Experts reveal their top most effective blogging tactics and talk about what business bloggers must do to be an accepted member of the blogosphere.
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Web Development Business Blogging Case Studies
Thought Leaders on Marketing Blogs - Part 2
Thought Leaders on Marketing Blogs - Part 1
How do you make a solid business case for blogging for marketing? What about managing upper management’s expectations on the outcome? Should you hire a professional blogger to write your company blog?
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Optimal blog posting frequency
My friend and colleague Toby Bloomberg of Diva Marketing Blog posed an interesting question to me and a small group of other bloggers whom I hold in high regard (Tris Hussey, Paul Chaney, Wayne Hurlbert, Yvonne DiVita, and Dana VanDen Heuvel). Her question was this:
What is best practice for scheduling posts?
If you’re not going to post 5 days a week, should posts be scheduled consistently for the same days of the week e.g., if you’re posting 3 times a week Monday-Wednesday-Friday? How do you feel about mixing up posting days? One week post M-W-F and the next week post T-TH-F. Or does it really matter? For the most part are the only blogs that are doing a consistent schedule the networks?
What a great question! And what great answers from the group. So great, in fact, that it evolved into a podcast group Skype-conference call that we conducted just yesterday. The 53-minute audio recording should be ready soon. I’ll post it when it is.
In the meantime, my take on the issue is this: as far as retaining your readers, frequency is not nearly as important as recency. A couple weeks of inactivity makes the reader feel like nobody’s home. Conversely, having the latest post be only a day old makes the blog appear “fresh”. Personally, I don’t like keeping feeds in my newsreader that haven’t had recent activity.
It also depends on the type of blog you have. A “writer’s blog” (as defined by Seth Godin) doesn’t need the same level of recency or frequency as a “news blog” (also defined by Seth in the same post).
Relevance overrides both recency and frequency. Searchengineblog.com recently posted (paraphrased) “I’m going to stop posting about SEO for several months but I’ll post about my vacation”. Making such an announcement wrecks even more havoc on recurring readership levels than two months of inactivity, because the blogger is in a sense inviting his readers to unsubscribe from his RSS feed. After all, how many of them would want to read irrelevant I’m-touring-the-world posts? My guess, in this time-pressed world of ours, is not very many.
As far as gaining new readers, the trick is getting noticed by the “connectors” (using Malcolm Gladwell’s terminology) in the blogosphere and then getting them to link to you. Again, this isn’t necessarily an issue of frequency. One blogger could post to his/her blog once per week and be more successful at getting coverage by A-list bloggers than a prolific blogger who posts many times per day. This could be achieved a number of ways. Linking to other bloggers can get you noticed by them. Mentioning their names could get you noticed by them (see my recent post where I described the name dropping tactic). Already having some of them as friends helps too. 
A lot of the blog entries floating around in the blogosphere strike me as “filler.” I strive to have this blog be filler-free. I only blog when I have something I believe to be valuable for you, my dear readers. I won’t blog about “Adobe acquires Macromedia” unless I can come up with a unique angle that would deliver real value to marketers who read my blog. Unique commentary, I believe, is key to the value proposition. Last week for example I blogged about “how to search engine optimize your podcasts” - something I believe has not been adequately addressed by bloggers. This I’m hoping will get some coverage in the blogosphere because of its uniqueness. “News blogs” can get away with less unique and practical posts than “writers blogs”, but they tend to make up for it with volume - increasing the frequency.
Finally, posting too frequently increases the ephemerality of your blog posts. Mike Davidson made the insightful comment:
“The relative importance of the feed vs. the site depends almost entirely on the ephemerality of the posts. Scoble?Ĵs posts are extremely ephemeral because he a) has so many of them, and b) only comments briefly on each item. Their place in history is rather fleeting, in other words. In the case of a more traditional blog, you have far fewer posts with more in-depth writeups. In this case, the site is of utmost importance and the feed is merely a notification technology.”
With all that said, Wayne Hurlbert has an interesting case study to share of how he doubled his blog traffic by doubling the number of posts per day from one to two. Have a read. (Paul Chaney makes the point that “every blogger is different, the way we write is different, and our personalities are different,” so there’s no right or wrong answer here and of course your mileage will vary.)
Bottom line of all this: the blogosphere is still the Web and the basic online marketing principle of testing everything, rather than just believing whatever I say, still applies.
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Getting noticed in the blogosphere part 2
As a follow-on to yesterday’s post about getting your blog noticed by influentials, i.e. A-List bloggers, I thought I would describe a scenario just recently presented to me.
I have been asked by analyst Shar VanBoskirk of Forrester Research if I would be willing to blog about their upcoming boot camp on integrated marketing on May 5. It’s a full-day intensive workshop being held at their offices in Cambridge. I said “Sure, I’d be happy to mention it, but I don’t think it will get picked up by other bloggers and thus it won’t spread through the blogosphere.” So the effectiveness of such a promotion strategy is limited.
A-List bloggers, like everyone else, are forever tuned in to the station “WII-FM” - What’s In It For Me. As such, Forrester’s message would be much more contagious, if there was a “free prize inside,” so to speak, for the bloggers who read my boot camp “plug.” In other words, the way to spread the word about the Forrester boot camp is for Forrester to make an irresistible, exclusive offer to bloggers who blog about the boot camp.
For example, what if Forrester gave away some exclusive piece of research that normally only their clients have access to? It doesn’t have to be an entire report, just something exclusive and something bloggable. Like a “scoop” on an upcoming report. Or a synopsis of key points or perhaps a mini report. Now what if the bloggers who blog about this integrated marketing boot camp get access to this exclusive information as part of the deal? In fact, what if Forrester Research turn this into an ongoing program, kind of like how Microsoft is wooing influential bloggers with their “Search Champs” program (where they hand-pick influencers and fly them to Redmond to wine-and-dine them and to discuss how Microsoft might improve their MSN search engine).
Hmm… “Forester Research Champs.” Sure, they’d be buying off bloggers. But everybody would win, including blog readers. Bloggers get access to exclusive research early and often - as long as they agree to blog about Forrester. It is an interesting proposition. Forrester, what do you think?
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Business Blogging Teleconference
What happens when Netconcepts’ president Stephan Spencer gets such blogging and marketing luminaries together over the phone as Seth Godin, Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, Shel Israel, Steve Rubel, Debbie Weil, BL Ochman and Toby Bloomberg? An amazing discussion about the possibilities and future of marketing blogs, that’s what! Produced by MarketingProfs.com.
Read the Executive Summary: part 1 and part 2
Download the Transcript: PDF (600 K)
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Move over Blogs: Here come Podcasts
Think what audio books on tape did for the road warrior—turning our cars and airplane seats into mobile universities. Podcasting has the same capacity to change the way we learn and take in new information.
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New eyetracking study: where Google searchers look and click
I found the eyetracking study from Enquiro and Did-It unveiled last week at Search Engine Strategies and covered in Search Day fascinating. The aggregate heat map shown on the right (larger version here) shows where participants focused their eyes (and their attention) the most. As you can see, the first listing not only drew the most attention; the full listing was read more fully from left to right, than other listings.
Visibility drops the further down the search results you go, and clickthroughs drop even more markedly (as you can see from the graphs below). This got me thinking about Zipf’s Law. Zipf’s Law is applicable to Top Ten Lists, as Seth Godin explains, perhaps Zipf’s Law might be applicable to the SERPs (search engine results pages) too? (In general terms, Zipf’s Law states that being #1 is much, much better than being #2 which is much, much better than being #3 and so on. So dominating a Top 10 list is critical.) Although these graphs don’t follow Zipf’s Law exactly, nonetheless given this data I’d consider it foolish to be complacent if your search listings are not at the very top of the SERPs.
What is it about searchers that makes them so blind to relevant results further down the page? Is this due to the “implied endorsement” effect, where searchers tend to simply trust Google to point them to the right thing? Or is it just the way humans are wired, to make snap decisions, as Malcolm Gladwell insightfully explains in his new book, Blink? According to the study, 72% of searchers click on the first link of interest, whereas 25.5% read all listings first, then decide. My guess is that both effects (”implied endorsement” and “rapid cognition”) play a role in searcher behavior.
A few other important take-aways from the study:
- 6/7 (85%) of searchers click on natural (”organic”) results (not 60/40 as the search engines and PPC (pay-per-click) vendors would have you believe).
- The top 4 sponsored slots are equivalent in views to being ranked at #7 - #10 natural.
- (corollary to #2): This means if you need to make a business case for natural search, then (assuming you can attain at least #3 rank in natural for the same keywords you bid on) natural search could be worth two to three times your PPC results.
In all, a superb research study. Great job Did-It, Enquiro, and EyeTools!
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Will Blogs Become the Ultimate Marketing Tool?
The once neutral territory of the blogosphere is enticing corporates who have awoken to the fact that business blogging entails relatively low startup costs. It’s potential for ROI hasn’t been ignored either.
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AntiqueHardware.com
This ecommerce site offers a range of items from cabinet hardware to telephone booths and from rubber duckies to magnificent clawfoot bathtubs. AntiqueHardware.com offers original restored antiques as well as flawless replica pieces perfect for any home or office. Visitors are greeted with their own account pages and an easily navigated shopping cart experience.
[ database | client admin cms | SEO ]
Visit The Site: Antique Hardware
Audience Development and the Internet
Circulation and the Internet: Co-hosted by American Business Media and National Trade Circulation Foundation, Inc. — New York City
- The benefit of the internet to your circulation/audience development efforts, and how important it is to your company
- How to use email to renew or acquire new subscribers
- E-mail tests - what’s working, what’s not working
- Search engine marketing - what are you using and how is it working
- Banner ads - are they working, what have you changed, where do you have them
- How has can spam effected your subscription efforts? How has it effected your list rental activities? How has it effected your use of outside lists for subscription promotion?
- Web agents - are they still working?
- Blogs - are they a source of names? How can we get subscription information onto a blog?
- Email files - do you have separate files for circulation, web casts, eNL, or a combined database for all? Advantages and disadvantages for each.
Gloria Adams, Pennwell - Moderator
Laura Wilson, NEJM - Panelist
Sean Fulton, GCN Publishing - Panelist
Brian Klais, Netconcepts - Panelist
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