FIVE TIPS FOR SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS BLOGGING How to get the most out of your company blog

ID COMMS BEST

PRACTICE GUIDES Prepared by Matt Gill (ver. 12/5)

About these guides The ID Comms Best Practice Guides series is designed to help marketing and procurement leaders unlock greater productivity from investments in marketing communications.

They have been written by ID Comms consultants based on many years experience working with some of the world’s most demanding brands and their agencies.

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About ID Comms

ID Comms Ltd is a media consulting company with strategy and innovation at its heart. Based in Shoreditch, London, we are leading providers of media solutions to companies that need access to first-class media expertise in flexible and cost-effective ways.

ID Comms provides high-quality media resources – from specialist talent to innovative processes and tools – that increase value, optimize performance and improve accountability for international brands.

The company was founded in 2009 by Tom Denford and David Indo, you can find out more about us here:

http://www.idcomms.com

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Context points for this guide 1.  Blogging is a powerful tool. Businesses that blog generate 55% more

website visitors, 102% more Twitter followers and 126% higher lead growth than non blogging businesses*

2.  Given the importance of blogging in contributing to the success and growth of businesses, it is crucial that you execute the right strategy for your company blog

3.  This means creating the type of content that will attract your target consumer and turn site visits into leads or sales

4.  To do this you will need to create informative, relevant and compelling content that your audience will want to both read and share

The following pages of this guide detail our top 5 considerations for helping you to develop a successful blogging strategy for your business.

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1. Agree on the overarching purpose and strategy for your blog

There are 2 key questions that need to be answered:

1.  What should the blog say about your company and what it stands for?

2. Who are you targeting as a business?

The answers to these questions will be informed by a broader vision and strategy for your company but are crucial in defining the role that your company blog can play in contributing to the success and growth of your business.

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2. Determine your content strategy

The next step is to then determine what types of content that is relevant to your business will appeal to this audience. What will they find interesting and useful?

Products and services should be integrated into blog posts in a subtle way, as long as they are a useful and relevant addition to the content. Explicit promotion can come across as shallow and is also unlikely to be interesting enough to hold an audience’s attention or for them to want to share it.

It is important to determine the frequency of blog posts - the general rule is the more often the better, but this must be balanced with the reality of running a business and it is important not to set unrealistic targets. The key thing is that each blog post is informative and interesting (this is the golden rule) - better to have 2 compelling posts a week than 5 dry ones.

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3. Optimise your blog content

Identify which key terms and phrases your target audience will be searching for and incorporate those phrases in both the content and title for your blog posts.

It’s also important to create eye catching or pithy titles for your blog posts (lists work particularly well).

Create individual pages for each blog post so that search engines have more pages to index on your site - this will help with your natural search rankings.

You should also link internally between pages on your site via key word ‘anchor text’ (text that is clickable) - e.g. linking from a blog post to a specific product page that is relevant to the content of the post.

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4. Encourage interaction

Allowing your audience to comment on your blog posts will encourage interaction and open dialogue - it also generates more fresh content for your site (search engines favour fresh content).

Overly negative, malicious and ‘spammy’ comments should be moderated but otherwise it is good practice to be as open as possible - feedback via comments will also allow you to determine which posts are interesting or useful for your audience and can inform future content strategy.

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5. Promote your blog posts and make them shareable

You should add social share buttons to your blog posts so that site visitors can share them within their social footprint - e.g. facebook, Twitter, G+, StumbledUpon, Digg, delicious, Pinterest. This will help to extend the audience for your posts and create more inbound links to your site which will drive site traffic and have a positive impact on your natural search rankings.

It is also important that you push your blog posts via your own social media channels in order to generate as much site traffic as possible. Again, this will have a positive impact on the rank of your content within search engine results pages.

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Final Thought

Stick with it.

Business blogging can be a ‘slow burn’ endeavour but will reap benefits in the longer term by attracting more visitors to your site and more subsequent conversions to lead or sale.

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About the author Matt Gill is an Associate Partner of ID Comms

Matt has spent the last 12 years driving media innovation for some stellar global brands from adidas, HP, Jim Beam and British Airways.

Matt has been a consistent follower of the technological revolution in media and clients value him for his intuitive understanding of how to apply communications innovations to their business. Matt consults for clients wanting qualified, independent advice on how to invest in media technologies. His straightforward measured advice helps clients discern which opportunities they might invest in now, when to ‘wait-and-see’ and which are likely just fads to be avoided. Matt introduced British Airways to mobile applications in 2005 when this was still a breakthrough technology and championed adidas to deliver their first ever digital-centric World Cup campaign in 2010.

Prior to joining ID Comms, Matt worked for media agency Carat where he was responsible for leading media innovation on the adidas business globally. During this time he delivered the much-celebrated adidas campaigns ‘Impossible Is Nothing’ and Originals ‘House Party’, and Matt picked up numerous industry awards for media creativity and innovation.

http://uk.linkedin.com/in/mattjwgill

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All the words are our own, or credited where quoted. Images are found and have been credited where known / possible.

© ID Comms Ltd, 2012

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