Archive for the ‘online communities’ tag
My take at a Blog Strategy
Recently, I created a blog strategy for a client that I thought was really pretty good. Maybe a bit aggressive, but after reading Justin Kownacki’s post on “What I’ve Learned From Blogging Weekly Instead of Daily,” I thought that this strategy was pretty close to getting the sort of website traffic that I thought was needed to really make a difference.
It’s really pretty simple, as most things should be, and I know I don’t follow it myself, but as my parents told me several times, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Let me know what you think or if you’ve created similar strategies.
Your Blog should have a purpose and strategy behind it to make sure that it works and doesn’t get blog rot.
Here are a couple questions to consider:
- Why are we doing this?
- because it’s fun?
- to find business?
- to show off our thought leadership?
- increase customer engagement?
- PR for media, news, social networking and other bloggers?
- Improve search engine optimization?
- Provide a way to disseminate information?
- Recognize and promote employees, clients, partners, projects, etc.?
- How will we know it’s successful. What metrics are we setting for ourselves? Can we put numbers to this?
- Analytics, increased traffic, time, pages, etc
- Comments on blogs
- Links to blog postings
- Increased leads
- SEO
- Social Media mentions.
1. Purpose of the blog. The blog should show that you are a collection of experts that are not only knowledgeable in your respective fields, but excited about learning and sharing what you see, know, experience and demonstrate in your key business areas of expertise.
2. Solve a problem or identify a solved problem. This is somewhat related to number 1. Part of your strategy should be solving a problem, or another way to think about this is responding to issues from clients or to just find a way to be useful and relevant – with examples.
3. Be the Subject Matter Experts (SME). This will help determine your content strategy and help build your brand. Demonstrate what you’ve done and how it’s improved our success or our clients’ success. Wave your own flag a bit.
4. Optimize our content for SEO. Do a bit more work to get the right titles and keywords for the post. Find keywords that support the blog and the post.
5. Be honest, encourage 2 way conversations. Create content that is open and honest and is truly trying to offer solutions. Give of yourselves without needing anything in return accept happy readers.
6. Monitor the world. Create searches on keyword or clients to watch what people are saying in the world. Re-tweet, create a post about it or tell your client. If there’s a client you’re trying to land, monitor what’s being said about them to find a way to respond. See Number 3 “Be the SME.”.
Some bullets on process:
- Address a business need
- Participate in other industry specific blogs, LinkedIn answers, business.com answers. Guest post both ways whenever possible.
- Encourage online reviews of your work
- Be strategic not trendy
- Focus on long-term engagement, not a short term hit.
- Social media is NOT an experiment. It is a proven, strategic, integrated part of your website.
- Test, Measure, Optimize, Repeat.
- Frequency: 1 major article per week, several supporting per week – create a schedule and trade off.
- Social connections. Connect the blog to pre-determined set of social media outlets. Don’t do all of them, but go deep in the ones we do.
- Take into account customers, competition, your Unique Value Proposition.
More on Facebook Suicide and how to delete your Facebook account
Just as we’re building more and more Facebook apps (stay tuned, they’re pretty cool) it seems more users are bailing on Facebook and committing Facebook Suicide, if they can find the link. So, in case your curious, here’s a link to more info about this.
How do I delete my Facebook account?
Building Client Confidence… One way to lose it.
Yesterday I was in a local coffee shop in Evergreen, Colorado getting some focused work done. I go to coffee shops somewhat regularly because I can plug in my headphones and really focus on getting some work done away from the phone (I turn my email off too!). I went again today because I needed a couple hours to put together a new program I’ve been working on called SEO Readiness for the Small Business Website. But that’s info for another post (coming soon).
Anyway, yesterday I happened to pull my headphones out and noticed 2 women at the table next to me talking about building a website for what appeared to be this woman’s greeting card business. I didn’t hear much and I wasn’t trying to listen too hard, but as they ended the meeting I heard the client say “I REALLY, REALLY hope this works!”
hm.
My first thought was what did this web developer tell her client to make her doubt her abilities? How could she part with her client and leave her doubting? Definitely not the way to end a client meeting.
My second thought on this was to be grateful for the almost 15 years I’ve been in the internet marketing world and the knowledge I’ve gained. When I’m in a client meeting, it’s not over until ALL of their doubts have been addressed and are gone (and I can talk a LONG time). I never hold anything back; if you have a question, I’ll tell you everything I know about it. In this case, the client had a doubt and she did her job by telling the web developer, but the web developer either missed it, or ignored it and failed. I only wish I knew who they were so I could see what transpires.
Remember, it’s all about the conversation…
Google is bigger than they say they are
A short while ago I mentioned that I found on Google’s site that they’re adding 10 hours of video per minute. While impressive numbers, it’s actually mich higher, about twice as high… According to Mashable, YouTube is getting 20 hours of video uploaded per minute! There are 1440 minutes in a day, and that means that there are 28,800 hours of video uploaded per day!! It makes me wonder how many people they hire just to install hardware.
How long can they lose so much money? $470,000,000 this year alone.
I agree that You Tube is one of the strongest online communities, if not THE strongest, but somehow, they’ll need to figure out the monetization problems. No business can run with losses that continue for too long.
That said, taking advantage of You Tube’s channels for all of your company video is a pretty good way to broadcast yourself.
