While it’s understandable that you may believe there is no need for you or your business to stake a claim on the blogosphere, the truth is, if you are looking for a new way to start and grow new customer relationships, starting a corporate blog may be just the thing you need to do.
A B2B blog (business to business blog) differs greatly from your average business blog that sells products directly to customers (known as a B2C blog). The goal with a B2C blog is to complete the sale. B2B blogs, on the other hand, deal directly with other businesses, and therefore are designed to build long term relationships.
Here are some things you should know when starting your own B2B blog.
Aim For Uniformity
When building your blog, remember to follow your brand. If your company logo is in the top right hand corner of every page of your website, it should be in the top right corner of your blog as well. When you send your customers email newsletters, do you use a conversational tone of voice? If so, maintain that same tone on your blog. Every aspect of your company’s brand should be reflected in every piece of content you produce, from your website, to your blog, to your advertisements.
Go In With A Plan
Before your blog goes live, make sure you know what topics you intend on covering. The worst thing a blog can do is launch with flare and gusto, and then go dark as you get lax when it comes to posting consistently. Readers expect new content and they want it on a regular basis. You must develop the ability to effectively plan and schedule your blog’s content. If you begin to fall behind on your posts, you may risk the loyalty of your readers.
Keep Your Readers Informed
The whole point of having a blog is to make sure that the people who visit you have something interesting or entertaining to read. It’s important to go in with a plan, but you have to be flexible. If your company or product makes the news, or if a law changes that may concern the businesses that purchase your products, let them know. Don’t be so strict in your schedule that you may miss the opportunity to give your readers some important information.
Format
Readers like to know what to expect when they visit a blog. Apart from updating the content on your blog regularly, you should try to stick to a predetermined format. This goes for the amount of images in each post, as well as the length of the post in general.
Be Realistic
If you don’t see your blogs traffic building by leaps and bounds once you start your blog, don’t worry. B2B blogs take longer to build a following than B2C blogs because of their long term relationship building nature. Be patient. Focus on providing your readers with useful, relevant, informative content on a regular basis, and you’ll see your community grow.
As we know, B2B marketing is about starting and growing relationships with your clients. Concentrate on the relationship as opposed to the sale, and your clients will become loyal.
In your role as a content marketer and becoming a publisher, one of the most significant functions you and your organization needs to develop is the ability to effectively plan and schedule your blog’s content. In publishing, this is simply known as editorial planning. As a marketer new to publishing, this can be difficult without the proper guidance and in my experience, it is one of the most common areas that causes the best of intentions with a corporate blog to go awry.
You see, a corporate blog is very much like a trade publication. “How so?,” you ask. Consider these characteristics of a trade publication:
Targeted to a specific audience
Published with a consistent frequency
Has a variety of article styles and departments
Covers a range of topics
Has some combination of writers, contributors, and guest columnists.
I could go on, but the point is that these common characteristics are what makes a corporate blog, a publication. And it’s this mindset and approach to a corporate blog, (it’s your publication) that will lay the foundation for success. I hate to say folks, but writing the actual articles is really only a small piece of the work.
Here are some tips and definitions to help you effectively plan your blog’s content.
Editorial Planning
The act of selecting and coordinating topics, dates, and resources for the articles to be published in a given period of time. It’s recommended to complete this activity every six months, with check-ins each quarter.
Editorial Planning Tips
When planning your blog’s topics and articles, first fill in your calendar with significant dates that affect and impact your company. Examples of the types of dates to consider: new product releases, trade shows you will be attending (and those that you won’t but are important to your company/industry), webinars that are scheduled, milestone and historic dates for your company and industry, dates of economic reports that will be released, dates of earnings calls if public company, key legislation etc.
With these dates on the calendar, you can now visualize what is happening and when, and begin the process of “penciling in” articles ideas and topics.
In our corporate blogging consulting, we recommend that your blog topics be categorized as: primary, secondary, and tertiary.
Primary: As indicated by the name, these are the most important topics for your blog and should be covered the most frequently. These articles should address your buyer persona’s most vital pain points, provide relevant, valuable information to assist them, and support your brand promise.
Secondary: These topics have less of a direct relationship with the use of your products and services, but still have a place in your industry and interest to your buyer personas. As an example, you may write an article on “Five Must Have Skills For Tomorrow’s Leaders,” to help your customers improve professionally, all the while this is not directly related to your content marketing consulting services ; ).
Tertiary: These topics are covered with least amount of frequency and can delve into reflective topics, personal stories, and even comics. The key though is that they do add the opportunity for levity, providing insights into the people behind the blog, and what makes you and your company tick.
It is better to underestimate the amount of articles your organization is capable of publishing when you are first getting started. There is nothing worse than adding pressure that is unnecessary. If it’s a new activity for you, so start slowly and build frequency as you gain competence.
Editorial Calendar
The end product of your editorial planning containing the dates, topics, and penciled in titles/subjects for the articles. It should be a formal (or at least semi-formal) document that once complete is shared throughout the company. By doing so, you are providing an opportunity for everyone to participate in the blog and add .
Publication Schedule
A publication schedule plays a vital role in helping to operationalize your corporate blog as it identifies all the deadlines that must be met to ensure that the final publication date is not missed.
For all the benefits an editorial calendar offers, it only provides one date: the publication date. It does nothing for all the activities that must take place prior to publication. Enter the publication schedule. It is used to plan the pre-publication development process and milestone dates of articles, including writing, copy editing, proofing, approvals, posting the article to the blog platform, optimizing, etc.
By using these tools and following these tips you’ll be on your way to developing a corporate blog that STANDS OUT and gets the ATTENTION of the people you care about. If you don’t, you are in for a long struggle and blog that will probably in it’s lifetime have less than 10 articles.
As the saying goes these days, everyone is a publisher, but the truth is not everyone should be. If you are gonna do it, why not do it right? Here are some tips to help you effectively plan your blog’s editorial content.
Standing out from the millions of blogs online can be a difficult task for marketers. From competitors to industry pundits, it is easy to get lost in the shuffle among the social media channels and search engines. Although as a B2B Marketer, your blog exists as a means to educate existing customers and new prospects about your company’s products and services, the end-result is that you are building confidence in the mind of your readers that you really know your particular field of business.
Buyers are more likely to buy from you with the confidence that you are a knowledge expert in your field and will share further knowledge once they become customers. By consistently employing best practices in your blog posts, your B2B Marketing blog will likely be a larger lead generator than your corporate website, attracting prospects by way of social media and the search engines.
1. Content leads to Volume:
Within a few months of instituting a blogging schedule at LoopFuse, our Marketing Automation blog grew from 100 visitors to several thousand per month. The catalyst to the increased traffic was in the amount of content that was being offered, and it was made possible by employing an internal schedule of blogs and bloggers. Every week employees of the company were to blog about a relevant topic, and those posts would then be scheduled across the following week, thereby creating a constant stream of content that led to an increased volume of search and organic inbound leads.
If enforcing deadlines is difficult at your company, I’ll share a tip that an ex-coworker once told me: Institute “Blogging Friday”, where every Friday employees would be given a few hours to write a short blog. Having everyone blog on one day makes for great office conversations and knowledge exchange, and you will likely end up with higher quality content.
2. Blogging for Search:
Although SEO is beyond the scope of this article, an important note to remember when you’re blogging is that you are not only blogging for human readers, but the search engines and other social media search websites and content aggregators like Collecta. There are some basic tactics to employ a when focusing on a data-driven blogging technique by identifying keywords in your post and bolding them, interlinking other relevant parts of your website, and employing custom URLs that include the title or keywords of the blog.
Since your blog will be responsible for a large portion of your website traffic, this is one area we advise customers to invest in professional services that are knowledgeable in designing and laying-out blogs for optimal search engine and social network growth.
3. Virality – Leveraging Social Media:
With respect to your blog posts, social media should be viewed as a way to engage not only your network, but your network’s network. That is, by posting relevant and constantly updated articles, your followers will inherently share your valuable insight with their network of followers. Over time, you should amass a large following that will carry your viral campaigns on their own. As a best practice tip, make sure you mention your new blog posts on Twitter, FaceBook, and other social media outlets and have your employees syndicate the mention.
4. Dumb it down:
It’s a known fact, people don’t read on the web, they scan. When writing a blog, keep the post short and sweet and put yourself in the shoes of a reader that has limited time looking for a knowledgeable resource on a specific topic he or she may be researching. A common practice when writing a blog post is to preview what it will look like and scan for keywords that you believe readers are looking for. Those keywords should then be highlighted and linked to more in-depth resources. By keeping posts short and to-the-point, you are more likely to gain repeat readers and a perception as a knowledge expert.
5. Measure, Rinse, Repeat:
What’s best about blogging with a data-driven technique is that marketers can measure the demand of a particular post and capitalize on it; for instance, looking at our web analytics, we noticed that a particular post on email deliverability was responsible for an enormous amount of new visitors and conversions. In contrast, a post on Free Marketing Automation, although responsible for an even larger amount of visitors had very few conversions attributed to it. Further analysis shows what we suspected, that email marketing is a hot-topic for marketers/customers, yet our blogging about a free version of our product mainly appealed to competitors and industry pundits.
Armed with the data that your web analytics service provides, you are better able to identify what your customers are interested in and provide additional knowledge articles on those topics. In the end, you not only appear as a domain expert in that field, but you further saturate the market (the search engines) with that knowledge.
Armed with these 5 best practices for B2B corporate blogging (and these 10 B2B corporate blogging pitfalls to avoid), you should be on your way to creating repeatable, knowledgeable, and search-engine-friendly blog posts, increasing web traffic readership and building loyalty across your customer-base.
About The B2Bblogger: Roy Russo is co-founder of Loopfuse and is the driving force behind fulfilling its vision and extend the adoption of marketing automation solutions to sales and marketing organizations. To this end, Roy is responsible for product strategy, management and expansion. Roy has a Bachelor of Arts in economics from Florida International University.
Definition of Pitfall A. a hidden or not easily recognized danger or difficulty B. A video game released by Activision for the Atari 2600 in 1982. It is one of the best selling games ever made for the Atari 2600, with over 4 million copies sold.
While I may have spent nearly all of 1982 and 1983 playing definition B, the definition that matters to B2B marketers today is the “not easily recognized dangers” of corporate blogging. Here is a list of 10 issues that you should be aware of when launching your company’s blog.
1.Not gaining buy in
The first step to ensuring the success of your investment in B2B blogging is to gain organizational buy-in. Corporate blogging is not a one time event. It’s a long term commitment to ongoing dialog and communication with your customers, prospects, investors, partners, employees, and press. Without buy-in and a full understanding of the impact a blog can have (both positively and negatively) for the organization, in times of need, you will busy gaining buy-in rather then solving the issue at hand. Start off on the right foot. Build consensus, get commitment from the key stakeholders within the company, and then and only then, start.
2.Flying by the seat of your pants
In order for a blog to be successful you need goals, knowledge of your audience (buyer personas), and an editorial strategy to connect and engage them. Does that sound like winging it? Of course not. Spend the time and do the up front work to ensure you achieve your desired results.
3.Swinging for the fences
Corporate blogging is a long term commitment. You should not expect to hit it out of the park with every post. You wanna be a singles hitter. Hit for average, not home runs. Sure there will be articles that you publish that will be super popular, but that is not the point. Your blog is a channel for you to use to communicate, connect, and grow and influence your community. This is accomplished over time by providing helpful, useful information that will serve your readers at every level – emotionally, rationally, and logically.
FUN. Have some. Actually make it a loads of fun to be involved with your blog. Corporate blogs often require resources from across the organization to write, to make design changes, to handle comments, etc. Keeping employees engaged and interested is ALWAYS easier when the job is fun. If it’s boring and a burden, your long term blogging success is doomed.
5.Thinking a blog is just for marketing
Enough said.
6.Failing to measure
Facts are friends. Without them you have nothing to guide your future actions. You won’t know what’s working, what’s not, and even worse, anything to support your future requests for additional resources to support your growing community.
7.Failing to communicate
The good, the bad, and the ugly. Success or failure. Whatever the message, just be sure to spread the word. Make it a point to keep the company informed of your progress. Remember that buy-in you received before you launched, keep the stakeholders in the know. You’ll need their support when you would like to make additional investments in social media and content marketing.
8.Believing everyone can write well
Just don’t do it. For a corporate blog, you are likely going to have contributions from multiple people. Some will be up for the task others not so much. Having that understanding going in will help you plan for the copy editing process. Also, remember when you get that poorly written draft, the person submitting it likely believes it is their best work. Don’t be harmful with your feedback, be helpful.
9.Being lax on deadlines
If you read our eBook, How to Think And Act Like A Publisher, you know you need deadlines. Lots of them. Not just for the publication dates of your articles, but all the additional dates and milestones in the the article writing and blog posting process. Once you establish them, make people accountable for them. Why? If you become known as someone that is lax on deadlines, you’ll forever be in a place that you are chasing the work, rather that it being submitted to you on time, every time. It’s just not a good place to be (or a way to run a successful corporate blog).
10. Failing to have a pre-defined process for handling negative comments
It is going to happen. You will receive negative and disparaging comments / complaints on your blog posts. Get over it. Instead of being afraid, be prepared. Establish a process for handling the negative comments with professionalism and tact. Be sure the appropriate people are involved. Having the process pre-defined helps you react rationally and logically. It also helps ease the emotional impact and panic that could occur if you are not prepared.
That’s my list, what’s yours? Do you have any other corporate blogging pitfalls to share with B2B marketers?
One of the biggest challenges marketers face when they develop a corporate blog is finding the resources to devote to it. This challenge is even more difficult if you don’t know what you should blog about. You may write a few posts, run out of ideas and let your blog sit empty as you devote your time to other critical projects. However, to realize benefits from a corporate blog, you must post engaging content on a regular basis.
Below are 18 topic suggestions for your corporate blog. If you used each of these ideas once a month, you would have enough posts to support an active corporate blog that can bring lots of traffic to your website. You can also pick and choose the topics that would work best for your company.
17. If you’re active on Twitter, you can share your weekly “top tweets.” That way, readers who don’t use Twitter can keep up with your latest news, and readers who tweet will want to follow you.
18. Mention your other social networks. For example, you can highlight discussions you’re having on Facebook and encourage readers to join the conversation.
If you still need ideas, ask your customers what they want to read on your corporate blog. They can provide you with insight into what topics are the most relevant to them.
Now it’s your turn, what other topics are you writing about on your corporate blog?
About the B2Bblogger:Rachel Foster is an award-winning copywriter and owner of Fresh Perspective Copywriting. She helps B2B marketers and professional service providers generate more leads and sales by providing them with communications that motivate their audiences to take action. Visit www.freshperspectivewriting.com to download free B2B marketing white papers and subscribe to the Fresh Marketing newsletter.
In this week’s #B2BChat, we take on the topic of B2B Blogging. Fun, right?
There is a tremendous amount of discussion on B2B blogging and the benefits it offers; extending your voice, the creation of ongoing, regular fresh content to be found by search engines, share-ability, inbound links and the list goes on.
While many B2B marketers have been at it awhile, many are also just learning the ropes of B2B blogging. In this week’s #B2Bchat, let’s discuss the questions below and learn how B2B blogging can be used effectively as part of a B2B marketing strategy.
We’ll ask:
Do you have a B2B blogging strategy? Or are you flying by the seat of your pants?
Are you consistent or erractic? Do you blog on a schedule?
What is the single biggest benefit you have seen from your blog?
What is the single biggest UNEXPECTED benefit you have seen from your blog?
How does it tie in into your lead generation activities, other things in your marketing mix?
Are you budgeting more or less time and money going forward (2011) to support your B2B blogging efforts?
Name one lesson you wish you knew when you started.
What advice would you offer to those just starting a B2B blog?
Ghost blogging. Good or Bad?
What is the biggest challenge to working with multiple internal authors?
Fatigue. How do you deal with it?
WordPress users: Favorite plugins?
Join us for a live conversation with other B2B marketers who face the same challenges that you do.
Follow @B2B_chat for updates and join us this Thursday, September 2nd, at 8 pm Eastern as we tackle B2B blogging.
If you’ve put your energies into building a community that engages with your B2B blog but aren’t seeing the kind of conversions you (or your boss) are looking for you might want to back up a little and re-examine your B2B blog strategy.
Common wisdom suggests that:
publishing conversational posts
engaging with your audience
cross-promoting on all the relevant social media channels
having a professional blog theme
and working with keywords and search engine optimization
will give you the best shot at success.
But at the end of the day success in the B2B sphere isn’t about conversations and engagement: it’s about sales.
Don’t Let Your Focus Wander
The “engage, start a conversation” mantra that seems to be doing the rounds at the moment might be a bit misleading from a B2B perspective. Especially when studies suggest that the overwhelming majority of visitors to a B2B blog are first timers.
If that’s the case, then to kick start your B2B blog and improve your conversion rates you need to stop thinking less about conversation and engagement for a moment, and more about:
generating targeted traffic
ensuring your site has awesome call-to-actions
and easily navigated links to well-constructed squeeze pages.
Targeted Traffic
One way to go about this is arguably to spend some of that marketing budget on Google’s sponsored links. This is particularly useful if your business is targeting local traffic because it keep those wasteful (and potentially expensive!) clicks down.
The more common approach, and one I personally recommend, is search engine optimization coupled with a well thought out keyword phrase campaign. And here I don’t mean guessing what your target audience might be clicking for but really investing time and energy into working out just what the most profitable and attainable keyword phrases really are.
Once you’ve got this sorted, you can set about planning your blog schedule for the coming month around those keywords and then figuring out how to make those posts engaging and appealing to your audience.
Call-to-Actions
If, as Marketo’s study (PDF) from earlier this year suggests, that 92% of buyers use search to begin the buying process then it’s probably worthwhile to think of blogs as a storefront:
The visitor clicks through from Google (or an integrated social media campaign, say, from a link on Twitter) giving you a few moments to capture their attention and funnel them to your squeeze page.
Because the design of blogs hasn’t really developed that much from their first appearance on the scene, that means you’ve only really have the sidebar, header or post content to grab your audience’s attention.
This is where A/B testing is an imperative part of your B2B blog’s first steps towards success. It’s not just about producing great blog posts; it’s also about ensuring that your call-to-actions are seen and acted upon.
So What’s the Best Approach for B2B blog success?
Before continuing to put energy and resources into building B2B blog conversations and engagement, figure out the best way to maximise targeted traffic to your site. Spend time and resources discovering well-chosen keyword phrases and make sure your website is optimized for SEO.
Then ensure that you’ve got a process in place that assesses the conversions you’re getting from that traffic, running A/B tests over a period of time to tweak your site.
Takeaways
With targeted traffic and optimised call-to-actions all wrapped up in some great site design, finally integrated with an engaging, conversational tone of writing and a social media strategy to cross-promote your posts, you should be firmly on track to B2B blog success!
About The B2Bblogger: Jon Buscall is managing director of Jontus Media, an online content marketing agency in Stockholm, Sweden. You can follow him on Twitter @jonbuscall and @jontusmedia.
Milestones are great time to stop, look back, and reflect. With the publishing of this article, we’ve surpassed the 100 post milestone (faster than I expected). So that’s a good thing. Speaking of good things, so are you – for being a reader and willing to share your time with me and B2Bbloggers. We are extremely thankful.
From the start on Oct 28th, 2009, the mission of B2Bbloggers has been to shape the future of B2B marketing. Our approach on the web site is to provide you a combination of original content from fellow B2B marketers and aggregated content from over 1,500 B2B marketing blogs (submit your B2B marketing blog).
Using our Twitter account – @B2Bbloggers – we are constantly tweeting links to helpful, useful articles to again make it easy for you to find the information you need to be more successful. Every tweeted article is hand picked and has to pass our filter: “Will this make the job of a B2B marketer easier?” and “Will a B2B marketer learn how to better market their company?”
We are just getting started, we are especially appreciative to each of you that have become our loyal readers, retweeters, and advocates. We look forward to our continued relationship, and as always you are welcome to share your voice and thoughts on the future of b2b marketing by writing for B2Bbloggers. Enjoy the list, it is a summary of learnings, happenings, musings, and some favorite blogs, posts, and eBooks that I’ve discovered over the past 100 posts.
Thoughts On Blogging
It’s fun. And hard work.
If you enjoy writing, it is a lot easier (luckily I do).
It’s changed publishing. We are all publishers now. (You have to take the good with the bad of that statement).
It’s more strategic than you first think. At minimum you need goals, well conceived buyer personas, and an editorial plan.
The written article is truly just 50% of the job. Copy editing, proofreading, optimizing, finding/creating images, and adding it to the blog platform make up the rest.
Eric Fletcher (coming soon) CMO McGlinchey Stafford PLLC
Musings
Content Marketing and Inbound Marketing work. Period. In a post back in November, I asked if these terms were synonyms and the leaders of the charge Joe Pulizzi, David Meerman Scott, and Brian Halligan all weighed in. I prefer (and use) the term Content Marketing more so than Inbound Marketing for the reason that (in my view) content marketing takes into account all the channels your content can (and should) be used in to attract, nurture, and engage people.
To all the people who are saying, “Why do I need an iPad?” Were your parents the people asking, “Why do I need a microwave?” While you are probably right, you don’t need an iPad right now, in my view this next generation of computing devices will see 50% of us having some form of iPad, HP Slate, Microsoft Courier, or Google Tablet within the next 3-5 years (if the price comes down typical to Moore’s Law that percentage may even be higher).
Can someone explain to me how working with a writer to draft blog posts (i.e. Ghost Writing) is any different than having a PR agency write a press release (or any other form of marketing content)? I just don’t understand how on one hand you can preach the benefits of content marketing and then on the other hand (knowing the labor involved) say that to be successful you have to do it yourself.If you give me authenticity/transparency/trust argument, does that mean PR agencies haven’t been that way in the past when writing press releases for clients? I really just struggle with understanding the argument. A good partner will go to whatever lengths necessary to understand your business and ensure your communications are honest, transparent, and authentic. Wouldn’t they?
This year will not be the year the content marketing and inbound marketing “cross the chasm“. We will see big leaps forward, but the vast majority remain skeptics. For lots of reasons (generational, time, fear, risk aversion), it is just extremely difficult to get some people to consider the benefits. We’ve all heard, “Twitter, you’re kidding me right?” We have to all remind ourselves on occasion that just because we live, eat, and breathe this stuff, we are still largely ahead of the curve.That said, comfort can be found in the fact that this same phenomena was just experienced 10-15 years ago, “What’s the internet and why would I need a website?” Internet marketing crossed the chasm and so will content marketing … just not this year.
In less than two years, B2B marketers will wonder what they ever did without Marketing Automation software (and also be thanking the universe for not to have sort leads in spreadsheets). Here is a comprehensive list of marketing automation systems available today.
Google rushed Buzz out. It did them more harm than good. In hindsight it seems rather clear now that they should have followed their normal go to market strategy of: Labs, Beta, Production.
The Books I’ve Read (not affiliate links)
I love to read – it is how I learn. Here are the books I made it through in the last six months. We also started the #B2Bbookclub twitter interview series. Once weekly, but now monthly, I am in the midst of working with Bob Gilbreath (Marketing With Meaning) and Jeffrey Hayzlett (The Mirror Test) to schedule the next dates.
I have twice missed the send of the B2Bbloggers newsletter. I’ve justified this by believing that if I can not add enough value, it is better to say nothing, than waste your time.Hopefully that rings right to you.
I haven’t been controversial enough. I’ve had some controversial thoughts, but lacked the guts to spit ‘em out and publish them here. Let’s see if that changes in the coming months.
The layout of the sidebar is long overdue for the addition of categories, an archive, and popular posts. Unfortunately, it keeps getting bumped down the priority list. (At least my failing is not have a priority list, right?)
What a great idea this was by Ksenia Coffman. Just a little over a month ago, she reached out to Kent Huffman and I and suggested we start #B2Bchat. Within a couple of days, we had our first chat and right after that Andrew Spoeth joined us as a fourth moderator. Each week we post the questions and the transcripts. Join us in the coming weeks and read the transcripts of the first couple.
That’s a wrap for our 101st post. As I mentioned earlier, we are sincerely appreciative of the time you spend here, please keep coming back. I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas for future of the site, so share them in the comments and we’ll consider putting your ideas into practice. Next milestone post will be at 250. Would love to get there by the end of 2010. Wanna help us? The platform is open. (One final thought on blogging, creating a post with 100 points takes about twice as long as you initially think.)
My oldest son lost his first tooth in the Detroit airport. The magical moment had finally arrived. But there was a problem: he’d really lost it. As in, we couldn’t find the tooth. Anywhere.
That night, my son and I wrote a note explaining our predicament to the fairy. The morning arrived, he looked under the pillow and…the note was still there. Yes, friends, I am a terrible and forgetful fairy.
The fairy incident of 2007 remains as yet another blot on my parenting record. But I share it with you since I’ve recently realized it holds some lessons that impact how I think about blogging.
When you start blogging, you start with the mistaken impression that something extraordinary is about to occur. It’s not. So, how do you let go of the fairy dust?
Put your magic wand back in the closet: As the blogger, you do not have all the answers. Hopefully, you can intelligently discuss challenges and opportunities. But truly great posts activate group discussions that identify solutions together.
Stop trying to fly: There is a real temptation to write posts that prove who you aspire to be as a thought leader or a firm. Resist that urge and write about ideas that reflect your core identity.
Forget bribes: Even when my son finally got his delayed $1 from the tooth fairy, he did not exactly become a perfect child. We all know bribes don’t really work, so offering endless white papers, idea series or special downloads can sometimes just be too much. You may need less “fancy” content and more basic content that’s easy for your readers to grasp.
Don’t get stuck underneath the pillow (it’s hot in there): It’s often called the echo chamber, and there’s a reason for that. The blogosphere can get pretty stifling. Are you really writing for other people that sell social media? If so, you are in the minority. I try to remind myself that every single one of my posts should make it easier for a professional services firm to understand the intersection of social media and public relations. Write useful, actionable insights for your audience, not for the influencers that you admire.
Take off the sparkly costume: It’s not about you or your company. Very simply, if you consistently use your blog to shed light on others, you will see repayment twenty fold. People like Arik Hanson and firms like Zoetica are roles models that inspire me.
Wake up the “kids:” I see many folks (BlissPR included) jumping in on “safe” blog topics. Forrester updates their social technographics ladder, then boom, a slew of posts evaluate it. That’s perfectly fine, but that’s a prudent post. If you really want to excite your audience, then focus on their pain and needs. Most of my clients won’t ever care much about that ladder, even if it’s really interesting to me.
So, it turns out that I’m a bad tooth fairy. (My record has improved with my second son, but marginally.) On the up side, it turns out that I am learning how to become a better blogger.
Do you have a magical strategy for successul blogging? Or a just hard won piece of advice we can learn from?
About The B2Bblogger: As BlissPR’s Managing Director, Elizabeth Sosnow (@elizabethsosnow) wears a number of different hats. Elizabeth develops and oversees implementation of strategy for large clients, leads BlissPR’s social media strategy development, and is also the firm’s Chief Media Trainer, helping clients maximize their direct interaction with the press. Finally, Elizabeth serves as a member of BlissPR’s management committee and helps to set future direction for the company.
The overarching goal of B2Bbloggers.com is to provide you, B2B Marketers, access to the growing amount of useful, relevant B2B marketing content on the web. It’s also to point out content that you may not discover otherwise. It’s with this in mind that we share this video interview between Hubspot’s Mike Volpe and Leigh Anne Reynolds from Reachforce and TheB2BLead.com with you.
While the interview is a little over a year old, it remains extremely relevant and useful for B2B marketers just beginning to explore the benefits of blogging for business.
Here are some highlights from the video.
1. Own your presence
Domain selection is a critical, and often overlooked, component of starting a blog for your business.
2. A blog is NOT a hard sales closing tool.
I repeat, a blog is NOT a hard sales closing tool. Mike and Leigh Anne share a list of business benefits that you can expect from your blog.
3. Know your buyer’s persona
There is a lot of discussion about “buyer persona” these days. It is well understood that an effective content marketing and blog strategy starts with knowing the audience you are targeting.
4. Develop quality content
After doing three (and only after doing three), begin developing content that speaks to the persona of your buyer’s.
That’s a wrap, enjoy the video. If you have any comments or tips to share, feel free to do so in the comments.
Hi, I'm @jeremyvictor, the founder of Make Good Media and Editor In Chief of B2Bbloggers.com.
B2Bbloggers.com is an online magazine for B2B marketers. Our goal is to engage, educate, and make it easier for B2B marketers to find the information they care about to do their jobs successfully.
As a publisher and new media marketing agency, Make Good Media advises businesses how to integrate social media and content marketing with traditional marketing tactics to attract, nurture, engage, and convert customers in the brave new B2B world of the social, mobile web. How can we help you Make Good Media?
About the B2Bblogger: Rachel Foster is an award-winning copywriter and owner of 
ne content marketing agency
