Thoughts On How To Become A Great Blogger

Here are Luis`s thoughts on each of the tips we presented:

1. Understanding the fundamentals of Blogger Relations: I never thought about it this way but the article has got a point. If you want to get out there and connect with others you would need to work on your Blogger Relations, indeed, perhaps at the same level if not more (Because of the remoteness) than the traditional PR. And perhaps being shy may not help a lot.
   
   
2. Create value: Indeed, this is one of the reasons why I primarily created all of my weblogs. To be able to add further into the conversation(s) my two cents worth of comments on the topics that I have got a passion for, because after all, it is all down to how passionate you are about the topics you want to discuss in order to be able to create that sustainable value.
   
   
3. Grow and sustain your audience by providing real analysis: Spot on! Otherwise why would you want to reference on something if you are going to be able to read in the original resource. What is the point? We can all read the original article by ourselves. In my case, I just want to know people's opinions about that piece of news. For the rest I can get the details myself. That is where I think the power of weblogging is; in augmenting the original conversation(s).
   
   
4. Report on community opinion: This is a very powerful option since it would allow to build further up on that sense of belonging to the group or the community with which you can start creating multiple connections at multiple levels and make it all a very worth while discussion where everyone provides their share on establishing the connection.
   
   
5. Respond with comments to build relationships and traffic: This is one of those tips that I cannot but stress how important it is. I am one of those lucky folks whose Internet weblog is not very popular. Yes, to me, that is a good thing ! It has got a good share of readers who get to comment every now and then and I am just very delighted that I can dedicate the time to respond to them the way they deserve for coming back over and over again and sharing their thoughts. That is, to me, what differentiates a good weblogger from a mediocre one just looking to have their traffic increased so that they rank higher. Waste of time.
   
   
6. Track your conversations: This is also another tip that I have been employing from the very beginning since I started weblogging away. I have even weblogged myself about it elsewhere when I provided an overview about coComment and how I am currently using myself BlinkList to keep track of all of the comments I share out there in the Blogosphere. Yes, indeed, it is all about the conversations so you might as well go ahead and keep track of them.
   
   
7. Don't be afraid of criticism: No, indeed, don`t be afraid of it because that is actually what is going to give character to your weblog and what will make people stick together with you. Believe it or not, you will be able to attract some more traffic through that criticism than just talking to yourself. It is just so much more entertaining and engaging, specially if you would want to be part of the conversations.
   
   
8. Conduct interviews to generate content and ideas: Great tip ! Something I haven`t exploited myself yet for any of my weblogs I maintain but perhaps something that I may be able to use some time in the future. Does anybody out there from you folks fancy doing an interview to talk about KM, Communities of Practice, Social Networking and the like? Let me know
   
   
9. Promote your weblog: Yes, in principle, I agree with giving some more promotion to your own weblogs, like I have mentioned elsewhere in another weblog posts, but I have also indicated that you should probably not overdo it in detriment of providing that value that is mentioned above. I think they could both walk hand in hand to provide some good balance. Sometimes it is not about getting the word out and about all over the place, but getting the right word out and about. That is, to me, what really matters. The rest is circumstantial. Check this other weblog post from Steve Rubel on the subject and its subsequent commentary (I will talk about it more in detail at a later time, not to worry; one metablog post at a time) for some additional reading on the topic.
   
   
10. Monitor the web for brand names and references: As far as I can see anybody who may not have been doing this for quite some time now, even if you do not have a weblog, I feel that they just do not want to be part of the conversations taking place out there and therefore become an integral part of them. Thus, if you haven`t done so yet, get involved ! We will all be much better off if you do so.

source : http://www.scoutblogging.com/blogging_tips/

Blogging Strategy

Blogging Strategy

A formal custom strategy and plan will be developed upon company approval based off of your SCOUT blogging assessment. Your strategy and plan will include the following elements:

Blog Strategy Overview – Executive summary of the strategy for your company highlighting the key goals, tactics, and measurement standards.

Designated Bloggers – An overview of the bloggers who will be posting and their administrative privileges. This section of your strategy also provides a profile of the types of people from your organization who would support your company’s overall blogging strategy.

Blog Description – The formal written description of your company’s blog(s) and its mission.

Content Focus – The content focus describes the various topics that the blog(s) will cover on a frequent basis. An abstract description for each recommended and agreed content focus area will be available in this section.

How often should bloggers post – Your bloggers will be provided with coaching on the posting frequency. Your post frequency strategy is determined by the assertiveness of the stated goals, available resources, and the scope of the agreement with SCOUT.

Content Review Process – This provides all parties with the agreed upon protocol for posting to the blog. The goal is to provide the highest level of content scrutiny without sacrificing the voice of the post or the ability to post an entry or comment in a timely fashion.

Blogging Policy – An outline of the limits to what can be written on the blog, what is expected of all bloggers, what topics are off limits, as well as basic rules and guidelines for engagement in the blogosphere.

Comments Policy – A publicly posted policy outlining how your company will filter and or respond to comments and trackbacks. The general guidelines are to post all comments and trackbacks as long as they are not inflammatory or obscene. Your company can also reserve the right to prevent overly promotional posts or spam.

Employee blogs: Internal and External – A posted guideline regarding internal or external company blogs. For example, you may authorize your employees to run their own “external” blogs as long as they follow certain guidelines, list a disclaimer, and link to the official corporate blogs with a designated image or line of text.

General Employee Consumer Generated Media Policy – We will work with you to set up a general employee consumer generated media posting policy. If even your employees don’t blog, it is important to let them know what can be said about your company on the web while they work for you.

Blog Marketing Plan – Based upon your marketing goals, we develop your strategy for generating awareness and reaching your marketing goals for your blog. The blog marketing plan will provide an overview of your blog SEO and PR goals, which will offer quantitative goals to achieve with the number of articles.

Blogger Relations Plan – How we intend to promote your blog with the key influencers in your space, addressing who we will target with comments, and trackbacks,.

Blogging Technology and Hosting – The recommended technology solution for your blogging needs.

Blog Design Recommendations – Design guidelines and recommendations.

Training Schedule and Participants – Training for your designated bloggers and affiliated team members.

Implementation Timeline – A living document outlining the implementation process for your custom strategy.

source : scoutblogging.com/blogging_tips/

Should you host your own corporate blog or use a service

There are essentially two types of blog publishing systems, user-friendly hosted systems (like Blogger and TypePad and Wordpress.com) and robust flexible server systems (like Movable Type and Wordpress.org). Building and hosting a server solution can be a huge pain in the butt, and probably not the wisest move for companies with minimal technical resources. However, there are a number of reasons why companies should consider their options carefully.

When it comes to corporate blogging, I recommend setting up your own blog system over relying on a large hosted service like TypePad, Blogger. Granted hosted systems require minimal investment, they're very powerful, easy to use, setup, and design, but they can limit your potential.

Here's why I prefer the robust flexible server systems for corporate blogging.

1. Server based blog publishing systems are less likely to be targeted by DOS attacks and system outages and slowdowns. With hosted systems, your company's blog is at the mercy of the provider. See this story in a May 3rd edition of Information Week. The headline reads Massive DoS Attack Knocks TypePad, LiveJournal Blogs Offline.
   
   
2. For me the most important advantages to hosting your own blog are the search engine marketing / SEO implications. This is one reason companies are so keen on blogging in the first place. Well if your blog content is hosted somewhere else, the link juice is not helping boost your website link popularity. Also, the content that you are working so hard to produce is not getting attributed to your primary domain but rather something.blogspot or something.typepad. When you are in control of your own blog publishing system then you can decide where the content gets published. Some hosted systems like TypePad allow you to alias to a sub domain but from an SEO point of view I much prefer to publish to a root directory or a subfolder. I have anecdotal evidence as to why I believe this so if anyone is interested in hearing about it just ask.
   
   
3. If you are into blogging for the long haul then you want the links and relationships that you build to accumulate and endure. You may start out blogging with a hosted service and then change your mind and go for hosted. It will be hard to transfer the rankings and subscriptions you have built up. That's like living in one neighborhood and then moving to another town. You can keep some of those relationships that you have built up but a lot of your friends will have your old address and it's a little like starting over.

Now, I know that this subject is rife with exceptions and grey areas. This post is not really about evaluating the features of various blogging systems but rather a discussion about whether it's a good idea to rely on one of the mainstream user-friendly hosted systems.

I have researched it a lot over the past year. This post is intended to get the discussion started but it's not the final word. Just for the record, we use Movable Type for all of our blogs but I think Wordpress (commercial) is also a very nice system.

Source scoutblogging.com/blogging_tips/

How can I drive more traffic to my blog?

I recently was contacted by Yehuda Berlinger, a professional blogger who runs a blog about being a blogger looking for corporate blogging positions called Blogging Without a Wire and another blog about gaming.

He had a few great questions. I answered his email and then asked him if it would be alright to use my response in a blog post. With Yehuda’s permission, below are his questions and my (as usual) long winded answer. Any bloggers out there that have more to say, Yehuda and I would love to hear your comments. I would also like to put out a call for anyone that wants to be a guest blogger on this subject.

1. blogging question: While my own blog (http://itinfoservices.wordpress.com) is doing "well" in terms of PR, it still has very little traffic (200 tracked visitors a day) resulting in only token monetization ($100 a month). I know that's better than most, but I feel like I have the potential to do so much better. How do I start really moving forward on my own blog?

2: blogging question: I recently got, and left, a job as a corporate blogger. The expectation was that I will drive lots of traffic and lots of results. But my own blog took two years to get where it is today, and, while high in PR, it's low in traffic. If what I think I can do as a corporate blogger (create daily posts, control the corporate conversation, be the friendly face of the company) is so much different from what people expect from a corporate blogger (drive traffic and sales), am I pursuing the wrong thing?

First of all, congratulations on the 200 visitors per day, that’s a pretty good start. What you are asking about is a big question and a challenge that my team and I are faced with as well. It's true that blogs can drive traffic and lead to sales but I think what you are experiencing is something I, and I think many of our colleagues, are encountering as they try to instill social media participating practices into the corporate process. A lot of companies shut down or ignore the concept that there is such a thing as blogging best practices and that's not something you can just slap on the production line (believe me I've tried) and start to see spikes in sales and traffic.

The bad news is that most of my answers require a significant investment of someone's time and brain power. Here's the opportunity or good news --- the fact that it’s hard to tap into blogging traffic makes corporate blogging a great value for the companies and people who master the art. Doing this takes a lot of time and effort and, depending on what the client is paying you, it may or may not be something that you can systematically provide as part of your arrangement. As professional bloggers, we need to sell the client and get the resources we need to prove the case for them. Once we get their buy-in, we need their support or a level of authority to go out and transparently blog on their behalf.

I think there are a couple of components to driving traffic. They are:

• The actual setup of the blog,

• Keyword research and targeting,

• Community research,

• Ongoing monitoring for keywords and identified blog feeds,

• Quality commenting,

• Quality posting,

• Social media promotion and blogger outreach.

All of these are very important, but I think that monitoring and commenting are the keys to driving traffic.

There are also some other factors that play into the mix:

• Who you are (commercial vs. independent blogger, due to the fact that many bloggers have their own commercial agenda. Just a hunch, but sometimes I feel that a blogging community is more apt to promote the independent voice than point traffic to a commercial entity even if the content is insightful and useful). This contradicts a point I will make below hosting the blog under the company domain but it does not override that advice.

• How stimulating or controversial you are (do your posts spark discussion or outrage), or how inquisitive / conversational you are (some bloggers have a knack for getting the conversation started by raising questions and then keeping the conversation going. This requires dedication, vulnerability and passion on the blogger’s side because they’re saying 'I don’t have all the answers').

So, to answer your question, here are some things to try if you have not already.

1. Optimizing the technical setup of the blog: If it’s a commercial blog, I think the ideal is when the blog is part of the company domain. For example, company.com/blog. My rationale… presumably, the company website has been around for awhile and this is an advantage over a brand new domain or a company.blogspot.com URL. If a company is going to invest in blogging, they might as well leverage this advantage and let the content and links that the blog generates boost the corporate website’s page rank and, as I like to say, overall content footprint. In my experience a sub-folder (.com/blog) is better for SEO than a sub-domain (blog.company.com). Also see my previous post written about this. In the past I've written about Should you host your own corporate blog or use a service and The Ups and Downs of Multiple Website Identities.
   

2. Making SEO more than just an afterthought: Also, you want to make sure your blog has some of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) basics. Each blog post creates a permalink. Make sure the permalink page uses a title tag that includes the title of the blog post. Also, tag and categorize the post with a category or tag name that is relevant but also part of your target keyword list (see next two items for how to discover keywords).

3. Keyword Research: Do some keyword research around your topic and figure out the relevant terms that attract the most searchers per month. There are some OK free tools out there for doing this: Webmaster Toolkit or SeoBook's Tools and Gagets. I assume that you are probably already aware of these. There’s also a commercial product called Trellian which is what my SEO department uses.

4. Subjective Input: After you have developed your keyword list, give each of the phrases your own relevancy score. I like to use a scale of .01 – 1.0. A 1.0 is a dead-on match meaning that this term is very likely to be a qualified visitor. I would give a broad general term like “game” a lower score (because it is likely that only a fraction of the people searching on this term are interested in your what you are offering). You can then use these scores as a way to adjust and filter against your search frequency and post frequency (see next item). I use Excel to calculate by multiplying frequency by the score.

5. Blog and Social Media Community profiling: Once you have figured out your best list of terms, use Icerocket.com to check the post frequency about those terms. If the term is searched a lot and posted about a lot you know that if you optimized a post around that term then it is likely to attract a larger share of attention. You can also look at it another way. If the relevant term is searched a lot but not posted on a lot, that could be an opportunity to post about something that is of interest to searchers but does not have a lot of completion in the social media search engines like Technorati.com. This means that your post will stay in the social media searches longer because it’s not getting pushed down into obscurity, but generating a high frequency of noise around the term. Assuming that the term is a popular search phase, it’s likely to garner some extra traffic and attention due to the decreased level of completion in the blogosphere.

6. Content Strategy: Think about your audience. What are they interested in and what are the popular blogs that they are reading? Develop a profile of the bloggers who are reaching your audience. Read through their blog and look at who’s commenting and visit their blogs as well. Develop a matrix of the community and really try and identify the influencers and the active participants in the community. Create a blog roll on your site of these blogs that will help the bloggers develop an awareness of your site. Develop a strategy that will lead them to reference some of the work you’re doing (Admittedly, this is the toughest part but that’s the price we have to pay for greatness).

7. Timely Monitoring and Quick Response: Start monitoring all the blogs and important keyword on a daily basis. You should be on the lookout for blog posts that you can add value to by either commenting or posting about. If you see a post that you think you can add value to, comment now and write a post later.

8. Comment, comment comment: A good insightful comment on a popular or even not so popular blog can drive a significant amount of traffic and awareness to your blog. More importantly, comments will help you develop a trust within the community and with that blogger. Don’t assume one or two good comments are going to do the trick. It needs to be a consistent process that is guided by your monitoring. The earlier that you can spot a good comment opportunity and make a comment, the better chance you have of getting your thoughts into the mix and gaining some visibility and respect from the community.

9. Use blogging best practices for outreach: A lot of people talk about how gaining the attention of influencers and getting them to blog about you is a great way to generate traffic. Of course that’s true but some people look at influential bloggers as a PR opportunities (visualize a juicy sizzling steak) and try to pitch them using traditional media relations techniques. This might work sometimes but it could backfire (see the Bad Pitch Blog). I would say developing trust through a comment is a far better approach than directly pitching a blogger to write about you. Of course, this approach takes more time, but luckily you did not ask me how to be efficient. Then try and develop relationships with not only the big influencers, but some of the more passionate and lesser known bloggers by commenting and reacting and adding value to what they are saying on their blogs. Commenting on blogs is one of the best ways to direct people to your site. Make sure your comment adds value to what is being said.

10. Cultivate Inbound links: The ideal is when this happens naturally; you write a nice post and a blogger finds it and cites your page. That generates traffic and a link. However you can also give this process a nudge. This is a tricky area and it takes a certain chutzpa to do it but reach out to the bloggers and ask them to feed back to you on what you have written. You never know what they’re going to say, if anything, but I think that if you genuinely try to solicit their advices, it’s likely to lead to some link love down the road. I know that this also seems a little like you have an hidden agenda, but really you’re trying to be included in the conversation that’s going on, and sometimes you have to put your client or yourself on the line a little bit. Initially you may receive feedback that’s not entirely positive, but that’s something to build off of.

11. More tips and tactics: Here’s a good article I found that talks about some of the technical, feed related ways to promote a site.

12. Create something new: Create a tool, academic research, do a poll/survey or produce some resources that will create some thought leadership or be of interest to your target community. I've done this for my own company (Corporate Blogging Survey , the Blogging Success Study, Corporate Guidelines for Using Blogs and Forums , 10 Tips for Becoming a Great Corporate Blogger ) and it continues to be a great source of links and traffic to my site.
    

13. Social media networking: If you have not already developed a presence in the large social media networking communities such as MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, MyBlogLog, those are a great resource. Or, target more focused communities that focus on a certain industry. A great new example of this is MyRegan, a community of communicators. You can also engage in micro blogging with things like Twitter and Pownce.

source : scoutblogging.com/blogging_strategy/

Repeat Blog Visitors and Traffic – Part III

Preface: Even the perfect visitor to the perfect blog will probably not become a regular reader immediately. They may need to be exposed to your hopefully excellent material several times before they become a regular reader.

How to get visitors to come back over and over until your blog “sticks??”

All the methods for creating blog traffic we already suggested work.
A few other suggestions that may work for you:

Some blog software supports emailing those who have commented when a subsequent comment is left, and some bloggers mention it’s greatly increased their traffic. For example Expression Engine, Typepad, and Wordpress support this, although Blogger doesn’t currently.

Some bloggers suggest having just partial posts visible on their main blog post (with a “click here” or similar to see the full post), so that even a quick visitor will see parts of several posts. One of the posts may be compelling to them. I’ve just started experimenting significantly with this technique, and some bloggers absolutely love it.

Some bloggers swear by “post series” – as in this three-part blog post. I love this idea as often what I want to write doesn’t fit easily into a typical blog post. Actually, that’s a prime reason for my free newsletter BizBlog+ -- to be able to go into more detail than typical blog posts, series or not.

Actually I’m seeing more bloggers starting free newsletters – these will certainly help regular readers stay regular readers!

A “Most Popular Posts” list as well as heavy interlinking between related blog posts can also help a visitor stay longer and be well on their way to becoming a regular reader, as well as let them know that you have lots of great content.

Some other quick ideas that will get visitors to return include contests and surveys

Summary:

First we need to get people to our blog.

Then hopefully they’ll return again and again somehow. There are techniques above that can hasten this process.

Once they’ve been exposed to our blog several times, hopefully they’ll become very regular readers. Then maybe they’ll hire us, buy our products, buy us beer, become friends or otherwise enrich our lives, as hopefully we in some way enrich theirs :)

source : www.bloggingforbusinessbook.com/blogging_for_business