How Blogs work for business

Firstly. What is a blog?

And hands up if you thought online dairy!

Well what ever you thought, your right

That is just one use of what is a very powerful marketing tool

• daily pulpit• a personal diary• collaborative space• political soapbox• breaking-news outlet • own private thoughts• Memos to the world• A promotional gold mine

So .. what is a blog?

How can this benefit my business?

Positions your company + staff as authorities

It enhances your core brand identity

Increases your reach

Allows you to communicate directly with users

Enhances your existing marketing strategy

Captures more search traffic via ‘the long tail’

Improves relevant internal linking to your website

Humanizes your business

Positions you next to industry thought leaders

Encourages feedback from users

Makes the most of your everyday activities by vocalizing them

How to achieve blogging success

Carry out competitor analysis with tools like http://www.quarkbase.com/ to find out what the competition are doing

Get to know words again, indulge in them.. They are now your sales team!

Write engaging titles that grab readers attention

Sum up your entire post in a title

Think how punchy news titles are

Advertise your blog on areas of your website

Use calls to action throughout your posts

Maximize your RSS feed subscriptions by including a large or prominent RSS icon

Make it easy for users to share your content by adding ‘share this’ buttons so that they can post your content to Digg, Yahoo buzz, Twitter, Delicious and Reddit.

Make sure your blog is integrated into your website, thus any links into the blog with benefit your site also

Comment on other industry blogs and forums to expand your authority and lead users back to your website

Make sure your blog visitors can easily navigate back to your website

Post often to ensure the search engines are returning regularly to index your content

Help the engines out by adding your RSS URL to a number of respected RSS directories such as Technorati

Include product shots in posts to reinforce the users journey from your site to your blog

Use keywords and phrases to optimize your posts

Consider opening a netvibes page to track everything going on in your industry via RSS feeds

What subject is at the top of Digg or Twitter search, what are people reading about?

Be interesting and informative

Use top 10 list, breaking news and how to videos

Video content should be utilized as it stimulates users interest and they can easily embed it on to their site or social space

Make good use of categories to help users navigate to the content that is important to them

Utilize the notoriety of others for your own benefits with Guest blogging and interviews

Create substance with high resolution images within posts

Remember the basic blogging mantra

Short and simple

Be a thought leader

Fresh and often

Ask for help

Have an opinion

Be authentic

Don’t sell

Be generous

A few things to ask your webmasters / web designers to action on your blog

If your using a CMS like Wordpress, make sure that you don’t get any duplicate content issues with permanent index.php urls

Set-up webmaster tools on your blog and make sure your site map is active

Set-up google analytics on you blog

Try to get an automatic plug-in to ping ever post your make to loads of nice RSS directories

Set-up google analytics on you blog

The value of Bloggingwas brought to you by www.mediamodus.com

& Claire Stokoe

and images creating using:

http://www.stripcreator.com/make.php#