Many companies and organizations struggle when it comes to adequately marketing and supporting their company blog. Either they don’t have the time, they lack the will or the creativity as to what should be written on it. The ‘Era of Blogging’ has been alive and active for sometime and if you aren’t blogging regularly, networking with other bloggers, sharing your ideas with the blogosphere, then you truly are missing an opportunity to market and control the message of your business online. Hopefully, some of the ideas presented here as well as on this blog will help motivate you and your organization to write regularly on you blog and create a dialogue with your clients moving forward.
1. Focus what you’re writing about — Sure, there’s lots going on in your life. You have a cat that you love very much, and you want to play with it all the time. Your job is crazy and your co-workers are crazy. You have boy/girl troubles. You enjoy reading mystery novels. You play the flute. While any one of these areas of interest can make for a compelling blog, if you over-diversify, you’ll fail to attract a consistent audience. This isn’t to say that you need to limit your blog to a particular subject (e.g. My Vegan Diet Attempt). Your web blog could be a humorous recounting of what goes on at your work every day or how your cat’s kidney stone diagnosis has progressed. What you write about doesn’t really matter — it’s the tone and the theme that needs to be one of a piece.
2. Update, update, update! — This step is vital to the success of your blog and ties into my opening statement. The web is a content-hungry beast. It always needs more. Sure, your regular readers want to see updates, but the search engine spiders will be just as anxious to see your latest postings. A freshly revised and updated blog will not only get more links and interest from other web users over time, but also it will compile larger more relevant archives, which will demonstrate to the search engines that your site is for real.
3. Employ a clean interface — Yes, you may want to grab some money on the side by putting up banner ads, Chikita ads and the like. You may also want to throw in some videos and links to other blogs and forums and spaces for you to twitter. But the more you gunk up your blog interface, the harder it will be for your blog’s fans to find essential information. Focus on your one tonal and thematic main task first, and then slowly integrate other features down the line.
4. Interact with your readers — Take questions, do interviews, respond to comments, e-mail with your biggest fans, link to other blogs that support you, and ask your readers to subscribe.
5. Patience, my friend — You may be the most genius blogger to come along since Nikki Finke, but you’re not going to be an overnight success, most likely, even if you’re a celebrity or a politician. Build your audience over time by focusing your mission, adding content, and following the other advice we’ve given above.
6. Experiment with SEO and PPC tactics — Obviously, one of the reasons you’re blogging is because you want to make money writing about something that interests you. However, don’t put the cart before the horse. Build your SEO campaign on the back of a solid, content-rich site — not the other way around.
