10.08.08

Digital Marketing Series: Tip #2

Tip #2: Create an informative blog on your topic of choice.

Why It Works:
Like content management systems, blogs are natural search engine magnets. They also help you communicate with a community of like-minded people and, if you regularly provide insightful and useful content, can position you as a thought leader in your particular industry.

A blog won’t do its job if you don’t update it, however. Gartner Group says that over 200 million bloggers abandon their blogs within a year after starting them. Tenacity, patience and fortitude are the keys to blog success. And of course it helps if you can write your way out of a paper sack as well.

Here are a few things to consider when it comes to blogging:

Make It Useful:
A blog with copious amounts of helpful educational content, news tidbits, and so on positions you as an expert in your field. It shows that you are passionate about your blog’s topic and instills confidence in those who may want to buy your services or products. Knowing what you want to blog about is the first big hurdle. Come up with a strategy on how you will approach content as well as an always evolving list of things to blog about that will serve your target audience well.

Comments and Trackbacks:
Find blogs on similar topics and start making comments on the posts. Utilizing blog comments and trackback fields will help you communicate with like-minded individuals across a series of blogs. This also helps build links back to your site, which ultimately increases search engine ranking.

Use Your Blog’s RSS Features:
Blog content can be easily aggregated via RSS (Really Simple Syndication) so users can subscribe to your blog feed, which alerts them to new entries instantaneously. RSS also lets you automatically feed blog posts to your Facebook, Plaxo or Xing profiles or send a new blog post alert to Twitter.

Register Your Blog:
Be sure to register your blog with sites like Technorati, Bloglines, BlogPulse, Google BlogSearch, and so on. These sites track blog traffic, links, and content in different ways. They can be used to get your content in front of a larger audience and will also provide metric data such as how many sites link to you and who they are.

Resources:
There is a huge wellspring of knowledge available online on every aspect of blogging and blog marketing. A simple Google search on “Why should I blog?” reveals ‘about 41,100,000’ results, so there’s no shortage of information on this topic available. Any of the sites mentioned above contain valuable insights that can answer many of your questions. The usual suspects of MarketingProfs, Hubspot, and Marketing Sherpa are great places to start. The American Marketing Association also offers seminars and online webinars on many aspects of blogging and online marketing as well.

If you prefer the analog approach, Blog Marketing by Jeremy Wright is an excellent resource to help you answer the questions you might have about blogging. The book includes thorough explanations of why you should start blogging and how to do it. Real world case studies on blog success stories offer useful information as well.

How We Have Embraced It:
Mightybytes added the Mblog to our site earlier this year. Updating its content while simultaneously juggling multiple client projects is admittedly a company challenge, but one we are committed to meeting over the long haul. Thus, we write when we can. Sometimes it’s several times per week. Sometimes it’s once or twice a month. Our entire site, including the blog, is currently run by Expression Engine, so in effect the entire thing is a series of blogs since that’s how EE deals with site content. We have also configured, skinned and created custom templates for many client blogs as well.

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