The world of business blogging exploits the full global-reach marketability of your company. Savvy blogging draws new and existing customers into a conversation that will increase site-traffic, generate exposure, and potentially increase your customer-base and  future sales.

But get it wrong, and your business blog can turn from an asset to a liability.

Mistake #1 – Irregular Blogging

Blogging compliments your business, and like any part of your business, it needs to be current and regularly maintained. Irregular blogging can lower your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) content, dropping your business page rank, and effectively minimizing potential customers. Consistent, interesting and relevant posting will build your reader-base, and show commitment to your business and your customers.

Mistake #2 – Inconsistent Voice

Unless your business blog is specifically designed to individualize your bloggers, … Read More »

I sat down with two members of the Westerville School board this morning to discuss the tough situation facing the district. Westerville is, like many communities, experiencing a financial crunch with decreased property valuations, delinquent tax payments and less money from the State. A levy to close the gap recently failed by a large margin (60/40) in a district that rarely fails levies.

“Rarely does the rumor mill
work in your favor.”

What happened and what does it mean for me and my business or organization?

I believe the levy primarily failed because of lack of communication – basically lack of a marketing plan. Even though the district was experiencing financial hardships, no real information was communicated or marketing campaign launched until just before the levy.  The information that was available was either hard to understand or high level. This … Read More »

Every time I read about a content management system, I inevitably see the value proposition of creating an unlimited number of blogs. On the surface that seems great right?  However, in terms of business blogs – is it?

Let me ask you this – who wants to create an unlimited number of blogs? Most of us can’t even get one business blog to work effectively. Instead of creating a lot of blogs that don’t work, focus on creating one blog that does work. Here are a few things your blogging software should do for you:

Make the content strategy clear to all writers
Suggest topics of interest
Permit many writers while maintaining control
Enable real Search Engine Optimization (on the keywords YOU are trying to own)
Take care of the heavy lifting in terms of cross … 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 often have the privilege of sitting with a business owner as they ponder whether a business blog would be good for their company. You can see the argument play out in their minds, it obviously isn’t something they had to consider and the argument always seems to focused around two recurring questions.

Is it worth the investment?
Does a blog make sense for what we do?

To answer the first question you must know what the total investment involves.

Total Investment:

Money – Blogging is not inexpensive! Yes, I know you can get a blog running for free depending on what you use… but what about the Opportunity cost of using your time to blog? You may want to invest in a business blogging platform. This takes me to the next bullet point.

Time – Blogs take research, planning, and wise … Read More »

You may have heard that Google changed it’s algorithm. This change was commonly called the Panda update. The intent of the update was to limit the power of website scrapers and award websites that produce the original content.

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 »

I read a blog post today by Lee Odden on his Top Rank Online Marketing Blog and I felt compelled to post about it.  It’s not often that I agree with everything in a blog post but Lee really nailed it with his post called 5 Tips on Business Blogging With Minimal Resources.

One reason I got so excited when I read Lee’s post – it validates the functionality we have worked hard to put into InnoBlogs.  Lee wrote this post because blog management is NOT easy.  It takes work and strategic focus and dedication and a team – which is then hard to manage and control… With each of Lee’s points about business blogging, I immediately recognized functionality we built into InnoBlogs to assist with or relieve each challenge.  Here are the Five points Lee makes … 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 »