I first heard the word “blog” almost 15 years ago at a church retreat workshop for youth group webmasters, and I’ve been filling the Internet with my comings and goings ever since, with a mercifully small audience. But it’s only been in the past few years that I’ve started blogging for business more seriously and trying to gain a significant following that is interested in my work and knowledge. To make your content delicious, you need a great base and the right toppings.

WordPress has been my blogging platform of choice since graduating from the online diary world of Xanga and Livejournal. It’s a fairly user-friendly system that requires no coding knowledge, but can easily be customized if you have the know-how and inclination. It comes in a hosted version with fewer customization options (Read More »

It is a simple formula… truthful thoughts + fans’ best interests = TRUST

All too often, we want the “magic pill” that will give us great blogging results without having to follow the proven path of trust. You know the magic pill… the “8 minute workout”… the “lose fat without changing anything in your lifestyle”… you know that pill…

Here two things that you must do at the start to building trust with your blog readers.

1. Have a purpose and write it down

What is the purpose of your product, organization, or service? What problem does it all solve for the user, or what problem does it help the user avoid? Write these down and use them as your guide. Write your blog to help your reader see your point of view, see your passion for how you can help, and why your … Read More »

I traded emails with a woman recently who runs one of the best (manual) collaborative blogs I have seen.  They have 6-7 content authors and their blogs are timely and relevant. That is no small undertaking when you are using a free blog product and the vast majority of businesses can’t sustain that long term.

The main problem I saw with their blog was that it was not set up to convert readers to customers. It was just pushing info. When I reached out to her, she said that they were in the middle of fixing their website as it was not converting either, and to follow up in about a year as they could not justify spending any money on the blog while fixing the website.

Although I certainly sympathize with cashflow, I see another problem here – how the … 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 »

The social media fight in established companies has been ongoing for years now with  a few visionaries going “all-in” with Social Media and inbound marketing, an equal amount doing nothing at all.  Most, however, have been sitting on the fence (this is the 10-10-80 principle you may have heard of).  With the help of  some years of data and great companies like McKinsey taking the time to study results, I think we’re going to see a lot more fence sitters getting on board.

The McKinsey study is no small undertaking – polling over 3,000 executives with a 2/3 response rate.  From our perspective at InnoGage, we were thrilled to see the number of companies engaging in Corporate Blogging increasing to 38 percent! We’ve passed that critical 1/3 adoption rate.  We believe that number will … Read More »

If you’re like most companies, you produce a lot of content for your media marketing – but creating content is not your primary business objective.  You blog, you have newsletters, email marketing, whitepapers, direct mail and other marketing materials.  The problem is your core business is selling products and services – not producing content.  How do you keep up with it all?

Try re-purposing your content.

If you are running dry on your business blog, take a look at past newsletters and web marketing materials.  Is there anything you can leverage?  Perhaps you can take the content of a newsletter and tweak it with minimal effort to make it into a blog post.  Email campaigns can be a great source of blog content.  Comb through your past emails to see what content can be leveraged.  If you use an email system … 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 »

I am going to be doing a small series on Business Blogging.  What is business blogging you ask?  Simply put business blogging is the art of being real with your customers, partners and prospects.  It requires a business to take down the facade and put themselves out there in a transparent nature.

Why would anyone do that?  There are so many reasons I will not cover them all here.  As a starter, it builds trust.  Let me be clear, being honest doesn’t mean you air your dirty laundry for all to see.  It means you speak about real topics that people can relate to in language they can easily understand.  It means you admit you’re not perfect and are always trying to improve.  It also means you answer people when they talk to you on your blog via comments, or in … Read More »