Blogging is an important part of Inbound Marketing

Forget the standard web template approach that most businesses employ, if your organisation wants to generate meaningful, engaged visitors then you should incorporate a blog into your website. Its a significant element of our Inbound Marketing philosophy.

Most corporate websites look fairly similar. There’s been a group-think mentality that your site should all be contained in the one screen, with content not falling “below the fold”. You see the same logo position, same navigation and the same bland corporate information.

What you don’t often see is regularly updated information that is both helpful and relevant to your target audience.

That’s where a blog can become extremely valuable to your organisation. Here are 6 reasons why one should be incorporated into your web presence.

1. A blog keeps your visitors interested. The more regularly you update your website with quality information, the more likely visitors are to return. Otherwise they can just visit once and then move on, quickly forgetting about you.

2. Visitors can actually show loyalty to a website by subscribing to your RSS feed or updates by email. The more interesting and helpful your information is, the more likely it is you will grow a base of subscribers. These regularly engaged visitors can be an extremely valuable asset and are obviously more likely to become customers over time.

3. A blog post is more likely to be shared or passed onto others than a normal web page. If you are generating useful content and have included social media sharing devices such as a Facebook “Share” button, a Twitter “ReTweet” button or a Digg prompt, there is a good chance visitors will share your information with others. This immediately broadens your audience and can boost your traffic. your audience can become your distribution network. Even if your organisation is not heavily engaged in Social Media it can benefit from those who are.

4. Search engines love blogs. Every blog post is another piece of content for Google, Bing and Yahoo etc to index, and its another potential slot in the search results that can deliver more traffic to your website. In fact, Google’s latest algorithm changes seem to be favouring fresh, relevant content so if your website is sitting there unchanged month after month you are likely to be overtaken by your competitors who are posting regularly. Even if you don’t have a sophisticated SEO strategy, simply posting regular content will go a long way to building your online success.

5. Most websites are limited by the design and pages in the websites they launch. Once the initial content has been uploaded the site is left to age. New content means design hassles, additional expense and problems. But if you built your site with a blog mentality the limitations are removed. You can add as much new information as you desire. In fact, the blog demands your attention and will keep your organisation more focused on driving your site onto bigger and better things.

6. Blogging is thinking. The discipline of blogging about your industry and organisationand creating new content can lead to great insight. It forces you to constantly consider why your organisation exists and how it can benefit others. Sometimes that “light bulb” moment can come whilst writing a thoughtful blog post.

We urge most organisations to add a blog to their online presence and have seen wonderful results from those who have embraced it. So move away from the old-fashioned corporate web templates and incorporate a more dynamic approach to your website.

For another take on how to blog successfully, watch this great presentation by Jason Fried called Marketing by Sharing

Here at Sticky we are big fans of 37 Signals and their approach to business and marketing. Recently Gavin Heaton posted this video on his site and I was surprised that I hadn’t seen it before. In it, Jason Fried from 37 Signals discusses marketing by sharing, which is a big part of the whole Inbound Marketing approach we encourage. Its such a good video that I thought I’d share it with you too.

Grab a coffee and put your feet up for 20 minutes to watch this.

This week I have been at the Connect Now conference in Sydney. It has had a stellar line-up of speakers including Gavin Heaton @servantofchaos, Katie Chatfield @katiechatfield, Tara Hunt @missrogue, Brian Solis @briansolis, Laurel Papworth @silkcharm, Jim Stewart @jimboot, Darren Rowse @problogger, Gary Vaynerchuk @garyvee, Debs Schultz @debs, Stephen Johnson @huxley, Fi Bendall @fibendall, Simon Mainwaring @simonmainwaring, Natalie Hofsteede @givealittle, Simon and Marie Young @audaciousgloop and Chris Noble @worldnomads.

While much of the information and advice might not be new to those already operating in the social media space, it has been extremely beneficial for the vast majority of people who are beginning to use inbound marketing and social media in their businesses instead traditional marketing techniques.

But as someone who attends a lot of new media conferences in Australia and the USA, I was still struck by a few of the key messages at Connect Now.

The biggest take home for me was that authenticity is crucial. While businesses are flooding into social media to take advantage of its burgeoning popularity, very few are succeeding, and that is likely because they lack an authentic voice.

But those who are succeeding are really showing the way forward with their truly authentic attitudes.

Consider Gary Vaynerchuk. The founder of Wine Library TV has enjoyed explosive popularity and a booming business empire without any traditional marketing or advertising. Gary video blogs daily and speaks with amazing passion and authenticity. Its the sort of thing than cannot be scripted or contrived, its 100% genuine.

Gary implores us to forget about the technology and fancy dressing of lighting, graphics and heavy editing. The message is the key for Gary. He concentrates on pushing out his content then takes the time to interact with his audience.

Gary says you must love your audience in order to succeed in social media. He claims that in the early days when he was building Wine Library TV he spent 30 minutes a day creating content then 14 hours in the community.

Gary urges people not to just talk about it, but to live it and its very clear that he does. His passion and authenticity is rocket fuel for his business.

Darren Rowse is one of the world’s most popular bloggers. Blogging is a business for him but you don’t think of Darren in a traditional business sense. His blogging is helpful, passionate and authentic first and foremost. He works hard on content and community and as a result his business thrives.

Gavin Heaton’s success in social media is not defined by sales but through his considerable “social equity”. One of Australia’s leading marketing bloggers, Gavin is a connector for many people who now operate in the space.

During the Q&A session on day 2 of Connect Now Gavin nailed it when he said “we now operate in a economy of generosity, the more generous you are, the bigger your potential”.

The implications are clear. Those who join social media to sell, sell, sell without making any attempt to engage, listen and help will not succeed.

Debs Schultz supported this feeling by saying “there’s no such thing as a social media campaign.” Debs says that you should start small, keep testing, success takes time. Join the lives of people rather than interrupting them. If you help users participate the benefits will flow later.

Inbound marketing relies on this fundamental shift in marketing thinking. But its also quite real. As Debs Schultz says, “The customer is not elusive, they’re annoyed”. We need to stop broadcasting, stop interrupting and start engaging.

And the best way to engage is with authenticity.

We are constantly asked why we use one platform over another when creating new websites. A big part of our rationale is that blog sites seem to be indexed faster and crawled more frequently by Google. We have had some ridiculously fast results over the years, but only on certain platforms.

So we thought you’d be interested in what the gurus at Google have to say on the subject. This video is from their Official Blog. Please note the last comment: make great content, get well known and Google will probably crawl you more frequently.

Watch the video = 2 mins

Several times each year Julian Cole ranks Australia’s marketing bloggers in a list he calls the Australian Marketing Pioneer Blogs. Julian’s list has been published in both Marketing Magazine and B&T and is an excellent appraisal of the Aussie marketing blog scene.

The Adspace Pioneers ranking is based on criteria such as Julian’s own “Pioneer ranking”, Google PageRank, Technorati Authority, Technorati reactions and Alexa rating.

These are some of the best content producers in Australia, generating some of the most stimulating and thought provoking content in the marketing community.

So we thought we’d run our NLYZR over the current Marketing Pioneers Top 20 to see how they stack up. NLYZR Scores appraise a site from a more business-like perspective including criteria such as On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, Keyword search results, Competitor scores, Social media and traffic conversion.

To be fair, good blogs hold up well under NLYZR’s scrutiny due to volume of content and social media bias, things which many corporate sites lack. Conversely, most blogs can suffer under NLYZR because they aren’t as likely to have a business focus and therefore aren’t as concerned with optimisation and traffic conversion. Overall, all these blogs score much higher than the national NLYZR average of 39/100, which was to be expected.

The biggest observation we can make about the blogs ranked here is that while the content and traffic is excellent, the optimisation for most is lacking. This has affected scores significantly. While many bloggers won’t be concerned by this, we recommend that if you have any business objectives for your blogs then you should look at implementing good SEO. It will make very good sites great.

Note: Obviously the bloggers at this agency have an advantage in knowing how to meet the NLYZR criteria and its in our best interests to do so. Therefore, please don’t read too much into our scores against everyone else’s….we aren’t trying to show off, we’d be worried if we didn’t rank very highly with our own analysis tools.

Another note: NLYZR Scores can change from month to month depending on site activity. The highest score we have seen from an Australian marketing blogger lately is actually Digital Tip (currently ranked 105 on Julian’s list), who has rocketed up to a score of 98/100 after diligently working on her blog’s SEO and having attracted a remarkable amount of traffic and inbound links recently, despite having a PR of 3. Meanwhile my Mediahunter site has fallen a few points recently due to inattention.

Source: Seth Godin’s Blog

…in a digital world where everything can be measured, we all work on commission. And why not? If you do great work and it works, you should get rewarded. And if you don’t, it’s hard to see why a rational organization would keep you on.

This is so true….read more….

This is a brilliant little video made by Dylan Spencer, a marketing manager in the USA. He’s created a wonderful introduction to Inbound Marketing in less than 3 minutes. Its both succinct and entertaining. Music credit goes to tastypigeon.

Enjoy.

By Lon Safko. Originally published at FastCompany.com

Blogs are not just web logs

A blog is the most important thing that you can create for yourself and for your company.  It provides an environment that promotes two-way communication with your customers, your prospects, and establishes you as a thought-leader in your field.  Blogging is free, it’s easy, and it doesn’t take much time.

The best way to explain why blogging is so important is to cite a few examples of companies that have realized exceptional success using blogs.  The first is this airline you might have heard of, the only one profitable, Southwest Airlines. The company created a blog a couple of years ago and what I really love about it is the name of their blog; “Nuts About Southwest.”  Get it?  Nuts about Southwest.

Southwest Airlines has gotten more than one million visitors to its blog.  One million visitors?  Honestly, who cares what Southwest has to talk about?  All I want them to do is get me from city to city, get my bags there, give me some nuts, and leave me alone.  But, you know what?  One million people cared enough to go and see what they had to say about their airline and comment, participating in their company and their brand.

What would you me pay right now if I told you I had a secret to get one million people to your homepage?  What would you pay me?  Write the check.  I just told you.  And the implementation and tools are free. That’s the wonderful thing about social media, the tools are all free.  You just need to invest some time and some creativity.

Here’s another example of the power of blogs: A hotel chain by the name of Marriott. Ol’ Bill, J. W. Marriott’s Chairman; is still running the company.  Excuse me for saying this, but he’s one of the old dogs, like me, over 50.  And Bill’s a little bit uncomfortable with technology.  As a matter of fact, Bill has never turned on a computer in his life.  But that doesn’t stop him from writing his blog each week. Bill does it by using a digital recorder.  He dictates his blog and gives it to his admin to simply transcribe and post.

Six hundred thousand visitors last year: They tell him the good stuff that Marriott is doing, so they can keep doing it; and they tell him the bad stuff that they are doing so that they can fix it.

What is that worth to you and your company?  To actually hear from your customers, in a non-confrontational cooperative environment, what they like and what they would like you to do different. And it’s free. You have to communicate with, not to your customers.  They’re going to start a conversation with or without you.  Why don’t you control that conversation?

When I began researching blogs for The Social Media Bible, I heard a rumor that the search engines were giving blogs preferential treatment in their indexing.  For the last several years I taught search engine optimization, and search engine marketing in more than 100 cities each year. I know that Google and Yahoo! take about 12 to 14 days from the time you create a new webpage until they index it.  Twelve to fourteen days to index your page.

To test out the preferential treatment of blogs, I created a test blog called, “Subway vs. Quiznos.” This is about where Subway was suing Quizno’s for defamation of sandwich.  This is under the category of social media gone wild.  I created this blog on December 3, 2007.  I had already set up Google Alerts for “Subway.” Thirty minutes from the time I hit “publish,” my blog page was indexed by Google and I was sent an alert.  Thirty minutes!  Not 12 to 14 days.  To view the original blog, click here: http://www.lonsafko.com/2008/02/02/social-media-subway-verses-quizno%E2%…

If you type in “social media,” that term gets more than 46 million hits (last count), so that’s not what will take you to my page.  And if you type in “Quiznos Subway,” Fortune 1000 companies, that’s not going to narrow it down either.  Don’t use my name, that’s too easy.  If you type in ”Social Media Quizno Subway”, I come up #1 in Google.  Not just on the first page, but in the #1 position.  And, I have been in the #1 position on Google for those four key words since December 2007.  What would you pay me or your webmaster to get you the #1 position on Google and keep you there since December 2007?  That’s the power of blogs.

Blog pages are created from HTML code, but the interface is incredibly easy to use.  It’s as easy as creating a word document.  A blog page template can look exactly the same as an HTML Web page, except it can actually have more features (widgets & plug-ins), than does standard HTML.  My 101 page website was HTML that I first built in 1994 and I continually added on to it.  When I saw the power of the blog from an SEO perspective, the next morning I formatted my server.  I actually erased 100% of my website and I recreated it, the entire website, using blog software (WordPress).  Now anytime I add a page, anytime I make a change to a page, Google indexes me in 30 minutes with priority preference.  Does that have any value to you?

To hear Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress and I talk about the power of WordPress, click here: http://www.thesocialmediabible.com/2009/02/27/matt-mullenweg/

Now, I’m not recommending that you go out and erase your corporate Web pages, but I am certainly telling you to add a blog to your Web site and start blogging. Blogs are powerful.

Read more of Lon Safko’s Social Media Bible blog

Most of our clients have heard me talk about Gary Vaynerchuk and WineLibraryTV at some stage. I like Gary’s story so much because it dramatically  illustrates what is possible for almost any business if they embrace the potential of marketing themselves online.

Wine Library today sells $50 million a year in wine in a sizeable store in New Jersey. Gary is taking the store global with a video show, Wine Library TV, that gets about 100,000 views a show.

I was lucky enough to have a few drinks and chat with Gary in Austin this year at South by South West, as well as attend one of his presentations. His manic enthusiasm is extremely contagious.

Anyway, uber-Geek Robert Scoble has just interviewed Gary for his Building 43 series and I thought I should share this with you. Business owners should pay particular attention on the information from minutes 5 to 8, minutes 10 to 11, minutes 13 to 19 and finally minutes 22 to 24. Especially interesting are observations about the changing media landscape and how Twitter provides businesses with the ability to listen.

Source: btobonline.com

Most marketers believe the only way to target hundreds or thousands of terms reliably is to invest in pay-per-click (PPC), which is easily measured, controlled and can provide ROI results quickly. Less attention—and far fewer resources—are spent on organic search, simply because most marketers believe there is no reliable and scalable way to target the same volume of keywords. But independent studies show that most all clicks on a search engine results page happen on the organic side. Read more