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 »

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 »

My next few blog posts will be dedicated to the topic of mobile technology and how it relates to your marketing mix of digital marketing and search engine optimization by helping you reach your customers and readers more effectively.

Mobile is coming at us fast.  By 2014 the number of users accessing the internet via mobile devices is predicted to overtake traditional desktop and laptop usage.

THAT’S ONLY 2.5 YEARS AWAY.

Stay tuned for what you can and should be doing to ensure you are ready for the mobile revolution, already underway. We’ll help you navigate this new landscape strategically by going over the low hanging fruit, the must-haves and most importantly, what you should NOT be going right now.

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 »

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 »

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 »

One of the things that drives me nuts about most software is the disconnect between the technical coders and the nontechnical users.  Have you ever bumbled around inside Facebook or Flikr?  I have.  Just because you have a huge presence doesn’t mean that creating intuitive software is easy!  At InnoGage, we strive to make our business blogging software incredibly easy to use.  It’s part of our core mission.  I was encouraged recently to discover that we are doing something right with ease of use…

Case Study: the InnoBlogs Search Engine Optimizer at Incept

We recently released InnoBlogs version 1.4 which changes the business blogging game.  Simply put, I got tired of not being able to answer the CFO’s question of “what’s my return on investment (ROI)”.  I know there are many people who believe that you shouldn’t … Read More »

By Kristen Carter

Have you ever clicked onto a blog , read a few sentences, and immediately clicked off thinking “Wow, that author had no idea what he or she was blogging about“? Because virtually anyone can post anything on the Internet people are typically very critical about what they read online.

Besides spending my time blogging, I also frequent classrooms at The Ohio State University where I conduct graduate work focused on search engines, SEO, and credibility. As I dive ever deeper into the literature surrounding these topics, I am amazed at the importance scholars place on the concept of Internet credibility.

What is credibility and what does it have to do with blogging? In a nutshell credibility is the perception of believability. If you could travel back in time a few hundred years and have a conversation with a man named … Read More »

I read a great article yesterday by Ben Elowitz on the rising importance of Social Media Optimization or SMO.  In this article, Ben predicts the death of SEO as SMO continues to rise to power pushed along by the partnership between Facebook and Bing.  So, is Search Engine Optimization actually dead?  Is Google shaking in their boots as reactive (vs. predictive) searching falls by the wayside?

Well, probably not quite yet.

Before you throw your SEO strategy out the window in favor of SMO I would caution you that a blended approach is probably the best bet for now.  If you’re doing neither SEO nor SMO, you may be in trouble (contact us!)  If you are doing only SEO or SMO, you are likely leaving value on the table.

The reason I think … Read More »