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)

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.

I might be late on this one, but have you heard of Google Analytics? This is another product of Google which you can use to analyze your web site or your blog in terms of traffic. Google may have its quirks and flaws but I have to say that Google Analytics does give you a LOT of information about your web site.

In order to use this tool, you have to have a Google account – who doesn’t at this point? Just log in to the Analytics page and then you can set up your account. At first, you may be a bit overwhelmed by all those terms and charts and whatnot but Analytics is pretty easy to use. There are a lot of guides online which can help you learn the ins and outs of the tool.

What benefit can you get from using Google Analytics? I like how SEO White Hats outlines the benefits:

1)Unlike other expensive visitor tracking services, it is free. This helps put Google Analytics at the top of the list.

3)Google Analytics helps you find the pages and links in the website that visitors click on the most. With this information, you can improve the pages and position them and their links appropriately.

Let’s continue with the rest of the benefits in the next post.

Another way that you can make it easier for your readers to read your blog is to make sure that your categories and tags are created and grouped properly. Categories and tags exist for a reason – so that people can find certain posts under specific topics easily. If your posts are mislabeled, then readers may not find what they are looking for. Oh, of course, if they are patient enough to go through the whole archives they will eventually find the appropriate post. However, I doubt that everyone will want to do this all the time. So, try taking a second – even a third – look at your categories and tags and make sure that they are properly organized.

Don’t make it hard for readers to leave their comments. It is understandable that you would want to set certain measures in place in order to weed out spam comments. However, in your efforts to do so, do not overlook the ease that readers are looking for. For example, requiring readers to sign in is a very effective way of avoiding spam comments. This, however, would turn off many readers to leave their comments. Look for alternatives such as plug-ins or word verification instead.

Make subscribing easy. You want readers to subscribe to your blog so that they can keep up with your updates easily. Place the subscribe link or button on all pages and in an obvious location.

I was browsing through one of my blog network forums the other day and I ran across an interesting thread entitled “Describe the reason you blog in one word.” The responses were quite varied but in the pattern that I noticed is that bloggers who wrote personal blogs tended to write for themselves while bloggers who wrote for business purposes tend to have the reader in mind.

When it comes to business blogs, the reader should be the foremost consideration. Have you asked yourself whether your business blog is optimized for your readers? Take a look at some of these considerations that could help you tweak your blog.

Content
I’ve written about this time and again but it wouldn’t hard to do it again (and again and again, if necessary). Your content should be geared towards meeting the needs and expectations of your readers. You want them to keep coming back for more and to patronize your business. Give them what they want.

Layout
Again, content may be king but the layout matters a great deal as well. Try putting yourself in your readers’ shoes. How would you like to keep on reading long blocks of longwinded text? How would you like to get lost in those long blocks? I bet you wouldn’t appreciate that – neither would your readers. Provide them with a pleasant experience – both in terms of content and layout. A great combination of these two factors would give you good results in terms of reader satisfaction.

Indeed, one of the biggest hurdles when it comes to business blogging is time. Time is gold and it cannot be wasted on having to come up with blog posts when there is a business to run – or can it? There are various aspects to look when it comes to this point.

First, if big business CEOs can find time to blog, why can’t small business owners do so as well? Second, how much time does it really take to come up with a blog post? More so, how much time does it really take to maintain a decent business blog?

Let’s look at the first post. To be honest, I think that writing for a business blog is a simple thing – you either make time for it or you don’t. That is not to say that it is easy but the fact is that if a person really wants to make full use of what a business blog has to offer, he would find the time to work on it.

This brings me to the second point – coming up with a blog post does not have to take such a long time. This is dependent on what you write and how you write. Perhaps the misconception lies in the idea that you have to come up with profound written work for a business blog. I like how Chris Baggott phrases it:

The most common misconception that business bloggers have is that they think that blog posts have to be really thoughtful…like they are going to have to spend hours crafting some deep insisght into the state of the Automotive Industry all the time. This is just plain WRONG.

My point is that in Corporate Blogging the Best Practice is to just talk about your day. Talk about your business, your inventory, your customers, your likes and dislikes…..just don’t over-think it.

In other words, easy does it!

An additional point before I end – if you don’t have time to blog all the time, involve your employees! Ask them to contribute to your business blog and see how much time you can save.

This is perhaps the million dollar question when it comes to businesses and blogging. We have to admit, one of the biggest reasons companies enter the world of blogging is to find new customers. This can be done in various ways. A business can set up its own blog. Alternatively, a business can get other bloggers to write about their product or service. In both cases, the aim is the same – to get the word out about something that the business is selling. Yet are the results going to be the same for both approaches?

I got the inspiration for this post when I read Tim Parry’s post “Can a Blog Really Increase Leads?” He illustrates an example:

I think that this approach can indeed generate tons of leads. Yet as Parry said so himself, how many of the leads are going to be qualified? How many of them would actually be converted into sales? We really cannot tell. Yet I think that it could work. What about you?

Blogging has been around for quite some time and as with most things, change is inevitable. I am sure that we have all foreseen these changes, although we might not have seen specific things about it. I like what I read at Conversational Media Marketing and how they outlined the changes in the blogosphere. More importantly, though, they presented some of the more significant changes that are taking place this year and beyond. Here is an excerpt of the blog post:

1. WordPress is now considered a lightweight CMS platform, not just a blog platform. (Has been for a while.) It’s becoming more common to see entire Web sites being built using WP or some other blog-related CMS. For example, two real estate news Web sites, RIS Media and Inman News, have now completely coverted their sites to blog-based platforms.
2. WordPress is also morphing into a social media application, as is Movable Type, which now has a social network version. I can imagine other blog platforms will follow suit.
3. New blog platforms continue to be built.
4. The widgetization of the web is a trend that will contribute to the welfare of blogs, as widgets can be plugged into the sidebar, extending the functionality of blogs as more of a social networking platform.
5. Blog posts will be less anecdotal and more article-like in their format. More of what Brian Clark refers to as value blogging. That, to me, spells maturity. The less important, more transient content now ends up on Twitter, Facebook or Utterz. This leaves the blog as the repository for more thoughtfully prepared material.

Indeed, blogging is becoming more mature and we can find great content in a lot of blogs today. Being aware of these changes can help us keep up with them and allows us to continue to have a strong presence online.