Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

You hear it all the time. “You should have a blog”….

You think you need a blog but you have no idea why. What are blogs anyway? What is the purpose? How is a blog different than a website? Do I need a blog philosophy?

What is a Blog?

Blogs are a type of website with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, text, graphics, video or links to other blogs, web pages and other related media. Unlike a website, a blog enables the reader to leave interactive comments after each entry.

Why do I want a Blog?

The most important reason to blog is to create a relationship with your customer.

What is a Blog versus Website?

How should your blog differ from your website? Your blog is about creating a relationship with your customer. It is “pull” marketing or publicity. Your blog reflects opinion, personality, individual viewpoints etc. Your website is an example of “push” marketing, meaning direct response, offers and promotions.  It is corporate information. Your website is factual. For example, while your website will contain press releases, your blog will contain commentary on announcements. If you host an event, your website will include facts about the event and registration information. The blog will include photos and stories from the event.

A blog can be used to get interactive with your customer, to raise awareness of topics related to corporate goals and to assist in closing sales. From a public relations perspective your blog can be used to deal with disasters and build the reputation of the company. Regardless of your blog philosophy, the blog should always be focused on your customer and talking to their needs, wants and desires. It is a dialog.

Testimonial Advertisements & Celebrity Endorsements

The Federal Trade Commission has finally issued an update to their guidelines concerning the use of endorsements and testimonials as used on the internet and social media. The last update was in 1980, well before the influence of websites, blogs and social media.

If you are a blogger, affiliate marketer or internet marketer, you need to be aware of how these revisions affect you and your business. You may want discuss these changes with your attorney and make adjustments to your web site, blog or social media campaigns.

The full text of the press release is available here.

The full text of the Act is available here.

In summary, the clarifications to the FTC Act are:

1) Advertisements that feature a consumer and convey his or her experience with a product or service as typical when that is not the case will be required to clearly disclose the results that consumers can generally expect.

2) “Material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. So, Bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.

3) Celebrities have a duty to disclose their relationships with advertisers when making endorsements outside the context of traditional ads, such as on talk shows or in social media.

It’s a good idea to ensure your web site, blog and social media strategy are following these new guidelines for the use of testimonial advertising and endorsements.

Have you ever heard someone say “I don’t need a blog, there isn’t enough to say about my product/service/subject?” Have you ever said it yourself? I used to think that way as well. How would I ever come up with enough to say about one particular subject? Well, there are all kinds of blogs with all kinds of purposes. The key to a successful blog is to know why your doing it and having a clear focused mission and strategy behind it.

Let’s say you are a crafts-person. A photo blog would be a practical and very effective means of sharing your custom work. A photo blog would do many things for your business, such as:

1) Create a portfolio of projects for your customers to review before making a purchase decision. For example, a painter, you can post before and after photos of her work.

2) A crafts-person could post photos of their booth and customers at the latest event they attended.

3) Allow your existing clients to post comments about the success of the project or event, thereby improving trust and probably conversion of potential clients and increasing the connection and relationship you have with your existing customers.

4) Your clients could link back to your blog post, increasing your search engine rankings and improving traffic to your site

5) When you add comments about the event/project/etc. in your post you can include keywords and increase your traffic and SEO.

6) It gives you more pages to be indexed by an search engine.

Just something to think about. There are many different types of blogs and many different reasons for creating them. One way to think of a blog is that if your business is involved in something informal, dynamic, changing, or current, perhaps it belongs in a blog. A blog is a great way to create an informal portfolio and to market your business or service.

Social Media Metrics

How do you measure the success of your social media campaigns?

Social media marketing actually encompasses a broad range of tactics, goals and strategies. Let’s look at the metrics as a function of what social media can do for you…

1) Establish a Presence

Do you have a presence everywhere your customers hang out on the web? How do you measure this quantitatively? Make a list and check it off.

2) Build Awareness and Drive Traffic.

This is directly measurable through your website analytics. Look at the source of the new traffic.

3) Capture Names and Build Lists

Well it just so happens that you can measure this directly from social media. Your basic metric is the quantity of new connections, followers, fans & subscribers (email and RSS).

4) Build Relationships and Trust

Ok, this is where social media can really shine. And, it is the most difficult to measure. Some suggestions for metrics are the number of interactions with your customers. How active are they in communicating with you? How many comments on your blog post? How many referrals to your site? How many retweets? Are you adding value? The number of inbound links to your site and any improvement in your search engine rankings (as compared to your competition) will also show the quality of the relationships you are building.

5) Conversion to Sale

When you make a special sales offer, you can use your web analytics to track conversions. But often conversions come through time with the increased relationship. It is often not one outlet that led to the sale but a series of exposures over time. Still, you can use web site analytics to trace the source of the sale. You can use surveys (how did you hear about us?). The metric is the increase in sales and revenues. Look at the dollar value of the new customers and its source (from analytics).

6) Upsell or Re-sell

How well are you getting additional sales from your existing clients? Measure this based on where the existing customer came from when they clicked through to make a purchase.

To get to ROI, you’ll need to know your sales income (by referring source) and your expenses (time/money spent on social media, opportunity loss, outsourcing costs, etc.). Again, social media is about building relationships, so the ROI should be increasing over time as you build those relationships. That’s another metric to look at. Look at results as a function of time, not just individual campaign. You should see an improvement over time of the cost of sale.