brand evangelists How will you know your blogging efforts are successful according to those goals? How are you measuring blogging success? We ran a poll last year with our readers that ranked their most important measures of blogging success. Here is the distribution: Engagement: comments, links 36% Improved brand recognition 31% Build thought leadership 31% Search engine rankings 31% Better communicate with customers 30% Traffic to the blog 27% Coverage by media and other blogs 18% Traffic to the corporate web site 16% Sales leads 16% Industry Recognition 13% Sell products 2% Improved customer satisfaction 11% Page views 9% Time on Site 6% Ad revenue on the blog 5% What tools are you using to measure blog performance? Goals for business and the blog are great but it’s essential to have the right tools in place for analytics. One of the biggest mistakes is to rely on things like Google Alerts. Web analytics (Google Analytics, Woopra, Clicky, etc) Feedburner Social media monitoring tools Link analysis tools Comment tracking tools Clipping services Forum conversation tracking tools It’s fundamental, this notion of setting goals, understanding outcomes and the tools needed to measure. But you know the saying, “Common sense is the least common thing on Earth.”  Companies can achieve great return on investment with the right plan and leadership in a blogging effort. The key is to do the baseline work to build a foundation upon which it can grow and succeed.  Stay the course and leverage both listening and engagement tools to guide content. Develop networks and distribution channels to grow readership and reach. Take the time to really understand the impact of data provided by reporting tools and create reports for executives that highlight business goals. What are some of the challenges you’ve faced with setting, measuring and reaching business goals through corporate blogging? Have you started a business blog only to shut it down? Have your company blogging efforts been successful beyond expectations? © Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | Setting and Measuring Goals for Business Blogging | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

Go here to see the original:
Setting and Measuring Goals for Business Blogging

5 Sure Fire Tactics to Promote a Business Blog

Posted by under Blog Marketing, Pay-Per-Click

Relevant, Consistently Updated Content + Flawless Technical Functionality & User Experience = Perfect Blog Launch What’s missing from the equation above? You guessed it: blog promotion. Creating a glitch-free blog with informative content means next to nothing without attracting readers. Start promoting your blog today with these five effective tips: 1. Involve influential industry bloggers. By linking to popular blogs, you can gain the attention of both the influential blogger and his or her readers. But your blog won’t be the only one to benefit. You’ll be giving the other blog a little link juice – and be paying them a compliment at the same time. Try out a few of these ideas for leveraging other blogs: Create a post around an interesting concept published by an influential blogger: Be sure to attribute the information to the blogger and link to his or her post. And don’t forget to offer additional unique insight to make the post your own. Interview an influential blogger and turn it into a Q&A post: That blogger is sure to link to your post, and his or her readers are likely to visit your blog as a result. Side benefit: Including the insight of a thought leader will help position you as a thought leader as well. Create a list of influential blogs: Include popular blogs from your industry, and include a link, short description and even a screenshot. Online Marketing Blog has successfully done this with its BIGLIST of online marketing blogs . Publish a blog post each week highlighting one or two new blogs to promote the list and acquire another link to the list. 2. Promote your blog via social media. If your organization already has a solid presence on Twitter, Facebook or other social media channel, leverage your followers or fans to promote your new blog. For example, when a new post goes live, create a short tweet with a link back to the post – and provide the link on your Facebook fan page. A few tips to keep in mind: Whenever possible (we know how quickly 140 characters can be used up!), include the blog name in tweets and other social media messages. Auto-feed new posts to your social media accounts with tools like FeedBurner . But if you choose this option, make sure your headlines are as compelling as possible for social media. Maximize promotional efforts by asking employees to add the blog URL to their signatures and personal social media accounts. Employees can also re-tweet posts that they find interesting. 3. Create “link-bait” posts and “sticky” headlines. Creating compelling headlines or posts that resonate with social web users is another way to garner attention for your new blog. Try some of these ideas: Write counter-intuitive posts – i.e, “The 10 Worst Online Marketing Ideas” or “The 5 Quickest Ways to Get Caught in the Spam Filter.” Incorporate celebrities into posts (if appropriate for your industry) – i.e., “Top 10 Celebrity Tweets of the Week” Leverage the sticky headline formula, “number + adjective + sticky message” – i.e., Lee’s recent post, “ 10 Must Read Tips to Start a Small Business Blog ” (see image below) 4. Promote the blog on your corporate website. It’s important to gain some valuable real estate on the homepage of your corporate site – particularly in the early stages of getting a new blog up and running. Create a button with a link to the blog to appear on the homepage, or at the least provide a link to the blog in the nav. The Otter Group does a good job of promoting its blog on the homepage of its corporate website (see image below). In addition to the homepage, ensure the blog is included in the upper and right-hand nav on all website pages. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for visitors to find your blog. 5. Promote the blog offline. For all of the online channels available to promote your blog, there are just as many offline channels to leverage. Don’t limit yourself to the online world. Instead: Add your blog URL to business cards. Promote your blog at industry events. Get print publications to pick up blog posts. Use word of mouth to let customers and business partners know of the new blog. Include the blog URL in the boilerplate of press releases (and in online releases, too). Of course, these five tips are just a few of many ways to promote and market business blogs. Whatever promotional efforts you choose, look for tactics that will help you reach business goals whether they are increasing awareness, garnering buzz in the media or driving additional website traffic. What tactics have you used to promote your blog?

OMS10 B2B Marketing Case Study: Marketo

Posted by BlogPostman under Blog Marketing, Pay-Per-Click

Our agency TopRank Marketing has been working with Marketo providing SEO, content and blog marketing consulting services for about 2 years. I finally had the opportunity to meet Marketing VP Jon Miller in person today prior to his presentation at Online Marketing Summit: Marketo’s Secret Sauce for Demand Generation. Marketo is one of the fastest growing software companies in the U.S. and this session is a case study for how Marketo has achieved that rate of growth. Marketo launched their main product about 2 years ago. In 2 years, they’ve signed up 400 customers at a value of about $30,000 per year in recurring revenue. The current run rate is over $12 million which is pretty impressive for a 3 year old company. Marketo revenue cycle benchmarks show that Marketo spends about 50% more than comparable companies on Marketing but less on sales. Their customer acquisition cost are much less than other software companies. Marketo has a very efficient marketing and sales effort. How is that so? They use their own product and have made smart investments in their marketing efforts. Rather than a sales cycle, Marketo focuses on the revenue cycle that starts from awareness to becoming a customer. Awareness > All Names > Engaged > Prospect Qualified > Lead > Sales Lead > Opportunity > Customer Marketo keeps their landing page forms very simple. They then actual manually check the company web site and decides if that inquiry is a worthwhile prospect. Since they’re marketing automation company, adding a manual process may seem contradictory but such activity helps sales people evaluate companies a lot more effectively.  Contacts are then nurtured and scored. If they score above a certain level, they become a “lead”. Awareness – Investments in awareness and brand have paid off in a very big way for Marketo. They’v found it to be very effective to focus on content and thought leadership through tips, best practices and ideas that are available without registering. Marketo’s blog is their single most effective marketing tactic. They’ve actually diverted marketing investment away from other activities and focused instead on blogging.   Woot! TopRank gets a shoutout as Marketo’s SEO agency. PPC is the top converting tactic and their best leads are coming in from inbound: search and word of mouth. Once a prospect is generated, sales follow-ups are personalized and very soft touch. What is Lead Nurturing? The art of maintaining permission to stay in front of your buyers as they educate themselves. The key to lead nurturing is relevance. Types of Lead Nurturing: Stay in touch, Incomin lead processing, Accelerators, Lead lifecycle.  If you get a new prospect, about 1/4 are sales ready. Putting lead nurturing in place resulted in 50% more qualified sales leads at 33% of the cost. Content mapping . Make sure content is relevant to where buyers are in the buying cycle. Think big, start small and move quickly. It doesn’t have to be your content either. You can package other content with your observations surrounding it. Companies with sales people that spend the time to qualify leads ultimately generate more revenue. Lead scoring rules focus on behaviors: Latent and Active. Latent means people engaging with content. Active means showing interest intent such as Googling Marketo’s brand name as well as downloading reviews, visit web site 2x in one week. There’s a certain threshold that’s met to initiate follow up. There’s a huge drop off for leads that are not responded to with 5 minutes or less. Inbound leads are segmented: target companies, enterprise companies, other. Also segmented by latent or active. Response time is based upon meeting scoring criteria.  Inbound calls, contact us forms, and qualified free trial requests get “Active” follow up. ie speedy follow up. At the end of the 21 day lead nurturing period, a final email is sent giving options for recipient to self score themselves in terms of interest in Marketo. No lead left behind: There’s an automated process that reminds sales teams to follow up. This dropped unresponded leads from 33% to 5%. Lessons learned:  Focus on the entire revenue cycle, not just generating new leads. Do not understimate the value of creating content! Build trust and reduce risk vie thought leadership and social media. Leverage analytics. You can learn more about Marketo on their blog and on Twitter .

Blog Marketing – Creating Dynamic Content

Posted by BlogPostman under Blog Marketing

Those online business owners and website entrepreneurs that have done their homework on what makes a successful website different from an unsuccessful one already know that content is the key. Content provides material for the search engines to inspect and use to rank you higher in the search results, as well as dynamic material that will keep visitors returning to your site again and again.

A common mistake for rookie website owners to make is that they will work hard on their web pages, and then leave them to stagnate while they focus on other parts of the business. Although you can’t be redesigning your home page over and over, blog marketing is a great way to display unique content every day.

If you’re interested in ways that you can leverage dynamic content more efficiently so that it will help you to climb up even higher in the search engine rankings for the keywords that you are associated with, you’ve got to consider blog marketing and all the ways it can increase your visibility.

Those who have heard of blogging, but never heard of blog marketing will be interested to learn that it is a method for driving interested viewers to your web pages by creating attention grabbing posts and linking them to your main website.

Many people want to take advantage of blog marketing, but don’t have the writing skills or the time necessary to accomplish this goal efficiently. This is when you should think about turning to an experienced internet marketing firm for help.

Those advertising firms that have a lot of experience with online companies will know just how to set up a blog marketing platform that can be easily updated, and that will attract attention from the major search engines, like Google and Yahoo. Then, if you so choose, these firms can have their teams of talented writers post content for you on a regular basis.

When you have a successful blog marketing campaign in place, you will have the advantage of additional sites linking to your site on a regular basis. The search engines will notice this, and they will note that the content on the blogs seems to be relevant to your site. As a result, you are likely to move up in the search rankings.

When it comes to internet marketing you have to be creative in order to survive. Click here to learn more about how blog marketing can increase your site’s visibility and traffic.

Ten Must Read Tips to Start a Small Business Blog

Posted by under Blog Marketing, Pay-Per-Click, Web Marketing

A friend of mine who is an experienced corporate marketer started a new business. The store just opened and being the good pal that I am, I was able to provide some advice regarding marketing on the web – specifically regarding blog marketing. This is a new small business, so considerations for what to do about a web site included: cost, functionality, flexibility, ease of maintenance and marketability. The web site needed to serve as both an online representation of the business, but without transactional functionality, as well as a host for landing pages used with email and PPC campaigns. My recommendation for a low cost, easy to use and search engine friendly content mangagement system? Blog software. What often happens when friends ask for advice regarding web marketing is that I’ll make some recommendations in a casual setting or email links to a few resources like this one on blog marketing tips , then a few weeks or months later, the conversation will turn to, “So, how is your blog or web site doing?”, and I find out that the site/blog was either not started at all, it was created in a way that blows away any chance of SEO or marketability outside of advertising or it was built using resources with no cost of entry but without the capabilities to scale if successful. Something along those lines happend with my friend’s blog. What was the issue? The blog was started using Blogger.com, which by itself is not a problem, but the blog address selected was: nameofstore.blogspot.com. This is understandable because it’s the default URL selection when you create a blog with Blogger.com. However, picking a third party domain for the blog address violates one of the most important rules in sustainable blogging: Always host the blog address with a domain name you control. That means yourdomainname.com/blog or blog.yourdomainname.com or yourdomainnameblog.com. Otherwise, you give up control. How so? What if the blog host goes down? Free services rarely provide support. Also, what if the service does not support the functionality you need? You can’t change their entire platform to suit your individual needs. There are other reasons for keeping the blog address as part of your own domain name including the ability to change blog software services without having to change your blog address. Of course there’s also a benefit for search engine optimization if you host the blog as a sub directory of your main company domain name such as yourdomainname.com/blog. Blogs are very linkable entities and other blogs tend to be enthusiastic about linking, so any links to your blog can be percieved as a vote of credibility to your main web site since the blog and the web site share the same domain name. Now back to our tale of the small business blog. My friend had only made one post on the blogspot.com URL so nothing would be lost by moving to a dedicated domain name. My own experience with Online Marketing Blog was different. After blogging for nearly 2 years at a blogspot.com address, I decided to move to a dedicated domain name and WordPress. It took some talented optimization and 6 months of aggressive promotion to recoup the linking footprint (100,000+ inbound links) that was lost. Of course, now our traffic is multiple times more than what it was. What my friend decided to do was register a domain name and setup a hosting account. Since there was no main company web site to attach the blog to, this makes the most sense. Essentially, the blog became the company web site. With more and more businesses, this is becoming a very practical, cost effective and functionally efficient way to manage web site content: Using blog software as a content management system. As my friend asked what to do next, writing everything down in a notebook, it became clear that there’s a litany of things you COULD do with setting up a blog. Even if we filtered it down to what one SHOULD do, the list was amazingly long. As someone new to the whole idea of blogging and this not being a formal consulting arrangement, I decided to create what I think, is a short list of what a small businesses CAN do when starting a blog. 1. Decide the purpose of the blog. Do this before going out and registering a domain name or anything else. Is the blog going to serve as a journal for starting the business? Is it a search marketing tool? Is it to be used to demonstrate thought leadership and create credibility? Will it be a communication tool for customers? Will it also serve as the main company web site? Is the purpose some or all of the above? I could elaborate on setting up each of these types of blogs if I ever decided to write that book, but for now, we’ll stick with a blog that serves as a company web site, hosts landing pages, serves as a small business resource and marketing tool. 2. Pick a URL. If the purpose of the blog is to support company brand and audience, then the URL should be part of the company web site. Ideally, the blog hosting situation allows for a sub directory such as companysite.com/blog.  Otherwise, a sub-domain such as blog.companysite.com will work and you can can host the blog elsewhere, separate from the company web servers. IT will like that. If the purpose of the blog is independent of the primary company brand, or messaging, then a dedicated domain name such as topicgoeshereblog.com might work better. It’s tempting to use a keyword only domain name, but those keywords will not be a silver bullet for search engine rankings. A catchy, meaningul brand name for the blog will go much farther as content can always be optimized for search engine rankings. 3. Pick blog software. In most cases, WordPress is the way to go. An inexpensive Linux platform hosting account that supports PHP and mySQL can be secured for $10-$20 per month. However, should the blog get really popular, expect to upgrade to support increased demand. It’s entirely worth it. The blog software will need to be installed on the server that will host it and the database will also need to be set up. This is fairly straightforward, but in all honesty, it’s best to have someone that knows what they’re doing help. As an example, I do very little of the technical work on our blog and prefer to have a specialist (Thomas McMahon) take care of maintenance, adding plugins, design and functionality updates. We have outside programmers do any heavy lifting in the application development department. WordPress software is open source, ie free, so if you are code/technically savvy and you have the time to figure it out, it’s certainly doable. There is no one “right way” to setup a blog. There are literally hundreds of shades of gray. It can cost a hundreds to thousand of dollars for a blog consultant to install, setup and customize the design of your blog. You’re not paying for the software, you’re paying for expertise that will save you MONTHS of time and allow you to get to market more quickly and efficiently. 4. Customize the blog. After installation of the core blog software, there are a number of customization tasks. First, the blog design should be modified to match your branding. If you don’t hire a consultant to do this, there are many free templates that can then be customized, but many of them require a link to the author at the bottom. Personally, I’m not a fan of those, but they are a low/no cost place to start. Design customization involves modifying the CSS, JavaScript, graphics and possibly a few database elements. The second set of customization tasks involves plug-ins to improve the adminstration, front end functionality and the SEO friendliness of the blog. Thanks to Twitter and Thomas for this recommended minimum list of plug-ins: Redirection HeadSpace2 Google XML sitemaps Gravity forms All In One SEO PostPost ACE WP Plug ComLuv Disqus Members only Cookies for comments Section widget Page order Related posts FeedSmith FeedBurner Plugin Sociable Askimet or WP-SpamFree Post Teaser 5. Create a content plan. In concert with the purpose of the blog, it’s important to generate a basic editorial guideline for creating content. The easiest way to manage this is by creating categories for the kinds of content you plan on posting. Before you create those categories, it’s a good idea to do some keyword research as the categories will become excellent repositories of related content. Why not make it even easier for search engines to understand and rank them? Common keyword research tools include: WordTracker and Google . Paid keyword tools include WordStream.com and KeywordDiscovery.com Once you identify which keyword phrases best represent the content you’ll be publishing, use them to name your content categories. Each time you make a blog post, that entry will be associated with one or more categories, creating a very search engine friendly repository of content. Create an editorial calendar or schedule of posts to keep you on topic for your audience and true to the purpose of the blog. Leverage interactions with blog readers as well as your analytics to know if your content and keyword picks are productive or not. 6. Pick your blogging team. In the case of most small businesses, the blogging team is a team of one. That’s fine, just be sure to document what’s working and what’s not so when the time comes, you can get your blogging team mate up to speed quickly. Since blogger’s block (like writer’s block) can really dampen a good thing for a small business blog, go ahead and keep a good number of posts in draft mode. Add to them as you get new ideas and inspiration. Or facts and examples. That way, you’ll have a steady stream of blog posts ready to publish in advance. In fact, you can schedule blog posts in advance using WordPress. 7. Make it easy to share. Blogging in a vaccum is inevitable blogging death. It’s essential that you solicit comments in your posts, respond to comments quickly, create and enforce a commenting policy. Being responsive is an essential part of attracting subscribers . Don’t covet the comments either. Visit other blogs in your industry and write useful comments. Those bloggers may notice you and it can become something more, like an invite for a guest post, collaboration or simply a new online friend. Make it easy for readers of your blog to save and share your content with sharing buttons or widgets. It pays to create accounts on the more popular services and develop social networks there. Your contacts on Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and similar services will watch for your next post and vote for the good stuff, which can drive your content to be exposed on more popular areas of those web sites. More exposure can mean more traffic. The social bookmarks tool is handy for adding such functionality to any web page and Thomas offered several new blog promotion tips last week. 8. Get your social on . RSS feeds come with blogs and it’s worth taking the time to make sure the RSS feed is readily available and obvious for people to subscribe. Submit your blog and RSS feed to our HUGE list of blog and RSS directories . Set up social profiles on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as appropriate and automate the sharing of links from your blog posts to those services. In other words, you could use a service like TwitterFeed to publish your latest blog post to Twitter and Facebook automatically. Be sure to publish your blog URL everywhere you publish your web site address. 9. Make static. If you’re using the blog as a CMS for a small business web site, then make your static web pages such as those for About our Company, Product/Service pages, Contact Forms, etc. The blog can be customized to have a home page like any other web site as well. That way, visitors arriving on your site can see what they expect from a company selling products/services. At the same time, blogging creates a rich and frequent source of useful content that’s syndicated via RSS, promoted automatically to relevant social channels and leaves the door open for interaction via comments. 10. Measure. Test – Test. Measure. It’s important that you set goals for the blog, a plan to execute tactics and most of all, measure progress. Most web site measurement is focused on web analytics and metrics specific to different types of marketing such as with email, SEO or PPC. Standard web analytics software such as Google Analytics will address the vast majority of your needs. I would also recommend social media monitoring and analytics. Monitoring can be as simple as the RSS feed from search.twitter.com combined with the RSS feed from the results of a search on Google’s blog search. You could also use services like socialmention.com , trackur.com or more robust social media monitoring tools such as Techrigy SM2, ScoutLabs or Radian6. Social monitoring tools will help you understand what your customers are saying about you on the social web as well as uncover new interaction opportiunities with influentials. Real time search means real time marketing and social monitoring can facilitate that. One example would be if a competitor Tweets a deal on a product. Your Twitter search on that competitor or product would create an alert. You could then decide to offer a deal at a lower price or some other counter offer. Another example is if a customer complains about your company. Before others jump on the bandwagon, your social monitoring tools would alert you and you can then qualify and address the situation quickly. As web analytics and social media monitoring tools become increasingly intertwined, you’ll be able to identify many other key metrics for the effect of your social participation on bottom line business goals. There you go. Ten tips for starting a small business blog. This was a long post and yet, it’s nowhere near a comprehensive guide to create a small business blog. Even though there is plenty of free blog software and advice available online, many companies would benefit from having professional help with a business blog. The funny thing is, my friend will look at this post and say, “This is the SHORT list?”. Blogging can be simple to start, but no one said it wasn’t hard work. If you’ve created a blog for your small business, what has your experience been? Did you do it yourself? Do you get expert help? Have you set up a small business web site using blog software? we’d love to hear about your experiences, challenges and successes.