Top 10 Trends in Corporate Blogging 2009

Last night I attended the webinar by Chris Baggott, CEO/CoFounder of Compendium Blogware. He has been honored as one of the ‘100 most influential marketers of 2008’. Compendium Blogware offers a solution for corporate blogging. Can you imagine the importance of organizational blogging? If done correctly and with a little caution, corporate blog can prove to be a turning point in your marketing efforts. It can convert the eyeballs into potential customers. Online presence of a company not only helps in attracting more customers, but it also ensures its presence for more generations to come.

Chris gave a presentation explaining 10 points on writing blog post for corporate blogs. Points covered by him were as follows:

1. Blocking and Tackling – Gather data from various sources about the hot topics and trends of searching.
2. Focus blogging and search – Know what people are doing online. According to a survey, 85% of search clicks happen in organic results. Search is the only metric you can manage. So, isn’t online marketing obvious? More and more people are searching online and therefore, to reach them, you must increase your marketing efforts.
3. Social Media – Rethink everything you hear about social media. It doesn’t mean that you should not get indulged in it, but it means you should prioritize the social sites according to the probability where people might be searching for you. Very rightly said by him, “Don’t spam social media. It’s not a place where you can yell at people anything you want”. (I agree with you, Chris. This is one of the most misunderstood points these days by SEO professionals.)
4. Content and Volume – Content is the most influential factor. Content drives awareness, not advertising. More number of posts drives success.
5. Keyword awareness – You must be aware of what your blog is all about. Keywords guide you. Although there are many keyword tools, but Google AdWords is the best keyword tool these days. Select those keywords which are searched for maximum number of times.
6. Dumb it down – K.I.S.S rule… Keep It Simple, Stupid! Keep your post simple, quick and easy to understand. Think how people are consuming your content.
7. Widespread employee blogging – Blog about customers’ problems and not your products or services. Ask your employees, who would want to blog in your company? More participants give more variety.
8. Great Local – 50% search has local intent. Reach your local customers first. Mentioning streets, cities, zip codes, townships, counties etc. help in increasing local presence.
9. Coupons – Blogging for coupons. Offer your customers coupons to buy your services.
10. Measurement and metrics – Measure the impact of blogging. Measure the keywords that drive traffic. Measure over time and quantity. Less posts, less traffic. When posts increase, traffic will also increase.

Conclusion:
‘Get out of SEO weeds’. Only optimizing your site doesn’t guarantee you top rankings. Write good content and get people’s attention. This is the ‘success mantra’.

Followed by the presentation, he answered a few questions asked by various bloggers. But due to an emergency, he evacuated the place and the session was taken over by Megan Glover, Director of Marketing.

A very good question answered by her was:

Q: How transparent content should be?
A: The content should be such that personality comes out. Try to engage your visitors in a conversation. Rest, it depends on business too that how much information they can reveal.

Unlike the Google webinar, this webinar didn’t offered any way to interact with other fellow bloggers but overall it was a nice experience.

So, are you gonna start corporate blogging? Lemme know if you want to.

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