Corporate Blogging Secrets for Success

I'm sure you're aware that networking is a huge part of any business' success, online or off, but what you might not realize is that blogging provides the perfect venue for that in a corporate setting! Having a blog that is genuine and not too 'salesy' makes you approachable to customers and potential business partners alike. This also gives you a free ticket to a slough of social media outlets to join and get talking. Try a few on for size and you might be surprised with the results!

del.icio.us
digg
facebook
twittr
flickr
MySpace

I'm looking through you, where did you go? Oh, sorry. Had a Beatles moment there. But these lyrics should resonate with you when you approach corporate blogging. I can't stress it enough - if you want to have a successful corporate blog and establish thought leadership and trust in your readers, you have to be transparent.

This isn't to say that you have to go exposing all of your biggest strategies and trade secrets! But what it does mean is giving your writing a little personality; allowing yourself to miss that comma or use a colloquialism; sharing the passion you have for your business and the subjects that relate to it with your readers in an approachable way.

You can still be business-like and not lose that sense of professionalism, while allowing your readers to have a little inside glance at what you do and how you do it. They will feel privileged to be 'getting to know you', and will look to you as an authority figure. And plus, blogging is fun! So don't be afraid that your posts won't sound perfect. The imperfections are what make blogging worthwhile.

Looking for a way to keep in touch with your fellow employees and have a one-stop place for everyone to be on board together? Set up a company blog for your employees! A password-protected private blog is a great way to add transparency and reinforce trust within your company.

Here you can discuss proprietary information, or discuss what you ate for breakfast. The possibilities are endless. You could use the comments field on entries like a forum, or keep comments closed and provide a separate forum link for everyone to talk.

Have a special category for a 'suggestion box' that allows anonymity for employees to put in their questions or suggestions.

You can design your private blog to look like your company website, or you can choose one of many different templates available to you from resources like WordPress.

I think you'll find if you employ methods like these within your company, whether you have 10 employees or 10,000, you'll notice that your employees are a lot more communicative with each other and there's a greater sense of loyalty to your company. You might even be able to improve your business to clients or to your employees by receiving some feedback you might not otherwise have!

Like any new project, starting a blog can be a daunting task if you don't know much about it. If you look up advice online, you'll see thousands of articles telling you all of your options, and after awhile, this can get very overwhelming!

Ok, breathe. I can't promise that this lens will give you every last detail, but I can certainly help you get your head wrapped around the concept and get off to a great start. Take a deep breath. Here we go!

Step 1 - Goals: The first thing to consider, before even thinking about domain names, SEO and other technicalities, is to establish what your goals are as a business owner or professional. What do you want the blog to accomplish for your business? Do you want it to primarily drive sales, or do you want to establish yourself as a thought leader? Do you want to use it more as a tool for letting everyone know about the latest news at your company, or do you want it to be a way for customers to create discussions? You may want all of these things, but try to prioritize and figure out what direction you most want to go in.

Step 2. Get to know your neighbors. Chances are, there are other blogs in the 'blogosphere' belonging to professionals with your background. Scope out the territory and see what other bloggers are writing about. Figure out what you could bring that's new or different to those conversations in order to get ideas for your own blog.

Step 3: Keyword time Once you have some of your niche in the blogosphere figured out, try to establish at least 100 key phrases that you want people to use to find your site. The more, the better. Eventually you will want to narrow down about 25 that you really want to use frequently, but include other "long tail" phrases for use as well. (more on this later)

Step 4: Set up shop Now it's time to decide what aesthetic vibe you want your blog to have. There are countless layouts and styles you could go with, so if you already have a corporate identity on a website, this makes it a lot easier. You'll need to decide things like how many columns you want, whether you want to implement affiliate advertising, etc.

Step 5: Host me, baby Do you want your blog on its own domain, as a subdomain of your corporate website, or hosted on a service like Blogger? There are pros and cons to each type, so you will need to figure out what works best for your budget and business goals, as well as level of technical know-how.

Step 6: Make new friends It's always good to get ahead of the game and start interacting with other professionals in your field. Comment on their blogs, participate in forums, and start making people aware that you're out there. (but DON'T SPAM THEM! they'll catch on really quickly and it'll backfire.)

Step 7: Develop a content strategy I find a really helpful way to get moving is to sit down and just have a 'brain dump'. Think of what topics you could write about right this second without performing any research and jot down the topics. Then think of ones you'd be interested in but that you'd need to learn a bit more about. Then think of more obscure and unique topics that you'd like to include. Try to come up with as many as you can, over 100 if possible. Then if you're ever stuck for an idea, you can pull from your repository of ideas!

Step 8: Testing, testing 1 2 3 Get your blog designed and put in a few test posts to make sure it looks and acts the way you want it to. Have some friends or family members (or coworkers) tinker with it to make sure no links are broken and that everything is intuitive and pleasing, and that it works across all browsers. You may want to include unique ways to handle archives or searchability to make your blog easier to navigate for readers.

Step 9: Post your first entries! Introduce yourself, your company, and what you hope to bring to the blog in an introductory post. Assure your readers that it will be frequently updated, and maybe mention some of the topics you hope to cover. Invite users to provide feedback as well. This will set the tone of your blog. Then you can add some more posts over the course of the first week to boost your search ranking and establish your blog as a valid website.

Step 10: Promote! Tada! You're up and running! Now what you need to do is promote. First of all, remember the sites you found earlier? Add them to your "blog roll" and let them know you did. Issue a press release to the public about the launch of your blog. Put a promotional link on your main homepage. Comment and participate in forums and other blogs even more, and be sure to keep up on it and become a repeat visitor. Submit your blog to sites like Technorati and other blog search engines. And remember, keep on posting high-quality, keyword rich content!

Alright, so blogging isn't exactly like a sandwich, but Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and keyword research are a lot like that in the sense that they will really give your blog what it needs to hold it together and make it better.

There are countless eBooks, printed books, and online resources to help you with search engine optimization and keyword research, so if you don't find what you need here, be sure to check out some of the links or resources I've included below.

What is SEO anyway? SEO comes in many different forms, but the bottom line is, it's a way to ensure that your site ranks well on search engines as a result of high-quality, keyword-rich content. There are many 'black hat' SEO practitioners out there that use not so nice techniques to boost their rankings, but we're not interested in that. You're a dignified business professional- you want to be as honest on your blog as you are with your customers!

A great, free way to make sure your blog gets visitors is to create high-quality original content that utilizes the keyphrases you established in your 10 step process. There are numerous online tools that can help you establish what keywords are good keywords. Google Adwords is a great example. There are tools that let you plug in your competitors' sites to see what keywords rank well for them, or you can put in a list that you have and see how much search traffic is performed on the words and how many sites are competing with those same phrases.

Some other great research tools include SEObook's keyword research tools, and IceRocket's blog trend tool.

Keeping highly ranking keywords in mind when you look for things to post or compose your posts will definitely help add authority to your blog. Putting keywords in titles as well as toward the beginning of paragraphs in your posts will make the best use of them too.

Another way of utilizing SEO is to use paid search programs. There are many different kinds, and one effective type is called Pay-Per-Click advertising, or PPC. PPC campaigns can be set up on Google through Google's Adsense tool. It can be a bit of a confusing topic to wrap your mind around, but basically what it means is you set a budget where your ads are run on particular sites, and each time someone clicks on an ad that you created, you pay a fee. This may seem counterintuitive since you're paying money, but the goal is that you will make more money as a result of someone visiting your site and buying something/signing up for a service. You can learn more about this strategy at the Google Analytics Website.

You can host your blog on your own website as a subdomain like www.yoursite.com/blog

You might instead want to create your blog on its own domain, so your site would be www.yoursite.com and your blog would be www.yourblog.com with a link from yoursite to yourblog.

Alternatively, you may want to avoid setting up a blog on your own hosted site and go with a provider like Blogger, WordPress (WordPress has a downloadable blogging tool to implement in your own site or you can have a more low-maintenance account hosted on wordpress.com), or TypePad. Each of these providers is different, but generally you can get up and running faster with a hosted account if you're less tech savvy and don't want to fiddle with things like SQL databases and DNS servers.

(if you don't know what these things are but still want to try to have your own blog on your own site, no worries! I've found that WordPress provides really great documentation for getting up and running even if you've never touched an FTP server before.)

The choice is up to you. You have less freedom about the way your blog looks and the features it has if you use a service like blogger, but you may find that it suits your needs just fine. There are some bloggers that have gained a TON of authority and a loyal readership who use hosted accounts (see Seth Godin, marketing guru extraordinaire), and there are others who have been just as successful on their own sites (like engadget). This proves the point that it's all about your ability to market yourself and provide high quality content to your readers that will determine your success as a blogger. (being able to be entertaining and having a really great product or series of books to accompany your content doesn't hurt either. *cough* Seth Godin *cough*)

There are several online tools to help bloggers boost their blogs. With social bookmarking sites to let people share their favorite websites publicly, if your blog makes those lists, it's guaranteed traffic. (see all those links to bookmarking sites? I found this on Joe Midway's blog post about 81 social bookmarking sites.)

You also may want to allow commenting on your blog. This lets others get in touch with you, start discussions amongst each other like a forum, or introduce you to other sites you may want to link to. Doing this will depend on whether your goals as a blogger entail talking with other people and building your network (hopefully you want to do this! But some people are able to muddle through without it)

Trackbacks are similar to comments, but without the personalized message. If someone includes a link to your post in their blog, they can send you a trackback to let you know. This is helpful for keeping track of where you're being linked to elsewhere on the Web.

Some social networking and bookmarking sites that might serve you well to use on your blog include:

Digg
Del.icio.us
Reddit
Twitter
flickr
CoComment
StumbleUpon

These services often will have buttons you can put on your blog or browser plug-ins to make things easier for you and your readers. You can search for other fun widgets online to add to the functionality of your blog.

Ever seen a little orange RSS icon and didn't know what it was? It symbolizes that a feed is available, and this is a very valuable thing to have for your blog. (along with awesome Photoshopped venus fly traps)

If you have a feed on your blog, others can click on that little icon, subscribe to it, and be notified whenever you put new content on your blog. Search engines get pinged when you add new content, so why not let other people know too?

This also creates an opportunity for people to keep up on your blog's activity in a feed viewer like Google Reader. It's sort of like skimming the headlines in the daily paper, except online...and...er...on your blog. : )