Don’t overlook the importance of PR
According to the Business Week article, PR is a large part of blogging. This, I think is one of the strongest points of blogging. It provides an easy and convenient way of communicating with your clients. They can leave comments without going through the normal channels of communications (e-mail, phone calls, snail mail, etc.). Your part is to address these comments as fast as you can and as effectively as you can. The idea is to deal with the comments in real time without neglecting any of them. If you decide to forget all about the interaction between you and your customers through your blog, then you might as well forget about corporate blogging. Not only will you be wasting a very good feature that blogging is offering you but you will also risk negative publicity.

More importantly, place high value on full disclosure
Don’t try to hide your intentions when you do your marketing through blogging. More likely than not, you will end being found out and everything will blow up in your face. If you want to pay bloggers to create buzz for you, then do not hide the fact. Who is to say that your strategy is faulty anyway? As long as you do not try to dupe people and your intentions are made clear, you’ll be alright.

In the last post, we talked about two things that you may want to consider with regard to corporate blogging. Just to recap, they are:

-Bloggers should be trained in their task and they should know their limitations
-Fake blogs are not always the right way to go and there are risks associated with them.

Let us look at some more considerations when it comes to corporate blogging.

Consider tracking blogs
This means tracking other blogs – not your own corporate blog – that may be following your own blog. This would mean that someone in your company – it could be you or someone else – should spend some time in finding out the buzz going around online about your company. Why is this important? Because you can find out relevant information from the actions of others online.

Case in point: Big Blue is testing advanced technology called Web Fountain, which analyzes billions of postings to see if they predict spikes in consumer behavior. Last year, Web Fountain plumbed the blog world for buzz on books and then compared it to sales data from Amazon.com. In about half the cases, researchers could predict the sales growth that would follow the buzz.

This was an example provided by Business Week. If you can use your blog to predict sales growth to a certain degree, why not take advantage of that possibility? More so, you can find out what your customers and clients think about you and your services. Read other blogs which may have mentioned your company or your service or product and see if there is information that is relevant to you.

Photo courtesy of sgis

Blogging is one of the ways to exploit the way that information is being spread all across the world today. Corporations and big businesses who pay large amounts of money to people who do their public relations work can actually save considerable amounts just by engaging in blogging. Here are some thoughts on corporate blogging that can make the whole process easier and more streamlined.

Bloggers should know what they are doing
Just as PR people are trained for their jobs, people who blog for the corporate business blog should know the ins and outs of this task. It does not mean that they have to go to blogging school (if there is even such a thing), it just means that each blogger should know what the limits are. Corporate blogging is a bit more sensitive than personal blogging as the former is basically representing what the company is all about. One misstep can cause the company a lot of damage.

The idea is for your company to have a clear set of rules and guidelines when it comes to blogging. In this way, you can prevent any mishap from happening. You can even use your PR department for this.

Fake blogs may not be the best option
What exactly is a fake blog? They are still blogs, make no mistake about it, but what happens is that this kind of blog is basically set up by the PR or marketing department solely in order to promote a specific product or service. The person behind the blog is not real. This happened a year or so ago when Sony created a fake blog under the pretense of a teenager who wanted a PSP for Christmas. The results? People were outraged. Blogging is based on the principle of authentic information. Engaging in fake blogs is very risky and just might ruin your foray into the blogosphere.

(to be continued)

Is there such a thing? There better be! Otherwise, why would readers keep coming back to specific blogs? Why choose a certain set of blogs to frequent if you could find the same content, presented in the same way, from anywhere else? I think that blogging showcases the uniqueness of the blogger and this is one of the main reasons that the activity continues to thrive despite the large number of people engaging in it.

So the question is this: Are you blogging in your own unique way or are you merely copying what others are doing?

If you are not sure, then take a step back and analyze how you go about your blogging. There are many ways by which you can be unique about it.

First, take a look at your content. Naturally, if you blog about a specific product or service that you offer, you already offer something unique. But more than what your business has to offer, you can add relevant content that does not solely focus on your product. For example, you sell vacuum cleaners. You can’t very well always write about them. Instead, it would be good to throw in posts about housecleaning tips and the like from time to time. Your customers would certainly appreciate that. More than the idea, though, you can put a twist to the entry by adding your personal views on the matter. You can talk about your own opinion and experiences – that in itself adds something unique to your blog.

Second, take a look at your style. Style is something that you develop on your own. You would, of course, be influenced by other things such as blogs that you read yourself. Yet in the end, it is your own personal touch that should emerge in your blog.

How else can you make your blog unique?

You may have heard from some people that blogging is just “one of those fads.” “It’s not going to last forever.” “They will soon tire of it.” Perhaps one of the main reasons that some people think this way is due to the fact that there are countless “dead blogs” littering the Web. Yes, many people get all excited about blogging, set up their own blog, and forget it after a while.

Yet if you take a harder look at the situation, you would also see countless other blogs making it big. Even those that do not have that large of a readership are continuing to thrive. Based on this, I do think that blogging is here to stay – at least for a while.

The question now is this: how do you maintain you business blog so that it will remain competitive amidst the tons of other blogs online?

I found the answer while I was reading an entry on BizzFlip:

The best entrepreneur blogs – and often the most successful ones — do more than just promote the entrepreneurs or their projects. Star power can draw attention, but it won’t sustain it if the blog doesn’t “give.”

Makes sense, doesn’t it? The tendency for some business bloggers is to merely promote their products and services. If you rely solely on this, you will probably find yourself running out of content to write about quickly. That is, unless you come up with new products and services all the time, without fail. Of course, we know that that is not always the case.

On the other hand, if you impart other information – useful tips, tools, strategies, and even inspirational anecdotes related to your business niche – then you are giving something more to your readers and you are thus able to sustain your business blog’s attraction.

What are you giving your readers?

Photo courtesy of studiotau

How would you feel if someone came across your blog and wanted to print or e-mail an entry that you published? I personally would feel happy about that. I think that this could be an understatement. The fact that someone else saw some worth in your entry is something to be very proud of, right?

Yet how many blogs have you come across that provide easy access to the content? By easy access, I mean features such as printable view and an e-mail to others button. We normally see these features in news web sites but I have hardly seen a blog with these features. The thought is actually not my own but something that was provoked by a blog post by Krishna De. In that post, the author raises the very same question that I raised in the previous paragraph.

The entry goes a step further, though, by actually presenting a solution to the problem! I have never heard of ECO-SAFE before but it seems that this will allow features such as print and e-mail to be displayed in your blog posts. This is not to say that there are other platforms which may offer similar features. I am just presenting something which I have recently discovered.

The idea is simple – make it as easy as possible for your readers to disseminate the information that you have presented to them. Think of it as free marketing as well!

What else can you put in your sidebars? Read on to get more ideas.

Archives and categories
Whenever I look around the web and browse blogs, I always appreciate it when I can easily find the content that is relevant to my needs and preferences. The archives section makes it very convenient to browse the contents of a blog with regard to the timeline. Though this is quite useful in many cases, I find that a categories section is even better. This is especially true when you are new to a blog. In this case, the archives might not be of much help. On the other hand, if you can browse through posts based on the topics, then it is much easier to find posts that you want to read. So, make it a point to include these two things in your sidebar.

Ongoing promotions
One of the best things about your business blog is that you can use it to promote new activities, products, and services. You can use your blog to let your customers know what’s new with you. I think that the sidebar should be utilized fully in this sense. You can always publish a post on an ongoing promo but if you place another banner in your sidebar, it would catch people’s attention more. You can even be creative about it and design something that is more than text.

These are only some of the things that you could include in your sidebars. Can you think of other ways?

In the previous post we highlighted the importance of placing your profile and contact details in the sidebar of your blog. Here are a few more important pieces of information that you should put in the sidebar.

Aside from placing information about you, the blogger, in the form of text, it would be good to add a photo. One effect of this would be to humanize yourself and your business. This is taking the idea to personalization to the next level.

Another piece of information that you can place in the sidebar is the purpose of your blog. If you are focusing on your business, it would be good to write about the specific purpose of your blog. It would be much like giving new readers what your blog is all about in a nutshell.

In order to provide your readers with the most updated information that is contained within your blog, you can also place some of the most recent posts in the sidebar. It is really up to you as to how many you can place in there. I would suggest about 5, though. More than the recent posts, you can also highlight the most popular posts. That is, the posts that got the most visits or comments. This will help encourage your readers to check out the best that you have to offer. In this way, you can entice them to keep coming back for more of the same.

(to be continued)

The format of your business blog is something that you cannot take for granted. I think that this applies to all kinds of blogs, actually. I have been receiving a lot of feedback in my personal blog about the formatting of my blog. Most of the positive comments I get are about my content and most of the suggestions for improvement are about the template and layout. This suggests that many readers pay attention to the physical aspect of the blog as well.

One thing that some people overlook is the sidebar. Depending on the blog template that you are using, you can have one or two sidebars. I would not go as far as to dictate how many you should have – it really depends on your preference and what content you are going to place there. However, I think that you should put some thought into what content you are going to place in your sidebars and make sure that you make the most out of it.

I think that the most important thing that you should place in your sidebars is your profile. This includes a short description of yourself and your business. This gives readers an insight to what you and your business are all about. More than this, you should place contact details in your profile. One of the biggest turn offs for readers is wanting to get in touch with the blogger and not being able to find a way to do it!

Let’s look at more sidebar content in the next post.

One of the most time consuming activities that you have to engage in when it comes to business blogging is promoting your business blog. I suppose that it does not really differ much from the more conventional ways of marketing. You have to take certain steps to ensure that people will know that your business exists and you have to exert effort and set aside time for these things. The same goes with blogging.

Creating a blog is easy. Whether you want to use a free blog platform or you want to use your own domain, the idea is the same and the execution very simple. Coming up with content for your blog is relatively easy as well – perhaps writing might prove to be a task for some but it can be handled quickly.

Marketing your business blog, on the other hand, I find to be more tedious. With the millions of blogs on the Internet today, how will other people find yours? More so, how do you get people you are targeting to discover you online? That is where marketing comes in.

One effective way is to submit your blog or web site to search engines. I have been working on a blog of mine in the past month or so and I have only recently been reminded of the importance of submitting to search engines. Before I did this, I barely had traffic to my blog. After spending several days on focusing on blog search engines, I began to see my traffic going up in the next few weeks. It does not happen overnight, mind you, but you do get results.