How do you get others within the company to become committed, engaged, and passionate about blogging?

Photo Credit: Victor1558 via Compfight cc
This is a question that all of our clients face when they start using Innoblogs. We make collaborative blogging easy with great tools built into Innoblogs, such as, editorial calendars, topic reminders, staleness notifications, ect. However, no tool, not even Innoblogs will build passion into your employees to blog. Here is how we approach it

Let employees participate in selecting and owning their topic focus - You will have a very disengaged employee if you approach the situation by instructing them to just write on this topic. Now I am assuming this isn’t an employee whom has the sole purpose of writing for the company. I’m under the assumption that … Read More »

I work with clients on content creation continuously when they sign up to use the Innoblogs Business Blogging Platform. There are 3 main stages that we go through.

1. Implementation planning
2. Implementation/content building
3. Continue content creation and blog maintenance

During the implementation planning stage we discuss the the goals of their content and blog. Also, we discuss the voice they will use to accomplish these goals. These two building blocks lay the framework that we’ll use to be successful with this tool, and not to get lost from where we originally wanted to go!

Implementation and content building is the time where we build up some content for the launch of our blog. The developers are quickly putting the nuts and bolts together so we have time to prep. Since we know our overall goals and … Read More »

Blogging for business is not a new subject. In fact, you can find thousands of articles discussing the benefits, downfalls, and process to blogging for business. In this post we’re simply going to discuss one issue…

Can you build an audience while writing for SEO?

Yes! You just need to understand how to inject quality SEO into a post that is helpful and relevant to the audience you’re trying to reach!

1. Identify a problem/issue your audience is facing.

2. If you have domain knowledge and can speak to this, then move to step 3. If not, do your research to find a solution or come to a conclusion you believe.

3. Write an article as if speaking to an individual in which you’re invested enough to share your true thoughts and feelings. How would … Read More »

The Ford Focus was not a good brand. In fact, the brand was in such bad shape that there were online groups dedicated to hating on the Focus. So put yourself in Ford’s shoes for a minute… would you kill the brand or try to save it?

Ford decided that the brand, although not well liked or respected, still had a ton of recognition… and that is real value. They decided to try to save the brand using some creative digital marketing.

The Ford marketing team, led by Scott Monty, knew they needed something radical to turn the tide, which is very difficult at any large company. They needed to go rogue.

Ford hired an agency and created a series of webisodes using a hilarious puppet named Doug. Apparently HR was not too pleased with … Read More »

By now, you have probably seen a ton of Infographics. These are the pretty visual images that tell a story with data. For examples, visit our Pinterest board where we have aggregated a lot of Infographics for Marketing

Did you ever wonder what goes into creating one of these great custom designed Infographics? It’s more than you may think!

I sat in a session by Graphic Design Company Lemon.ly at the New Media Expo (NMX) in Las Vegas recently where they took us step by step to create a high quality infographic. This blog post is about that process with some enhancement by our Innogage marketing team.

1. Inform

Start with the goal (the Thesis of your infographics). What are your 3 main points – what do you want to reader … Read More »

Welcome to Part III of the blog mini-series about Nudge Marketing with content from the Rand Fishkin presentation from NMX in Las Vegas. If you missed parts I and II, I encourage you to read those first and then come back to this blog post.

You can find Part I at this link, and Part II at this link.

To recap very quickly, Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz talked about a new kind of marketing when you slowly and consistently nudge your prospects and customers to take small actionable steps that benefit them and you. In the digital marketing space, this can take on many different appearances depending on what kind of business you have and who … Read More »

Thanks for reading installment No. 2 of my short series on Nudge Marketing. This is a continuation of 15 Nudge Marketing Tactics from the New Media Expo Conference with speaker Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz.

To recap quickly, Rand Fishkin spoke about Nudge Marketing at the New Media Expo (#NMX) in Las Vegas recently and I was lucky enough to hear his presentation. I blogged about Nudge Marketing Tactics 1-5 in an earlier post. If you have not seen that one yet, I encourage you to read it first and then come back to this post. For each tactic, I list the tactic from Rand and then provide my commentary in the [brackets] to expand on the subject matter.

Without further adieu, here are Nudge Marketing … Read More »

Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz spoke at the New Media Expo (#NMX) in Las Vegas recently and I was lucky enough to snag a seat in the back of the packed room. He talked about a new kind of marketing psychology he called Nudge Marketing. Much of what Rand said came as a flashback to me from several behavioral classes I took during my MBA coursework at Kellogg.

Here are the first 5 of the 15 Nudge Marketing tactics Rand covered in his presentation along with some additional explanatory commentary [in brackets] from me.

Nudge Marketing Tactics 1-5

1. A ton of people can’t be wrong. [Use a statistic to make people think they are not in the cool crowd if they don’t use you. For example, we could say, “4 out of 5 social media experts … Read More »

In my earlier post, Content 101, I mentioned the 3 C’s of large-scale content marketing strategizing. Today I’ll dive into day-to-day content planning, once again borrowing some principles from the field of education. After all, content marketing brings customers in by offering something, and often that is information or a skill. Sounds a lot like teaching and learning!

Understanding by design, or backwards design, is a planning framework that starts with the desired end result and, you guessed it, works backward. In teaching, the obvious goal is knowledge, but there are different ways to measure that: written tests or quizzes, performance tasks, or project deliverables, to name a few. I often wrote these objectives as “I Can” statements, as in, “I can identify the four trophic levels,” … Read More »

In keeping with my last post’s theme of questioning, let’s look at the most angst-riddled question every blogger asks him or herself at least once a day:

What should I write about?!

You can have the best blogging platform in the world. (I’m partial to the benefits of Innoblogs…but that’s just me.) You can have a legion of wordsmiths at your disposal. You can even have tons of eager prospects chanting, “Blog! Blog! Blog!” at your web site and a foolproof way to turn those prospects into clients. But the truth is, without a steady stream of quality content…Your. Blog. Will. Die.

Heavy, I know. But an easy way to relieve that what-to-write anxiety is to turn the question around: What do my viewers want to read about? What are the key questions coming from your audience? If you have … Read More »