Blogging is no longer a novel marketing communications tactic. At lightning speed, blogs have moved from innovative tactic to an accepted and expected part of the online media mix. This rapid adoption and growth have created a number of unforeseen challenges for publishers. Today, most publishers already maintain a blog or use multiple blogs to communicate with their publics. Many are now facing the challenges of maintaining and sustaining these initiatives in trying economic times. This article will present some suggestions for how to nurture and sustain a blogging effort that is apart from the main publication.
Today, Everyone Is a Journalist or Publicist
With the broad acceptance and adoption of blogging by the general public, anyone who can string a sentence together can mount a publishing effort. The traditional barriers to entry into the publishing business have fallen. With huge numbers of would-be publishers competing for readers, there is additional pressure placed on publishers to create something of genuine value so as to separate themselves from the clever amateurs using blogs as their publishing medium. Many amateur blogs, providing high quality content, have in fact morphed and grown into significant publishing voices. With so many new voices clamouring for recognition and readership, there is an enormous amount of noise. The challenge becomes how to cut through the noise and escape the echo chamber.
The rapid rise of social media and micro-blogging – the Twitter phenomenon – has created additional challenges. Is it possible to grow a sustainable readership with 140 character “tweets”? Is this just another bright shiny technology object that will briefly streak like a comet across the technology sky, or should publishers take micro-blogging as seriously as blogging? How can they integrate both technologies into their marketing and publishing efforts? Then, there is always at the periphery the nagging concern: “What is the next technology that must be addressed?”
The Good News and the Bad News
The good news is that the blog format is increasingly accepted as a communications medium. There are advantages for publishers using a blogging platform. Blogs are easy to set up and can be rapidly re-skinned should a new look or design be deemed necessary. Even though the technology will continue to evolve, we can expect to see the basic format stay the same. Readers enjoy being able to interact with the content and interject their comments into the conversation. The major shift is that with a blog, every post is an invitation to a conversation. This is a difficult ideological hurdle for some businesses accustomed to just one-way communication with their audiences. Engaged, avid readers keep a publication healthy. The challenge becomes one of keeping the blog lively enough to engage readers on a long term basis.
The bad news is that we can expect the noise to stay in the system. The rise and continuing popularity of social media is generating considerable noise and consuming attention and energy. Whether it is Twitter or just the echo chamber of thousands of bloggers, the noise and information clutter will stay with us. The short format micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, which are so mobile-friendly, will not go away. Those who look to the future see mobile applications as the next, not too distant, frontier. If you have already mastered blogging and social media, be on the lookout for how you might add a mobile application to your marketing arsenal. The challenge is how to integrate all of these new technologies into the overall publishing / marketing strategy.
Keys to a Successful Blog
When a blog is expected to be an ancillary to the main publication, its goals are often marketing, but the activity is publishing. An editorial voice and positioning is essential for a successful blog. This is critical whether the blog belongs to an individual, such as an executive of the firm, or is part of a larger publication marketing effort. Experience has shown that me-too editorial positioning and stale content, re-purposed from other available media, is not a winning combination. The most successful blogs have a clear editorial focus and abound in fresh content.
If you are launching a new blog, scan the landscape and look for an editorial niche that is not currently being filled by a blog, and then build an editorial battle plan for what it will take to fill the void. If you are just now launching your first blog, there are several lessons that can be learned from the mistakes and efforts of early blog pioneers. One caution is to be sure to adequately estimate the budget, personnel and web resources needed for the project. It is advised to have a timeline and a plan for moving blogs started as experiments either into the mainstream or closing them out graciously. The last thing you should see happen is for the blog to simply stop publication abruptly or dwindle off. A blog with a marketing thrust should always be sending positive signals.
Blogging, like any publishing effort, requires a sustained effort and must maintain its editorial edge over a long period of time. Many blogs start strong and then lose their impetus, their edge. In my experience, this is a common fault among business bloggers who are unaware of the rigours of producing high quality engaging content on a continuous basis. In my opinion, this signals a flaw in their editorial planning.
Staffing presents another challenge. Many early blogs were the result of a single champion of the technology stepping forward to take on staffing the blogging effort. Having only one individual responsible for all of the “blogging” puts its future in peril. During these difficult economic times, most businesses are asking their employees to shoulder larger responsibilities. With staffing slashed, the blogger is often either re-assigned or let go. For the health of the blog, it is often the best idea to have a team of bloggers assigned to create the content. Each can then bring a unique voice to the blog, keeping it fresh and interesting, while spreading the effort to sustain the blog across more people. By using a team approach, it is less jarring to the readership to welcome new bloggers and bid adieu to bloggers no longer writing for the blog.
Second, with blogs, it is easy to determine how well the content resonates with the audience. Web analytics give us a clear window into our readers’ preferences. It is important at launch to have solid web analytics in place so that you can track your results from the start and adjust your editorial choices based on what your users have found interesting. Check your analytics to determine your most popular posts and review your comments on a regular basis as you do your editorial planning. With new blogs, you can make early adjustments that can catapult the readership upward.
Many blogs take this analytical approach and further extend their reach by actually showing the most popular posts and most recent posts to readers via sidebars on the blog. These are particularly useful for guiding to deeper content casual readers, dropping in from a link or a search engine result to read a single post of interest. The sidebar gives them a flavour of the rest of the content and often prompts them to explore the blog in depth. The casual drop-in often becomes the ardent reader.
Use Search to Extend Reach
Quality content is exactly what search engines want to deliver to their searchers. Since their inception, blogs have enjoyed excellent results in search. With this knowledge in hand, it is easy to see why part of your action plan for successful blogging should include leveraging the power of search engines to deliver new readers. Search success is doing a number of basic tasks flawlessly well. For the most part, blogging software eliminates the structural and architectural barriers to search success that so often impede the search visibility of other websites. The search engine challenge for blogs is to make sure that the content is easily understood by readers and search engines alike.
To ensure that the content is in the language of the searcher, it is advisable to build before launch a target keyword list for the blog – those keyword phrases that most relate to the editorial focus and content. This keyword list should then be used in the content development. If you use organic search marketing for your website, this is simply an extension of the effort to the blog. Experience has shown that these efforts will be rewarded.
Here are five proven tactical search marketing action items that you can employ to enhance and improve your results:
1. Include keyword phrases in your titles to improve the likelihood that they will be displayed in response to user queries. The subject matter of the content must be easily understood from a keyword-rich title. A potential reader finding the article through a search will have little more than the title to use in deciding whether or not to read your article. Tweak your titles so that the keywords are placed prominently (preferably at the beginning of the title).
2. Simplify your archive structure so that your readers and search engines can more easily find archived posts. If you use categories, make sure that they are easy to interpret.
3. Tweak the code. Although blogging software eliminates barriers to search, it can be enhanced through plug-ins and code tweaks for additional search power. For example, you should make sure that your blog’s style sheet (CSS) gives you control over and respects the hierarchy of the H1, H2 and H3 elements on the page. Search engines expect this and reward it.
4. Build optimised RSS feeds for your blog content. Consider having multiple feeds from the same blog. For example, a group blog might include a feed for the entire blog and separate feeds for each of the major contributors. Be sure to include branding (logos and images) in the feeds.
5. Enable social networking so that your readers can share the good content that they have found on your blog with their network of friends. Tapping into your readers’ social networks can be a powerful source of new readers.
Embrace Social Media
The marketing plan for the blog should include how you will leverage social media. Build a Twitter following for the publication and then use Twitter and other social networking tools to announce posts. Urge readers to re-tweet the notice and tell their friends about the article. To fully harness the dividends that social media can offer, develop a mini campaign for each post with social media announcements to boost readership. Then, track the results of this effort and use the data to refine both your content offering and your social media strategy.
It takes considerable effort to build a Twitter following adequate to support such full-on efforts. A simple rule of thumb is to follow as many individuals as follow you and make sure that not all of your tweets are just self-serving hype for your own blog. Be part of the community, not just a user of the community and you will find that the community rewards you richly.
