The corporate blog is most commonly used as a newsletter for the company but this is a limited view of the potential of the corporate blog. Today we are going to look at the potential of the corporate blog as a marketing, branding, PR and SEO tool.
Why Blog?
Photo Credit mutednarayan
I would hope that by the fact that you have made it here, you appreciate the value and power of the internet as a source of data, news, opinion and ultimately customers. Blogging and generating social media traffic is getting people into “the shop” so they can be made more aware of your brand. Successful social media endeavors will generate inbound links if you are quoted in other blogs and sites which has great value to SEO *.
* The term SEO, in case you are not familiar with it, stands for search engine optimization. This is the active action of increasing the ranking of a website in search engines such as Google usually under specific search keywords. The corporate website can be very restricted in what you can do in this arena but the corporate blog has no such restrictions and can be actively used to capture the search engine traffic you want...
.
.Internal vs. External
Photo Credit Mannobhai
The first thing that has to change before the corporate blog can blossom into a valuable outward facing tool that generates exposure, positive buzz and sales potential for your company is the viewpoint of its use. The blog has to change from being an internal notice board to the fully supported and promoted publication. All the rules of running, promoting and building up the readership of a blog apply. In many cases of dealing with corporate clients wanting to venture into social media, I had to have the internal newsletter type posts and the external social media postings divided between two different blogs. The reason for this is that if you seriously want to venture into social media and build up a thriving blog, you will need to separate these posts.
The most common advantage a corporate blog has over an individual blogger is resources. A corporate blog has in many cases money to promote, unique data from the industry or sector they are in, several experienced professionals including possibly a PR department who can write original articles and in most cases a mature website with some search engine ranking to assist the blogs ability to build up...
.What are the New Type of Posts?
Photo Credit Cosmic Kitty
The type of posts should be posts designed not to “sell” the company but to entertain a desired readership first and foremost. The minute you try and use these posts to sell, they will be rejected. Think of your own favorite magazines, publications or blogs that you visit - the article is written to entertain you and you accept the reality of advertisements placed around the edges of the article. The same applies for the corporate blog, write entertaining and/or helpful posts for your public and it will be accepted with whatever links and advertisements around the edges to capture this hard earned traffic.
An example of a successful blog I have worked with is an online freelance job board site. They opened up their blog to social media and decided to use internal data on employment trends for various technical skills as fodder for blog posts. They managed to hit the front page of Digg.com and have consistently made high traffic on every post weekly by writing for social media and actively promoting. The long term effects of some of these successful posts at the time of writing this is over 500 hits per month on very desirable keywords. 500 may be a lttle to you or may be a lot but if one post per week is generated and you look two years down the road, that is a lot of exposure.
To look at blogging and social media for just the traffic sent in the first week is short-sighted, the real payment is the building of a landing pad for your corporate website with a large spectrum of desirable keywords. Don’t get me wrong, there is great PR, sales and marketing value in the initial surge of traffic but the long term view is to look two years down the road and decide if you want several thousand of your desired “public” finding you for free on search engine searches. Once you get them “in the shop”, you can do things with them.
I will be following up on this article on “How to do it” soon so either subscribe or contact me for details.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
For those of you new to social media, you will see certain terms used with some regularity on sites like twitter, digg, stumbleupon etc.
Here are some terms, definitions and in some cases, hidden meanings for you to get better acquainted with social media:
Social Media Guru: “I once got a picture of a cat to make front page of Digg”.
Please (As in “Please Digg”, “Please Stumble” etc.): Will whore myself for a chance at traffic.
Tweet: Read my blog post please.
Retweet (or RT): I’m telling people to read your blog post if you tell them to read mine.
Spammer: A Social Media Guru who tweets too often.
Crowdsourcing: The combined effort of a collection of individuals to perform a task or tasks that somehow makes Kevin Rose more wealthy and famous.
Activism: I will write a blog post complaining about <insert topic here>.
Revolt: I will vote something up/down because some complete strangers are excited about it and it seems to be the thing to do.
Friend: Exploitable resource.
“IM me”: I would like to break the terms of service of the current social media site we are using and I would like you to also.
Democracy: Much like democracy in the “real world” where individuals vote to affect their environment but in truth is decided by an elite few.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
So you have a new blog and man would it look good on the front page of Digg.com.You can envision the mob of diggers swarming over your newly minted literary delight.
Photo Credit jurvetson
Yes it probably would but hold your horses there cowboy. The truth is anything with enough quality can make the front page of Digg but the reality is that it is highly contested territory fought for by more hardened veterans than you.
So, whats a good social media strategy for a new blogger and social media promoter? Well lets start with the target of 3000 visitors to your blog post. Not too shabby for your first week, right?
Caveat: All successes will come from quality of your content and all failures will come because of the lack of it.
Small Fish, Small Pond
One very good source of predictable traffic are smaller Sub-Reddits. Find the smaller Reddit communities and note the number of subscribers in each. Posting in Reddits with 1,000 - 3,000 subscribers mean that your post can go popular with only a couple of upvotes and the submissions tend to move a lot slower so you can appear on several thousand reddit pages for several days. For a software client of mine, I have posted in a single 1,000 range subscribers sub reddit and gotten over 600 visits in a week from that one submission. Reddit allows you to submit the same post to several Sub Reddits. Theoretically, if your article is liked you can get a few thousand visitors by just working sub reddits.
Working similar smaller social media sites can have a similar return. For example, to go popular on AOL’s propeller, it takes somewhere in the region of 12-16 votes at the time of writing this and that has predictably sent over one hundred visitors per popular story. To get 12-16 votes, it does not hurt to have a few friends on the propeller network and the same can be said for any of the sites I mention here. The bigger the site, the more friends you need. There are hundreds of social media sites for you to work, some too big for the beginner to expect great success but plenty of small ponds that can be conquered within a few weeks. Read my article on how to make social media friends to get the basics in on making new friends on any social network and then apply the advice from How to Submit an Article to your Social Media Friends to have a good chance at popularity.
In the Shadow of a Digg
Photo Credit Jagian
Yes I know I said that Digg might be out of your league right now but that is only partially true. If you watch the upcoming section of Digg for a bit, you will have a good sense pretty quickly which articles have a shot of making the front page (Hint: they tend to have more than 80 votes). If an article of yours aligns very well on a pro or con of a rising story you may be able to get your link into the comments section of Digg before it goes popular and benefit from the traffic to the comments section as it goes popular. A majority of the time, the link will get buried but every so often it will survive if the Digg community likes it and does not feel it is a self interested attempt at traffic and you can expect a few hundred from traveling in the shadow of the popular digg submission.
Before a story goes popular on Digg, it usually only has a handful of comments so your comment with link can appear high on the page. If the article is threatening to go popular on Digg, you can also comment in the comment section of the actual blog post (if comments are allowed) and gain some traffic from that but the Digg comments section is by far the most remunerative section.
There you have it … A little work will gain you respectable traffic over a week and if your content inspires, you may pick up a few regulars.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Assuming you have built up a following of friends on a chosen Social Media Network by your own means or followed my advice on How to Get Friends on any Social Media Network, you are now ready to promote an article with the real hope of generating traffic to your website.
Photo Credit Daveness_98
Friends or Partners
The first thing to determine is among your friends are people who will definitely help you. This should be easy since you will have had a few requests by now to look at various friends posts and with or without overtly saying it, vote it up. If you followed my previous advice on How to make friends on any Social Media Network, you should have previously helped them out and told them so. Basically at this point you will have scrtached a few backs and you will be calling in your debts by asking these friends to help you out. To this list of people, you will be asking them to assist you in promoting the article.
Timing is Everything
Photo Credit Duy
Submitting an article to social media is usually a time dependent affair. Putting an article up immediately starts a stopwatch and the various algorithms view the time an article has been up as a factor to calculate its position and rank. Another time factor is the time of the week at which to submit since an entry in social media has a 24 to 48 hour window in which its chance to “go popular” is calculated. I recommend submitting between Monday and Thursday since the weekend has less predictable activity.
Pulling the Trigger
Photo Credit DanieVDM
It is now very simple at this point. You submit your article with a compelling title. You contact your “partners” and ask them to “look” at your article which you can predictably expect support. You then send messages to the rest of your friends with a less spammy message like “hey check out my new blog post if you get a chance, let me know what you think”. Those who like it (or you) will support it.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Photo Credit Kevin Dooley
We are now venturing in a Grey ethical area once we approach this subject. Social networks in their purest forms are intended for the natural interaction of real friends with the opportunity to make more. Any promotion of a piece of media should strictly make its way to popularity on its own merits with no real active attempt of the submitter to “make it popular”. The truth of the matter is that if you have a submission into Digg, for example, it has a slim to no chance of making it popular without some attempt to at least push it to some prominence in the upcoming section. The same to lesser or greater degree can be said for almost all other networks.
If you wish to use social media to promote your work, you face an early decision with respect to this - are you going to pay your dues by developing a network that will support your work because the common element here is that “the other guy” promoting your work without a question will be coming back to you for the same with “no questions asked”. Since this amount of back-scratching is going on, you are somewhat doomed to failure unless you embrace it until such a time as you have a respectable readership that will give natural promotion of your work.
Now that you have addressed that ethical dilemma for yourself, away we go ….
The best analogy for a social media network is walking into a party where you know very few, if any people
Photo Credit Wili Hybrid
If you just sit in the corner, you may get into a conversation but for the most part you will be sitting in the corner holding your drink. So just like a party or other similar social event, you gotta get out there and make a few friends by good old fashioned communication. Lets start by one of the most genuine methods of making friends - using the network the way it is intended. Get out there and look at the media and when you find an entry you like give it an upvote (I will use this as the generic term for promoting a social media submission) and send a message to the submitter with a “Nice find, added you to my friends” or some other acknowledgment. Concurrent with that message send your friend request. You will find a respectable percentage will “friend” you back. When the person “friends” you back, send another message acknowledging this and add the following to your message - “Thanks for friending up and send me anything you want me to look at anytime”. This will let the new friend know that they can send you an article of theirs that they are interested in getting promotion without retribution and that you will probably upvote it.
This is a numbers game in that the more you do, the more you get. microsoftaccesscomponentsdata.info recovery-data.org youtube-america.info deai-gold-medal.com globalfundingsolutions.us c-r-kawakami.com toddbook.com housesforsaleingrandbend.com santropezmusic.com bridgesoforangecounty.com The amount of friends you need will be close to whatever votes you observe that is needed to either “go popular” or in a more honest method, enough to propel the article to enough prominence in an upcoming section so that others will at least see it to get “organic” votes. I recommend the latter since your content should carry you to prominence rather than your network but I guarantee there are people who are using the former.
Photo Credit Kalandrakas
Now before you go spamming your new friends for upvotes you still have some work to do. I covered the method to submit an article to social in another post called How to Submit a post to your social media network. Right now we are still in the mode of making friends on your chosen social network so lets stay in that mode for a while. After all, if you met a guy at a party and after 10 minutes of conversation he tried to sell you a used car without any indication from you that you wanted to buy a car, you might be put off to say the least.
OK, so now you have a few people who are willing to receive communication from you. Next thing is to get to know them a bit. Read their entries, comment on their blogs, profile pages, entries and generate some dialogue with them.You will start to receive personal messages from your new friends to “look” at their submissions. If you decide you want to support this new friends submissions with the understanding that they will help you in the future, upvote the article and send a message back to the person indicating you did support their article. They will remember you for it and you will need them to remember it for the future.
From this point on you keep doing this while consistently increasing you circle of friends and soon you will be ready to show them your work.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
I don’t know if it weird or unprofessional to leave the Hello World post up but since my wee blog is a celebration of the social elements of the internet, I have decided to keep it.
This post could technically be me having a conversation with myself since no one may ever read this.
Aaaah the sweet blissful descent into madness
Welcome to Atrocial!
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!