James Cope

I was recently asked to put together a quick presentation on blogging tips for businesses, and thought it might be useful to share my Top 10 Tips for sucessful blogging here.

Why Blog?
To start with perhaps I should cover why should you bother! Well in my opinion Blogs are a great way to engage with visitors who are interested in your subject area, to build your brand, and hopefully convert them to customers at some point.

I started this blog as a way to keep businesses I meet up to date with latest developments. I often will meet business owners only once or twice, but throughout the year there is information that they could benefit from, previously I would have been unable to communicate those.

My top reasons for blogging therefore:

• Quality Content – Inbound Links & Search Engine Love
• Build Reputation – Share Knowledge & Expertise
• Convert Visitors – Garners Trust
• Engage Customers – Product / Service Feedback

That said arguably blogging is not for everyone, if you identify with these reasons more than the above, don’t start, consider outsourcing it:

• You’re Bored – Will you add real value
• It’s all Sell Sell Sell – Will turn people off, damage brand
• Website News is Old – No time?

Hopefully the potential benefits outweigh the extra effort, but if you are in doubt if blogging might work as a route to market get in touch and we can talk the issues through. For those that are here are my top tips…

Top 10 Blogging Tips
Here are my top 10 tips for a successful blog, there no doubt probably more but hopefully these will give you inspiration to get you started.

1. Get Inspired
There is no sense reinventing the wheel, so use assets to your advantage where you can. I don’t mean steal content here but look out for other articles or news, write your own take on the article and include a link back to the original, or write a review on something. (Helps to start a discussion.)

• Interesting articles from Newsletters & Other Blogs
• Constructive response – agree or disagree!
• Write a review
• Link to original, add additional links

2. Attend An Event
Preferably one of my Business Link Events! but attending and blogging your thoughts on it, commenting on the topic, adding your expertise. The same can be said for any seminars, workshops or meetings that are topic related to your area of business and can allow you to build your profile.

• Go to seminars, meetings, events
• Share ideas from the presentation
• Your own thoughts

3. Cheat
Well not literally cheating, but if you find other experts in your field or areas related to your subject why not sub out the work.  This certainly helps with time issues, helping you to blog regularly, and can also add additional expertise to widen the information given. Alternatively you could invite guest writers to feature on the blog demonstrating a community of experts.

• Get someone else to write it
• Outsource to Blog writers
• Guest posters

4. Write How To’s Or Lists
‘How to’ and or ‘How do I / you’ and lists are a couple of the most popular web searches, so capitalise on this and create a guide for your area of interest. Great material for showing off your expertise, adding value, and usually encouraging inbound links from other blogs and sites from experts in your industry.  Icing on the cake would be to create an accompanying video that you can post on your Youtube channel and embed into your post.

• One of the most popular searches
• How to blog or 10 top tips for blogging
• Great for generating good will
• Add video too

5. Pick A Fight
Why not become the Jeremy Clarkson of your industry? Well within reason, but being controversial, having an opinion, being passionate about your subject area, and challenging existing models gives visitors something to get excited about. One strategy might be to look at popular blogs that you disagree with on an issue and having your say. With any luck an inter blog fight will break out and visitors from this blog will visit yours to read more.

I’m not recommending you do this without thinking it through, but if you genuinely have a difference of opinion, try and exploit it professionally and constructively.

• Being controversial – Jeremy Clarkson
• Criticise popular blog
• Blogger responds (hopefully) = traffic to you!

6. Keep Them Wanting More
It’s good to create as much copy as possible, but remember what the purpose of the blog is – to gain customers! So try and think of how each post will contribute to that objective. Will it provide a link to your main site, can you offer a white paper download and collect the email address, can the post stimulate a want or need for your product or service.

You might consider releasing stages of a how to guide, so readers are looking forward to the next post. For example when I wrote the presentation on the topic, out of my Top Ten Blog Tips only 6 were included, for tips 7 – 10 attendees would have to visit here.

• Keep visitors looking forward to next post
• Drive traffic to your main site
• Capture email addresses for give aways
• Don’t give it all away on the blog

7. Cross Promote
Most optimisation professionals will agree that inbound links are a great way to achieve search engine positioning (or am I just being controversial). So why not set up a blog that you can develop as a focal point that has a different look and feel than your main site, is more engaging, is not sales-y and can be a vehicle for a community. You might consider building a strategic alliance with other non competing businesses who cater to the same target customer creating a shared blog that drives quality traffic to the alliances individual websites.

To illustrate this point here’s an example that I’ve used before, my ex colleague David Lakins now of Key Multimedia, uses this to the benefit of his clients. See the Mankymonkey surf blog ,now apart from a mention in the Page Title tag and the odd advert icon, it’s not obvious that this blog is anything other than a surfing blog. The strategy behind it are links from articles in the reviews section to the companies wetsuit shop, and other sections to its surfing kit site .Although at the moment there is not much evidence of many comments on the articles, to some extent that’s irrelevant, it works well to draw in and capture traffic and then drive it to the e-commerce sites.

• cross promote – link information to sale
• team up with non competing businesses

8. Use Visual Elements
I’ve spoken above about using video elements to brighten up posts, Youtube is the second biggest search engine in the UK next to Google, so use this to your advantage. Blog articles don’t have to be all text, look at using images where relevant. If there is something visual that the business has done, post the photos with comments, and perhaps host those on image sites such as flickr

• use video to add interest to posts
• images will brighten up boring text
• hosted images & video will provide inbound links

9. Evolve Consumers To Prosumers
A side effect of some blogs  has been to turn some customers into the businesses development team. Now businesses actively seek the interactivity, by encouraging feedback on products or services. Running articles on new developments in production you can get customer feedback quickly and can help shape the product before it reaches the launch stage. Famous example of this being Dell’s now brightly coloured laptops and laptops running Linux, all developments thanks to interaction through the companies blogs.

• seek customer involvement
• expand your product development team

10. Ask A Question
Have I forgotten anything? Are there any blog tips or tricks that I’ve missed that you find work well?

This tip features last as it really only works if you’ve got an active readership, but once you have it is a great technique for debating, encouraging opinions and giving you chance to demonstrate your knowledge. So if you would like to comment on this post feel free!

• Ask a question
• Post a problem
• Conduct a poll

Hopefully these tips will have given some inspiration to develop your own blogs, using tools like Wordpress or Blogger

If you are a South East based business please get in touch if you would like to discuss in more detail.

Social Bookmarks

Social media has been on the radar for businesses for sometime now, now adoption and use of the media as a marketing tool is on the increase. Many businesses struggle with how this can benefit them and ultimately lead to increased traffic or sales. I was kindly invited to attend a really useful seminar yesterday which was primarily to add value for clients of a local developer Intergage, the session had some great tips which are the inspiration for this post on social media – get involved & increase traffic.

If you are struggling with questions such as those below this post will hopefully give you a starting point

• what is social media?
• should I be on Facebook?
• what on earth is twitter?

As with all marketing it helps if you can profile your target customer, you may have more than one type of target customer, but the key to getting to grips with social media is being able to work out who your audience is. With a profile in mind you can then start to identify how to engage potential online communities. Business Link Advisers can help with thinking on how to profile a customer, so if you have not undertaken this exercise and want to build a marketing strategy, that may or may not include social media, I would suggest getting in touch with your local Business Link.

Armed with that essential information you should now be ready to look at the world of social media and if it can work for your business. Generally speaking there is an online community for every businesses target market somewhere. The tricky bit of course is finding it, and determining the cost benefit of engaging.

Considering the growth in social media all predictions for the future that I have seen, and many other experts are in agreement, is that social media will play an increasingly integral role in businesses marketing strategies. In an era where businesses battle to get their message heard, and customers increasingly control the adverts they let through reaching them is getting harder. Research shows that customers are more likely to trust the opinion of a friend or colleague than that of your marketing material.

So how do you go about engaging with social media? The presentation delivered by Luke Williams of Social Tech Solutions and Rich Watts of Intergage, gave some really useful tips. Luke’s structured approach is similar to the advice I give basically, Look Listen & Think (or is that how to cross the road!). A link to Luke’s social media presentation and Rich’s case study on how his company did it are both on the Intergage site for anyone who is interested.

Step 1. Look – where are my target customers having online conversations or discussions, where do they come together in a similar interest group. There is a list of social networking sites available at wikipedia, this includes information on their focus. There are also communities and interest groups/forums to consider, tip from Luke here – get a google search going with your target search term and add ‘community’ or ‘forum’ to it and look a the results, visit those sites and see if they are appropriate.

Rich’s presentation gave consideration to which tools were appropriate for the job and Intergage chose not to use Facebook. I would suggest that generally speaking if you are a Business to Consumer company then sites such as Facebook are worth creating a page for – Luke’s tip is a page not a group, and for Business to Business then its LinkedIn. Visit my LinkedIn profile for an example.

Also are any of your employees engaged in social media, forums or communities. Do they look to certain sites to get technical information or industry knowledge already. Are any of them considered experts in those fields.

Step 2. Listen – join the forums or communities, or networking sites and look at the conversations taking place. Are these relevant conversations that you can possibly add value to when you do go on to engage, are they appropriate sites. Also monitor activity on sites such as Twitter, there is a really good guide to twitter online. I set up searches for example on ‘Business Link’ and other terms, pulling those into my iGoogle page. That way I can see who is posting using the term ‘Business Link’. Visit my James Cope twitter page and also Business Link’s.

As you are listening jot down typical post frequencies popular topics or the key influencers in those communities, study their posts and learn from their style.

Step 3. Think – plan your activity, make sure the amount and content of posts are in keeping with the community, it is easy to offend and you dont want to be considered to be involved in spam as this is the quickest way to damage your brand.

Think how you will deal with negative comments people complaining online, make sure you have a strategy if you see negative entries about your company. Also what is your internal policy, most companies now have an email and internet usage policy, if you are going to encourage employees to help they should have guidelines of your corporate style, the technique to use. One of Luke’s tips consider Facebook linkage, do you want your employees Friday night activities being shown to your customers? You might consider a decision not to mix personal profiles with business contacts.

Now it’s a question of trying it, put what you have learnt about tone and content into practice and start joining in. If you’re doing it right momentum should start to build. It can take time so bear with it and measure your results using your analytics as to how much traffic that particular group or forum is sending to your site. Hopefully by now you will have made it to the other side of the road, dodging the odd car or lorry along the way.

There are loads more resources and help online and people to talk to if you need help getting there. Business Link can help find companies similar to Luke’s to who can guide & train or even manage your social media presence, or its advisers such as myself can talk you through the process above.

If you are a business based in the South East and you think you would benefit from a seminar on this topic let me know, either contact me through LinkedIn or leave a reply here.

Social Bookmarks