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

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

We looked at three benefits that you can gain from using Google Analytics according to SEO White Hats in the previous post. Here are more benefits for you:

4)Google Analytics has a wonderful feature where you can also find out which site your website visitor had logged on before visiting your site.

9)If you own many websites, there is no need of logging in multiple times. With a single login, it is possible to keep a track on multiple websites.

I have been using Analytics for only a few months but let me tell you, it is very useful. For example, if you are working on getting more hits from SERPs, it is very easy to determine which keywords get you the most hits. Analytics shows you this in one glance. Another example is if you are looking to see which web sites refer the most traffic to your site. You can also find this out easily.

I am sure that there are more features to Analytics – I just haven’t discovered them yet. Have you?

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.

We talked about your commenting system in the previous post. Let us take a look at more ways to make the most out of comments.

Some bloggers take comments for granted. That is, they think that if their entry is good enough, comments will come naturally. This is true – but only to a certain degree. You should also do your part in encouraging your readers to comment. Aside from writing great content, try to encourage comments outright. At the end of the post, ask your readers what they think. End with an open ended question. More so, you can change your blogging template to reflect something like “Be the first one to comment!” instead of merely displaying “No comments.”

Another way to encourage comments would be to recognize those who leave their comments. Of course, their comments will be displayed on the individual posts. An additional incentive that I find particularly useful is to install a widget that shows the most recent comments. Seeing one’s name and ideas on the front page of a blog is something that can encourage readers to leave their mark.

Be open – do not ignore or block negative comments. This is the beauty of blogging, actually. People can voice out their thoughts, whether they are positive or negative. If you can post both the negative and positive on your blog, then why can’t readers share both the negative and positive as well? As such, resist the urge to delete negative comments. Instead, see if there is some value in their comments and act on them accordingly.

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.

We’ve come to the end of this series about the Four Ps of Effective Business Blogging, as Tom Pick has explained. To recap the first three, they are Personality, Persistence, and Passion. The last of the bunch is something more measurable and quite practical – Promotion.

With every business venture, promotion is one of the most important activities. To realize how important promotion is, it is necessary to go back to the core goal of the business activity. For blogging, why are you in the blogging business? Or rather, why are you maintaining a blog for your business?

The answer is simple – you want to reach out to the countless people out there who could be potential readers. For business blogs, you want to extend your business’s reach and let the whole world know that you exist and inform them of what you have to offer. The main role of a blog is to achieve this goal and the main way by which you can do this with your business blog is to promote the blog.

There are many ways by which you can promote your blog – SEO practices, making use of social networking sites, exchanging links with other blogs and sites, and so on. All these do not happen by themselves, you need to exert some effort in order to make your blog known to the world.

Of the four Ps that Tom Pick presents in his blog, I think that I have a particularly affinity for the third one – passion. He writes:

To maintain the discipline necessary to be persistent in blog posting, it helps to pick a subject one is passionate about. For example, among political blogs, there are a number of strong blogs on the both the right and the left ends of the political spectrum, but very few in the middle; it’s hard to be passionate about moderation.

Indeed, passion and persistence are closely tied with each other. It is way easier to be persistent about maintaining a blog if you are passionate about it. I think that passion can be identified in two levels – one, passion for the act of blogging/writing itself, and two, passion for the subject of the blog.

For a businessman, the chances are that he would be quite passionate about the topic or subject of his blog. This is because I am assuming that the blog’s topic would be focused on the business and what it has to offer, whether in products or services. Of course, my assumption could be wrong but I believe that many successful businessmen are those who have a certain degree of passion when it comes to what they are doing – their business.

Passion about writing and the blog itself is another story, however. Not everyone is cut out for blogging or writing. For businessmen who want to get something out of blogging, however, I believe that he will get to build up his passion for the activity if he realizes clearly what blogging can do for him.

The second P of effective business blogging according to Tom Pick is Personality:

This is perhaps the most unquantifiable of the four Ps of business blogging – or even blogging in general. Tell me, how do you measure personality? I suppose you can describe the personality of the blogger as reflected by his blog yet there really is not clear measure of how good or bad it is.

I think the more important thing is that the blogger (or bloggers, for that matter) is able to transfer his or her intended personality to the blog he or she is maintaining. More so, there is this interesting thing that I have noticed. There are some bloggers who write so well that they create a whole different personality for their blog. You just may be surprised to find out that the blogger has a totally different personality!

My point is this: one doesn’t have to be all charm and extroverted in person to maintain a good business blog. What is needed is for you to determine what personality you want your blog to have and work on building this image up through your writing. It may not be easy in the beginning but it can be done and believe me, it is worth it.