Skip to main content

The Four P's of Effective Business Blogging

Image
By

I was recently invited to give a presentation on the "do's and don'ts" of creating a successful business blog. In thinking about the topic, words beginning with the letter "p" kept coming to mind:

Persistence: the number one reason, by far, that blogs fail is that they aren't maintained. The blogosphere is littered with dead blogs that haven't been updated in three, six, twelve months or longer. They'll still pick the occasional search hit for an obscure phrase, but no one links, subscribes or offers comments to them.

Personality: the best blogs have a personality all their own: factual, thoughtful, helpful, smart, amusing or something else. The blogger also reveals himself or herself through a short bio, picture and contact information.

Passion: to maintain the discipline necessary to be persistent in blog posting, it helps to pick a subject one is passionate about. For example, among political blogs, there are a number of strong blogs on the both the right and the left ends of the political spectrum, but very few in the middle; it's hard to be passionate about moderation.

Promotion: if you're passionate about your topic and write about it persistently, you want the world to know your blog exists. The most important technique for blog promotion is the same as for any website—SEO. But the blogging format also provides unique promotional opportunities, such as tagging on social networking sites, submission to RSS feed aggregators, and cross-linking with other blogs in your subject area.

At that point I started creating my presentation, thinking I was done. But then, other P-words started coming to mind. What about being positive—isn't that an important attribute for a successful business blog? After all, it never pays to make enemies, and a blog post is forever. And how about prodigious (one of those wonderful, under-used words); being persistent simply means blogging a regular basis. Being prodigious speaks more to the frequency of posting.

And what about perhaps the most important term of all: patience? Unless you are already famous for some other reason, it's extremely unlikely that your blog will be an overnight success, but if done well and persistently, it will build a following over time.

Hmm, I may need to keep thinking about this. More to come.

*****


Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

All Time Greats

Top Notch Digital Marketing Tip: Google AdWords and PPC

By Anonymous
MARKETING: 101 Looking for some online marketing strategy or social media tips to grow your business? Well, you’ve come to the right digital marketing resource! Web Market Central has been doling out the proper digital marketing advice for years. And as you already know, marketing to customers online is 100 times easier than using dated, expensive and traditional marketing tactics. Like seriously, who uses billboards in 2019? But you already know how effective digital marketing can be in the modern age. So now that you're totally convinced of what you already knew, let’s give you today's top-notch digital marketing tip! The Pure Unfettered Power of PPC (Pay-Per-Click) and PPC Campaigns Just like optimizing your site to rank for keywords, you can use our online marketing tips to pay to run advertisements on Google so that your business is shown on the first page of search engine results. Ranking this way is instantaneous whereas SEO (Search Engine Optimizati...
101 comments
Read more

How to Use SEO: Leverage SEO To Be Found Online and Boost Your Online Marketing

By
All businesses that want to attract customers online, no matter the business size or age, have few options other than Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  SEO In The Box™ by Results Driven Marketing®, LLC There are roughly 1.8 billion websites online, and basic SEO allows Google to find and index or catalog your webpages.  After that, Google serves you up to searchers in the organic section.  The question remains: where they list your site, on page one or page 22 or further back? SEO controls your positioning. Do you want to be found online or not? If your business is online or you want your product or service to be found online, then Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a must, and knowing how to use SEO to leverage the power of the internet is vital. Arguably, an effective SEO strategy gets you on the organic results section of the search engine results pages (SERP). Organic traffic is highly valuable and requires high-quality SEO. But even busines...
102 comments
Read more

Top-Notch Digital Marketing Tip: Advertisements That Make Sense

By Anonymous
MARKETING: 101 Looking for some online marketing tips to grow your business? Well, you’ve come to the right digital marketing resource ! Web Market Central has been doling out the proper DM advice for years. And as you already know, marketing to customers online is 100 times easier than using dated, expensive and traditional marketing tactics. Like seriously, who uses billboards in 2019? But you already know how effective Digital Marketing can be in the modern age. So now that you're totally convinced of what you already knew, let’s give you today's top notch-digital marketing tip! Advertisement Congruence If your business is running ads this is one of our most important online marketing tips! Ad congruence is when your ads and landing pages look alike or have the same message. Have you ever clicked on an ad and been taken to a page that looked nothing like the ad? When your ads look like the web pages they lead to, customers will feel like they are in ...
75 comments
Read more

Web 2.0 Social Tagging Sites, Part 6: Tier 2 Sites

By
Here in the second of three posts on the effectiveness of specific Web 2.0 social bookmarking sites at driving B2B website traffic, based on my two-month test, are the mid-tier sites. These sites drove a meaningful though not large volume of traffic across the half-dozen B2B websites and blogs in the test. In ascending order, the mid-tier sites are: 7) Newsvine Though much more heavily-used than WireFan, results were similar. Categorization of news items is helpful but overly broad. 6) Simpy Works better with IE than Firefox. 5) MarkaBoo Clean design, easy to use, respectable results. 4) NowPublic News-oriented, a great place to expose user-targeted, thought-leadership PR. 3) del.icio.us Given it's incredible popularity, B2B traffic results were surprisingly second-tier (though near the top of this group). 2) RawSugar Primarily for blog promotion, but works for B2B thought leadership content as well. 1) Reddit The best of the second tier, though the delay it im...
2 comments
Read more

Top Notch Digital Marketing Tip: Optimize Your Site

By Anonymous
Looking for some online marketing tips to grow your business? Well, you’ve come to the right digital marketing resource! Web Market Central has been doling out the proper digital marketing advice for years. And as you already know, marketing to customers online is 100 times easier than using dated, expensive and traditional marketing tactics. Like seriously, who uses billboards in 2019? But you already know how effective digital marketing and an seo strategy can be in the modern age. So now that you're totally convinced of what you already knew, let’s give you today's top-notch digital marketing tip! Optimize Your Site to Improve Search Engine Rankings Most small business owners know that their websites need to be optimized in order for search engines, like Google and Bing, to find them and rank them on the search engine results page. If you don’t know, that’s okay. You can learn all about Search Engine Optimization and SEO best practices here to help impr...
81 comments
Read more