Building Your Brand with Your Company Blog (liveblog)
Jonathon Narvey and I were on a panel along with Yu-Kai Chou on how you can build your brand with your company blog. I had originally assumed that we’d be giving a talk (however short) but I’m quite ok with not offering a formal speech. This was part of the Internet Marketing Mastermind on Thursday September 10th, 2009.
Yu-Kai Chou gave a formal talk with Q&A and then Jonathon and I sat on the panel along with Yu-Kai to speak about our own experiences with corporate blogging and branding.
| Building Your Brand with Your Company Blog |
(09/10/2009) |
| 7:35 |
Customers don’t trust everyone on the internet. They want it free, and share. That’s the nature of social media. They’re trusted by the customers.
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| 7:36 |
Word of “Text” – brand reaches out to “Joe” – shares with 1200 friends on Facebook, 900 followers on Twitter, 500 followers on FriendFeed, 3000 readers on blog, 300 subscribers on YouTube. |
| 7:37 |
Keys to Success
- MUST engage
- Have a focus
- Be interesting
- Be different, even controversial
- Be helpful
- Be personal and authentic
|
| 7:37 |
It doesn’t matter if people follow you and they don’t actually care about what you really do. |
| 7:40 |
People like people. If you feel like it`s a person behind a company brand, sharing his or her frustration, his or her happiness, it works better. |
| 7:41 |
Yu-Kai recommends WordPress – lots of plugins that can work with it. |
| 7:43 |
Advantages of having a blog
- SEO boost for your site
- Engages your community
- Builds trust
- Establishes thought leadership in your field
- Becomes a go-to place for your niche
- Eventually leads to higher sales and lastin brand
|
| 7:44 |
Well, I have been doing this for a couple of months and it`s not working. We aren`t selling anything yet. |
| 7:46 |
When people actually need your services, or when they have friends who need the services, they`ll do it.
Blogging for your company
- Blog about news and info in your industry
- Become the go0-to place for related knowledge
- DO NOT just talk about your company
- Don`t be overly professional. Show personality
- Listen to your market by asking questions.
|
| 7:47 |
There are blogs with lots of traffic but no engagement, or blogs with not so much traffic and LOTS of engagement. |
| 7:48 |
Promote your site
- Build relationships with bloggers through comments
- Use social media sites like Twitter & Facebook
- Use content discover sites like Digg and StumbleUpon
- Don’t use SEM (unless for direct sales), use SEO
- Put your blog URL in yoru email signature and business card
- Interlink between articles and other pages
|
| 7:51 |
Yu-Kai is recommending not using SEM (he says that you’re paying for traffic, buying visitors, buying friends) and you should go with SEO (which is more organic). Unless you have a direct selling method. There’s a conversion rate that is measurable.
|
| 7:53 |
SEO TIPS
- Identify your keywords
- Include the right meta-info
- populate the keywords with H1, H2, H3 or bold
- Update regularly (ideally twice a week)
- Use text-friendly URLs
- Host the blog on the same domain
- Solicit links from other sites
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| 7:53 |
[Though I have to say that I thoroughly disagree with soliciting links from other sites - RPV] |
| 7:54 |
Google Page Rank – build link-backs to your website, etc. Google Rank that are high (5) are relevant. |
| 7:59 |
Keys to Success
- Stay consistent on a theme for focus
- Update regularly
- Be persistent
- Keep SEO in mind
- Write timeless posts
- Build relationships with other bloggers through Twitter and commenting
- Respond to every comment
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|
| 8:05 |
Analytics
- Every audience is different, optimize for your own
- Useful stats: unique visitors, time on site, returning vs new visitors, sources of traffic, popular posts
- Don’t be fooled by the sheer numbers
- Goal is to increase direct traffic and time on site
- See what works and focus on those
- Set analytics goals for blog-led leads
|
| 8:09 |
Social media marketing through blogs
- Locate the influencers in your niche
- Advertise on their blogs
- Have them write product reviews
- Sweet spot – 7,000-50,000 in traffic
- Find blogs with no other banner competition
- High ROI if done right
|
| 8:11 |
Media Temple (every advertiser wants to target them) |
| 8:15 |
Monetizing your blog
- Generally need very high amount of traffic a month to earn “sizable” income
- Affiliate ads
- Banner ads
- Consulting
- Product reviews
- Sell products (such as eBooks)
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| 8:18 |
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Related posts:
- The return of the liveblog?
- My yyjWordCamp talk on integrated socmed WP site building
- What should your super power be?
- Liveblog – Shane Gibson on Needs Analysis (Sales Performance Meetup)
- How fast is your typing speed?
September 10th, 2009 in
blogosphere,
liveblogging
At the moment that you were speaking about blogs I was trying to convince coworkers on it’s usefulness. I was stopped dead in my tracks when the subject of quality of content came up. Is a company blog still worthwhile if the content goes stale? Is it better not to start if this could be the result 6 months down the line? Your thoughts?
Hi Stephanie,
We discussed the possibility of having someone ghost-write your corporate blog. I am not a fan of the option, but I can completely understand as it can be one of the best strategies to revive a stale blog.