If you read our blog often, you probably recognize posts by Drew Dillon, Marketing Manager at Innogage. Like other Innogagers, Drew is an enigma of talent both on and off the digital marketing field. Whereas my “off the field” talents lie mostly in music, Drew’s lie in the area of power lifting. In addition to being an awesome manager at Innogage Drew is also a trainer and agent for Olympian Holley Mangold who lifted in the women’s competition in London this year.

There is another way that Innogage is similar to the Olympics and that has to do with content. Although we may have all had a lot of resentment to NBC for not broadcasting most of the Olympics live from London, one thing they … Read More »

One of the things we are very proud of at innogage is our business blogging software, innoblogs. About a year ago, we got a little nuts with our blogging software and our goal to crack the ROI nut. We developed a mantra at innogage called “Search and Convert”. In other words, any enhancements to our blogging software were immediately halted if they did not relate explicitly to Search Engine Optimization or Customer Conversion – the two pieces of the ROI puzzle in social media.

The result was a cool piece of technology called the Search Engine Optimizer inside Innoblogs that coaches non-technical / non-SEO writers during the blog creation process to ensure that blog posts are strategic and driving brand, as well as being optimized for the RIGHT keywords and phrases for SEO.

Read More »

Last week at the Dublin Entrepreneurial Center (DEC) our monthly blogging roundtable group explored possible blog topics for small business owners.

Finding a suitable topic to write about can be a big stressor for bloggers. In fact, I received an email from one of my clients who gave up trying to write a blog post for today, “I went down one road and it just didn’t work …”

Even a writer on my team started a blog post on a topic last night that he hadn’t researched, and didn’t appear passionate about, and he ended up at a dead end.

My advice? It’s better not to post than to post something you don’t like and doesn’t move you closer to your marketing goals.

Here are 10 content ideas for your business blog:

1. Review an event, blog, App, website, movie, book or song. … Read More »

Keyword density as it concerns content optimization, is the percentage that a keyword appears in your content, as compared to the total number of words in your content. There was a time when keyword density was extremely important to your search engine rankings. Today, not so much. At least, not in the way it used to be.

A little keyword density history
Over time, a couple of things began to happen. First, online content writers became proficient in applying keywords, and this method of website optimization became the norm. Second, webmasters began to take advantage of keywords, to the point that they abused them. Terms like keyword stuffing, search spam and spamdexing came about as a result of this abuse. Essentially, search engines are smart enough to realize when content has too many keywords and this can result … Read More »

“I want you to take the leadership position, Kent!” That was the buzzword laden phrase uttered by one of the worst managers ever. We’ll call him Pete. In this situation, Pete wanted Kent to sign up for more work with no additional pay. Kent was about 65 years old and was disgusted by the request. Kent wanted to spend time with his grandchildren, not taking the “leadership position” whatever that meant.

Pete was trying to do the right thing but he was going about it the wrong way. Pete had additional work that needed to get done and he went after the person with the most experience, Kent. Kent, however, did not want to sign up for more hours. He wasn’t climbing the corporate ladder; he was buying time until retirement. Kent just … Read More »

So you’ve got a business blog and you’re hoping for great things but you’re keenly aware that nothing comes easy. Even if you’re running a free blog tool, you are investing time… and time is money. Here are 7 ways you can be sure to pour lots of time into your business blog and get almost nothing in return.

Don’t Plan: Do not have any idea what you are trying to accomplish with your corporate blog from a content perspective. Do not align any blogs with that content strategy and whatever you do, don’t put your blogging ideas into any kind of editorial calendar. Simply write whatever comes to mind when you feel like it or have some spare time.
Use short blog titles with no keywords. After all, it’s not like your blog title is … Read More »

I was recently asked to lecture on Content Marketing and Business Blogging at Sinclair College in Dayton Ohio. What I love about presenting at conferences and colleges is it always makes me take a big step back and look at the information through fresh eyes.

This time I added a new classification to content channels. I had always talked about the “home base” (websites and blogs) and social “outposts” (facebook, twitter, linkedin…) but I never had a good description for channels that you control but that don’t really “live” on a Home base or an outpost. Channels such as Webinars, Email Marketing, Podcasts, Whitepapers…etc.

You’ll have to check out my presentation on slideshare below to find out what new bucket I created for these media channels! I know it’s always hard to view a presentation without the verbal commentary so if you … Read More »

I recently had a chance to be a guest on Digital 411 on Talktainment Internet Radio with Dr. Erika.  It was a complete blast and I thoroughly enjoyed talking about one of my most favorite topics: Business Blogging and how it relates to return on investment, social media marketing and search engine optimization.

On the Digital 411 show with me was Lori Crock from WrittenImpact.  Lori helps companies and entrepreneurs succeed in social media including blogging strategically, sprinkled in with a lot of coaching.

It was a really good discussion with a lot of tips for small and medium sized businesses.  If you’d like to listen to the radio show you can hit the archive link here.  It will be well worth your … Read More »

If you follow the business blogging scene at all, you may have seen advertisements popping up for the Blogging Success Summit being hosted by Social Media Examiner and BlogWorld.

Note that we are not affiliate partners with the conference and are not generating any money from this blog or the links in this post.  That said, I would still encourage you to attend.  This is a fully digital conference that runs Feb 1 – Feb 22 and includes talks from 14 Industry leaders. They have an early bird special (50%) off if you register by end of day, Thursday, January 20th.

Below is a quick summary of the speakers and their content.  You can register for the digital conference here.

EVENT KEYNOTE: The State of the Blogosphere: What Businesses Need to Know

INSTRUCTOR: Read More »

With your business blog, you need to be careful how you interpret the bounce rate. It’s very different than your traditional website – where you want people to go from page to page, filling up their shopping carts or browsing all the different products and services that you have to offer.

Blogs traditionally have very high bounce rates because of the nature of how a blog works. As more and more people find your business blog from keywords in posts, they will begin landing on specific blog post pages (not the blog homepage). From here, there are several scenarios. Here are a few:

1) they continue reading through your business blog and go through a lot of posts. This may be fine – i.e. it builds the brand, people like your content…etc. However, it could also … Read More »