You’ve even read articles (here) about why you should have a blog. And these articles make sense and spell out the benefits that a blog can provide in terms of helping you market yourself on the web. But how do you get started? If you’re ready to pull the trigger, what are the things you need to consider so that your blog is not set up for failure?

Let’s break this process down into three key considerations: developing your blog content strategy, blog setup and ongoing content development. Ready to dig in?

Your Blog Content Strategy

Before you dive head first into the blogosphere, it’s vital to think through the overall marketing strategy of your organization and translate that into a blog content strategy. Ask yourself these questions:

• Who is your ideal buyer?
• What are their needs/pain points as they relate to your offering?
• What types of content would they find most valuable?
• In which formats should your content be created (written word, video, audio, all of the above)?
• Which words or phrases would they use when searching for your offering online?
• Do you have the capabilities to create this content in-house?

With these questions answered, spend some time brainstorming content topics and ideas that fall in line with your buyer’s informational needs. Your goal should be to consistently and frequently provide content that will attract buyers/influencers and move them to the next step in their buying process, which may be a phone call to you.

Blog Setup

The first question you need to ask yourself here is whether your blog will be seamlessly integrated within an existing website, or will this be a separate entity that you are starting from scratch. For most companies, it’s recommended that your blog be seamless with your website. This scenario typically requires programming assistance, but if you are building your entire website on a blogging platform (ex: Wordpress), programming assistance might not be required.

Important note: Search engines love blogs. The backend structure of blog websites is very search-engine friendly and the content you post is like food for search engine spiders. If you keep feeding them good food, they’ll reward you with higher search engine rankings. But there’s a caveat to this. Housing a blog on your website domain (ex: www.YourSite.com/blog) ensures that your website is getting the credit for feeding the spiders, thus higher rankings. If your company blog is hosted on a blog platform (ex: yourcompany.wordpress.com) separately from your company website, the search engines won’t put two and two together and you won’t get much credit for the food (content) you’re dishing out.

Another piece of blog setup is your blog’s design and layout. Design/brand consistency is always important and you don’t want new blog visitors feeling like they just jumped out of the trunk of a car and have no idea where they are. Try to incorporate your brand image into your blog design as much as you can and if you have the budget, hire a designer to create a custom theme that integrates your brand seamlessly. If you’re starting from scratch, there are also some amazing, inexpensive, pre-designed themes out there that can provide a high-end look for chump change.

Best Practices / Things to Avoid

As blogs and the practice of blogging have matured, several best practices have developed relating to the setup, usability and function of blogs. Here are a few to remember:

• Make sure to provide interested readers with both RSS AND e-mail subscription options.
• Create topic-based categories for your blog content so visitors can quickly locate the blog posts that match their informational needs.
• Offer content sharing mechanisms that allow visitors to share your content via e-mail, social networking sites and social bookmarking tools.
• Include links to your own social media profiles to build your network of followers.
• Include links to your most popular blog posts so that visitors can see your best stuff.

Ongoing Content Development

Can’t think of anything to blog about? Step out of your box and listen to your marketplace. Engaging in and monitoring the social media realm is great for content inspiration. Subscribe to industry blogs. Follow industry experts on Twitter. Identify online forums and groups that might be the virtual stomping grounds of your buyers. Take note of the questions they ask or the comments they make related to your offering.

If you’re still struggling, try this exercise. Keep a notepad next to your phone. After every prospect or client phone call, jot down the topics you covered during your conversation. At the end of the day, you’ll likely have noted a few common questions/topics that would make great blog topics.

As more and more content ideas develop, write them down! Start an editorial calendar that helps you organize your blogging schedule. Then develop some internal processes and dedicate some time for content development each week.

If you can’t get it done yourself, hire a professional copywriter to help you with content ideas and copywriting. A sit-down session with them once a month may be all you need to knock out several blog posts. Then space the posts out according to your desired frequency.

A Final Word of Advice

This is not an “if-you-build-it-they-will-come” scenario. Don’t expect too much, too soon. Between regular blogging, valuable content, promotion of your content via social media and the search engines, you should see a gradual, steady increase in traffic and opportunities each month. Conversely, as your blogging drops off, you’ll probably see a steady decrease. Keeping an eye on your traffic statistics can be a great motivator!

Here comes the sales pitch…If you need assistance with creating a blog (or a website, or both!) for your company, we’d love to help. Sometimes it feels like that’s all we do these days. Give us a call or submit our inquiry form and we’ll talk through things. No obligations.

• Part 1 – Series Introduction & Personalized Search
• Part 2 – Bounce Rates Will Affect Your Rankings
• Part 3 – Online Conversations (Social Networking) will Foster Offline Connections
• Part 4 – RSS Feeds Will Go Mainstream

Part 5: Got Video?

Video is the fastest-growing form of marketing on the Web. eMarketer estimates that in the next four years marketers’ spending on online video advertising will reach $4.6 billion, more than seven times the amount spent in 2008. And no wonder. Video lets you demonstrate your idea — with action, with humor, with the credibility of a great presenter. Ask yourself: Which would you rather do? Read 5-6 more paragraphs? Or watch a 90-second video that visually explains the topic?

Just in the last two months, I’ve engaged in six video projects with my clients. When you take a minute to think about your business from a video perspective, there is so much sitting right under your noses. For instance, I encouraged a real estate client to do a quick YouTube search on “olathe real estate”. From the quality of the resulting videos, my client was quickly encouraged to undertake his own video effort.

Video Ideas for Small Business

• Introductions – Introducing yourself and your company via video is much more engaging
• Education – Film your next educational seminar or diagram a concept on a whiteboard
• Sales – Record your next sales presentation
• Product Demos – Give prospects a closer look at your products, their features and benefits
• Video Blogging – Instead of writing about the latest industry happenings, mix it up and talk about them on camera.

Low-Quality, Guerrilla-Style Video is the Norm

As the popularity of web cams, hand-held digital video recorders and video-sharing websites like YouTube, Vimeo and Blip.tv has grown, so has the volume of videos created by people with little-to-no video production expertise. Much in the same way the MP3 file format desensitized us for music audio quality, this wave of online video has lowered our standards for video quality. In fact, great content shot in a lower-quality fashion is often perceived as more genuine vs. the same content with professional polish.

Having said that, you still need to understand the basics of video creation, which can go along way in making your viewer’s experience a pleasurable one…

Other Factors to Consider

Several other factors are also pushing marketers to take a serious look at online video.

• A Massive Audience - Just look at traffic numbers…YouTube – 60 million unique visitors/month, Yahoo Video – 23 m/month, Myspace – 16 m/month…The list goes on. If/when you start putting videos out there and they are optimized properly, people will find it and it’s author.
• Quality Website Traffic – Video makes great bait. Fishing in the video-sharing and social-media ponds can be huge for reeling in quality traffic and links to your main website.
• Universal Search Results – With the advent of univeral search, video is going to start gobbling up real estate within search engine results pages (SERPs). For example, a search for your most important keyword might be returning 10 webpages on page one of the SERPs. And your website is currently in the 8th position (page one). But a month from now, three videos find their way onto the first page of results and you find yourself on page 2 in the 11 spot.

Small Barriers to Entry

I think the only barriers to entry for small businesses lie within the perceptions of video quality and technical requirements associated with getting a video on a website. Both of these barriers are almost non-issues these days since average-quality videos can be created easily with modern hand-held video cameras, uploaded to YouTube and immediately embedded into any website with a little snippet of code.

Want video? Learn more about Something Creative’s online video development services for Kansas City small businesses.

Part 2: Bounce Rates Will Affect Your Search Engine Rankings

Another new ranking factor that Google is starting to integrate is bounce rates. A “bounce” is determined when a visitor lands on one page of your site and then leaves. Web analytics software programs track these occurrences and tally them up to establish your site’s “bounce rate”. If people are consistently landing on your site and then bailing, but they stick around and peruse your competitor’s site, what would we logically surmise from this situation? Their site must be more engaging. Google is going to give them credit for that and rank them higher. Can you blame them?

Google has done a spectacular job of flooding the web world with their free Google Analytics (GA) platform. On the website owner side of the coin, GA offers a plethora of analysis and reporting tools that provides an enormous amount of insight into how a website is performing. On the other side of the coin, Google is storing and mining all that data. And since GA has been so widely adopted, Google is keeping tabs on hundreds of thousands of sites.

I’m a GA user. They know my site’s bounce rate. I can only hope my bounce rate is helping my rankings.

Might your bounce rate be negatively affecting your rankings? Are you monitoring your bounce rate? Need help?

2009 Online Marketing Trends for Small Business – Introduction

 I came across a report the other day on Online Marketing Trends for 2009, developed by Strange Media, and the opening statement really hit home with me…

“2009 is likely to be a challenging year for many businesses as the global economic slowdown takes hold. Digital marketing, however, looks set to continue its rapid growth, as its many solutions and advantages become even more apparent when marketing budgets are subjected to even greater constraints.”

As industry giants feel the pinch and scramble to maintain market share and mass appeal, small businesses are uniquely positioned to move quickly and flourish within the emerging marketplace of online consumers.

Let’s face facts…Tough economic times means more people using the internet to research products and services, and more people searching online for the best deals. Small businesses that focus on continually building a strong online presence will be positioned well to chip away at the market share of their slower, larger competitors.

The Strange Media report mentioned above lists 16 online marketing trends for 2009, several of which I will touch on here. But many trends within their report may be “over the heads” of most small businesses who are still getting their online legs. Instead of throwing a bunch of advanced digital marketing topics at you, I’d like to focus on 10 internet and search marketing trends that I feel small businesses should understand and can take advantage of quickly.

Part 1: Personalized Search

Also referred to as behavior-based search, personalized search is a set of ranking factors that Google and other search engines have gradually implemented within their already-complex search algorithms. For years, Google has been keeping tabs on how we search, what we search for and the types websites we frequent. They also know where we live (think “Big Brother”). Therefore, in an effort to provide us with the most relevant search results, they’re factoring our search patterns and location into their algorithms and presenting us with web pages that are not only good matches contextually, but also good matches geographically.

For example, I type “underwater basket weaving training” in Google. Before personalized search, top web page results may have been dominated by top trainers in San Diego, Tampa or even Cancun. Well, I live in Kansas, and when I’ve done searches with the term “training” in the past, I’ve always clicked on Kansas City-based companies. With personalized search, an underwater basket weaving trainer based in Kansas City may find themselves on the first page of the Google results when I’m searching for them.

There’s an additional wrinkle to this that I should mention. For those companies who have been hanging your hats on top Google rankings, realize that personalized search may throw off your analysis. Searching from your computer may be returning top rankings for your key terms, but doing the same search at another location may return a very different result. Just remember that a certain ranking position doesn’t necessarily dictate success. Converting website traffic into customers dictates success. Focus your success metrics on conversion rates and know that personalized search may play a significant role in bringing higher quality traffic (fewer bounces) to your site.

Does this make sense? Did I miss anything? Feel free to comment…

Stay tuned for Part 2: Bounce Rates Will Affect Your Search Engine Rankings – Subscribe to the series via e-mail or my RSS feed.

About a week after the workshop, I received my speaker evaluations. My realization was confirmed. Several attendees commented, “that SEO stuff seems pretty technical…I wish we could do more ourselves to help our rankings.”

Enter Stage Left: Off-Page Search Engine Optimization

Here’s the good news. “Off-page search engine optimization” is a specific set of optimization and internet marketing techniques that are executed outside (off) of your site, and require almost no technical expertise.  All you need is your ability to use the internet, create content, and build relationships with others in your marketplace.

Off-page search engine optimization techniques revolve around the concept of link building, or getting other external websites to link to your site (a.k.a. backlinks). Why is this important? Because search engines determine your rankings based on relevance. And when other people link to your site’s content (backlinks), that tells the search engines that your content is relevant, high-quality and credible—which in turn helps you get ranked higher in the search engines.

So How Do We Get Backlinks?

Here’s a list of techniques that requires little or no technical expertise.  It may be just what the doctor ordered for your ailing rankings:

1. Develop good, keyword-rich content.  Good content is the ultimate driver of all things online. And keyword-rich content ensures that search engines will index it properly. If off-page SEO is the process of fishing for backlinks, content is your bait. The better your bait, the more bites (i.e. backlinks) you’re going to get.
    
2. Syndicate your content.  Article-marketing websites, news release websites, and social bookmarking websites allow you to easily post articles and news within their directories that link back to your web site. If your content is high quality, there’s a good chance other websites and blogs will republish your content on their sites. Don’t forget to include a keyword-rich link back to your site within your content.
    
3. Ask partners, distributors, and reps to publish or link to your content.  Leverage your business relationships to build backlinks.
    
4. Get links from well-established resource web sites.  You may find that the top sites for your keywords in Google are resource sites—such as industry directories, online media, trade associations, or local organizations. You may even find an ad from CraigsList.com getting top position. These sites have gained authority through domain age and backlinks of their own, and a link from them would act as a valuable endorsement of your site in the search engine’s eyes.
    
5. Get listed in Google Local and Yahoo Local.  These local business listings tie in with the Google and Yahoo mapping programs, and offer great placement at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs).
    
6. Participate in blogs and forums.   Pick any industry and I’ll bet money that there are hundreds of blogs and forums (and thousands of people) conversing online about that industry. Do some research. Create some Google Alerts. Find your fishing hole. Start participating by commenting on blog posts related to your expertise. Provide some good, objective advice on industry forums. When asked to register for your blog and forum accounts, create a keyword-rich signature with a link back to your site.
    
7. Create a blog.  A popular blog can reap HUGE dividends—not only for backlinks and search rankings, but also for your company’s overall sales. Do a search for “blog success stories” for plenty of examples. Keep in mind, however, that getting there takes a consistent effort. And if you can’t commit to it long-term, then don’t go there.
    
8. Participate in social networking sites.  Due to the popularity of social networking sites like LinkedIn.com, and their good standing with search engines, creating a simple link to your company’s website within your profiles can easily produce several high-quality backlinks.

Getting the Most Out of Your Backlinks

While SEO is not an exact science, there are a few linking techniques that will ensure you’re spending your time wisely, and getting the full value out of each link. Here are a few pointers:

1. Keep a keyword list close by.  Make sure to reference an up-to-date keyword list when writing any new content, including blog comments, forum posts, social networking site profiles…everything! Don’t have a keyword list? Google offers a great, free tool.
    
2. Use anchor text (a.k.a. “link text”).  Anchor text is words that actually make up a text hyperlink. Integrating keywords within your links plays a significant role in how search engines determine page relevance. It blows my mind when I see this on websites: “For more information on Bob’s high-quality taxidermy services, click here.” This link is almost worthless.
    
3. Quality vs. Quantity.  Focus your time on getting links from high-quality, well-established websites. Five links from older, established websites can be much more powerful than 50 links from newer sites or blogs.

How Many Backlinks Do You Need?

As I wrapped up the off-page SEO portion of my Las Vegas workshop, one attendee asked about the number of backlinks needed to increase their rankings. This is a great question, but one that is hard to answer. As mentioned above, quality links will win over quantity. The best I can say is to find out where you stand compared to your competitors in the SERPs. Here’s a tool that can do that.

Lastly, analyzing your competitors’ websites can provide a wealth of insight into their backlinking efforts. A simple way to get this intelligence is to type “link:yourcompetitorurl.com” into the Google Search and Yahoo Search boxes. This will show you other sites that link to your competitors, which also may be good targets for your link building efforts.

The Catch: DIY SEO = Time Commitment

Warning…there’s a bit of a catch with off-page SEO. While little technical ability is required, a comprehensive link-building effort can turn into a full-time job. If you have the time or the manpower to manage this task internally, great. If not, the Something Creative SEO team would be happy to support you in this effort.

Technorati Profile

First off, let me start with a few Wikipedia references so we’re all on the same page:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords.

Search Engine Algorithms – The set of rules, instructions and equations used by search engines to analyze online content and determine relevancy.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) - a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in the search engine result pages (SERPs) through search engine optimization, paid placement, and paid inclusion.

Internet Marketing (a.k.a. Online Marketing) – the process of growing and promoting an organization, and its products and services, using online media.

Grab Your Partner Doe-Se-Doe

In our ongoing quest to keep up with the latest search engine and internet marketing strategies, we often hear about the dramatic and sometimes devastating effects that a slight change in Google’s algorithms can have on companies’ bottom lines. These stories serve as good examples of why you don’t want to put all your eggs in the SEO basket.

While an initial SEO effort during the development and launch of a new website is definitely needed in today’s online marketplace, ongoing internet marketing strategies can be executed that will not only complement your SEO efforts and improve your overall traffic, but also help shield you from the ever-changing search engine algorithms.

That Was Some Good Squid

Talking about internet marketing strategies with clients often takes me back to the summers of my youth when my family used to all pile in the van and drive to Tampa, Florida to visit my retired grandparents. Their home backed up to the intercoastal waterway, which always meant great fishing. Immediately upon our arrival, my grandpa always broke out a plethora of fishing poles, grabbed some squid from the freezer and the whole family headed out on the dock to cast our lines. I tell you this story because within minutes, we’d have eight fishing lines in the water and my grandpa would say, “The more hooks we have out there, the more fish we’re gonna’ catch.”
Internet Marketing is no different. The more lines you cast with sharp hooks and enticing bait, the more fish you’ll bring in. Said another way…The more targeted online mediums you participate in and offer high-quality, original content, the more traffic you will generate for your site.

And as an added benefit, the fish you release back into the water are going to go tell their fish friends about the succulent squid they just tasted.

Internet Marketing Strategies That Work

Just like any successful marketing campaign, doing some research to get your bearings is a good place to start. We typically start with an audit of your industry’s online offerings to determine who is participating, what they are talking about, which websites are successfully providing these arenas, what your competition is doing and how you can get in the mix.

Using this information, it’s time to sit down and map out a plan for which internet marketing tasks are appropriate, feasible and within your marketing budget. Here are a few that typically make the cut:

Website Directory/Buyer’s Guides Submission – Getting listed in online industry directories and product/service buyer’s guides can help you hook influential industry practitioners and is a great source for backlinks, which increases your site’s overall page rank in many search engines.

Participation in Industry Blogs and Forums – Niche blogs and forums are powerful communication tools used by industry enthusiasts to converse about companies, products and services. Your genuine, consistent participation in these sites can reap significant rewards.

Corporate Blog/Forum Development – Is your industry behind the times? Can’t find blogs or forums that are covering your industry, products or services? If you build it, they will come…Being the first to offer an arena for candid discussion about your industry positions you and your company as the thought leader.

E-mail Marketing – When compared to traditional advertising, printed newsletters or direct mail, e-newsletters and e-blasts (electronic direct mail) are almost no-brainers since they can be executed quicker, are more cost effective and provide almost immediate customer feedback and marketing analysis.

Other Search Engine Marketing Strategies that Work

Comparing internet marketing tactics to search engine marketing tactics is a lot like comparing public relations to advertising. Public relations takes some work, but is often high-quality, free publicity, whereas successful advertising campaigns can be a significant expense.

That being said, search engine advertising (paid placement, Pay-Per-Click (PPC)) is among the most effective form of advertising on the planet today. Combine a well-funded Pay-Per-Click campaign with a high-quality website and you may find yourself swamped with new business in a matter of days.

A Consistent Effort Wins the Day

Regardless of your industry or marketplace, your potential customers are increasing their use of online mediums to research products and services everyday. And with all those fish swimming about, why not cast as many lines as possible, everyday? Many of the strategies and tactics outlined in this article can be executed affordably and come pre-packaged with powerful analysis tools that will show you real-time ROI. Please let us know if you would like help in implementing any of these programs for your company.