Your Dead Blog is Alive!
The numbers
According to Technorati (a company that indexes blogs) there are over 133 million blogs out there today and over 75% of people on the Internet are reading at least one of them. Of that 133 million, there are an estimated 863,500 business blogs—70% of which are abandoned after 1 month. While the number of business blogs has tripled over the last 4 years there has been an increasing popularity in the B2B/B2C media stream, it still seems as though corporate blogs are being launched simply to be launched. In the end, they’re not helping but hurting the companies that publish them. When we begin to get into the micro-blogging realm (like Twitter) and social media posts (like Facebook and Linked In status updates) this problem just increases exponentially. In the end these can have all add up to create a negative net brand impact.
The importance
With a blog it is important to 1) be found 2) have content that interests/engages your readers or stakeholders and encourages them to participate in your discussions.
The reasons that a neglected blog can hurt your company are simple. One is that a blog that isn’t refreshed with new content regularly will rank low in search engines and will not be found or clicked on. Two, is that when people actually do find it, they see a neglected blog and it can create a negative brand perception—which is really just a fancy way of saying “People will think your company is stale.” Third is that you risk a decrease in customer interaction. When customers are not interacting with your brand online they’ll go elsewhere and in just about every industry your customers can jump to a competitor at the click of a button. By neglecting your blog (and ultimately your online brand) you’re simply making that decision easy for them.
What you can do
So, what can you do to seize control of your blog? One option (and the most simple) is to hire a 3rd party to take care of it for you. Many Clients will do this specifically because they just don’t want to worry about it—but they understand the importance of blogging. There is quite a bit of time that goes into managing and maintaining your blog—particularly one that has the business/professional look.
Your other option is to manage it internally. This requires some detail-oriented planning, design, implementation and review—but more importantly a lot of time and a group of internal champions.
If you go with Option B of managing it internally, here are a few helpful suggestions:
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Define the Champion(s): Assign a group or team to take charge of the blog (include a team leader!) and making sure it stays current. Ideally, current means updated daily—even if only a couple paragraphs of information
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Planning: Brand your blog consistently and appropriately with your company and even include a tagline under your logo defining what the goal/purpose of the blog is
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Set your goals: Create a one-page blog roadmap (for your self/team) identifying the goals of your blog, your primary and secondary audience, internal team member roles and a schedule of maintenance and management tasks that is shared with everyone on the team
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Optimize: This means doing the right things that make your blog relevant and thus, found (by search engines) when people are looking for it. Some of those include having links to credible sites, images, up-to-date and relevant content and titles. To figure out what’s relevant ask yourself a couple questions: 1) what terms are people searching for to find your blog or what you’re posting about and 2) once people arrive—will they find your information helpful, stay and interact? As an example, let’s say you’re a used car dealership in Richmond, Virginia. You could setup a blog called “Used Car Reviews Blog: Offering Reviews of the Best Used Cars in the Richmond, Virginia Market.” Your blog could revolve around real employee and customer reviews of used vehicles specifically for customers located in and around Richmond, Virginia. This type of blog would help you build brand value for your dealership (by being a trusted source of information) as well as increasing rank in local search engines (because of the relevant information) which could become a tool for driving in-store traffic. You could even post photos of the reviewed vehicles, reviewers and satisfied customers
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Tie into your website: Ultimately you’d like to drive traffic to your website and your business. The first step is to add a link from your blog to your company site (and vice versa). One of the best places you can do this on your page would be the top right hand corner—where the typical reader’s eye will be drawn. The second step will be monitoring the amount of traffic generated from that link to your blog. In your analytics (presuming you’ve set these up) you can check to see just how much traffic is actually coming through that blog link—and overall this is a pretty good performance indicator
Conclusion
Overall you want to make sure that the blog you establish for your business is well thought out and implemented correctly with optimization, usability and readability in mind. You also want to make sure that you have assigned team members monitoring and managing the information in a steady fashion—most importantly to keep information up to date as well as moderate any comments that your readers are posting.
In today’s fast-paced business environment, stakeholders are looking to business blogs for the fastest and most up-to-date insider information and multi-directional dialogue about the company. Secondarily, your blog can be a great tool to help drive web traffic to other online media vehicles including your social media accounts and website.
Although it takes a good portion of time to dedicate to effectively running it—building and running an effective business blog is a great tool to help position your brand as a leader and innovator in your industry and drive online customers to your business.
NetSearch Direct specializes in helping businesses understand and optimize their brand online. If you have a website that isn’t driving sales for your company then it isn’t performing up to its full potential and could even be negatively affecting your business. We can help! We’d love to come and talk to you! To setup an informational session, please contact Kate Snowa at 1-800-418-8505 or kates@netsearchdirect.com.