According to Econsultancy, IBM recently published research showing that about 80% of those who begin a corporate blog never post more than five entries. Herewith are the keys to creating a happy home for your blog readers and steps you can take that will prevent you from ever becoming a blog orphan.

1)  Take a practice run. This first step is so obvious I can’t believe I just figured it out. No one says you have to publish your first written entry. Based on the above statistic, I’d recommend writing five entries before publishing at all. You need to find your voice and rhythm before going public.

If after that time, you think you might like the life of a content producer (sounds fancier than blogger, doesn’t it?), then you can space these out over two weeks and continue writing 2-3 posts a week. The pressure’s off, and you can begin to enjoy the experience.

2)  Enjoy writing. This also may seem obvious, but I’ve read many a blog where it was clear someone had told a company that sells industrial pipe to “start a business blog.” Take it from me — I author three blogs and post here frequently. If I didn’t like to write, no amount of money or coercion could get me to write. That said, one of my blogs is on its way to becoming a blog orphan. (Hey, there’s only so much time in the day.)

3)  Have something to say. Most people who enjoy writing believe they have something worthwhile to say. The best blogs are written from a unique point of view. Presumably, you have a certain expertise you want to share with a target audience. It doesn’t matter how niche the market may be, the Internet is so vast that people are searching for solutions on every conceivable topic.

Google estimates that, 33+% of daily searches are UNIQUE. This means that you can carve out your own search space based on what you know and establish a beachhead before your competitors figure out this “corporate blogging” thing.

After you’ve been blogging a while, you’ll be consistently amazed at the variety of search terms people use to find your site. They have a business problem, and your business blog now provides the solution. You will become viewed as a trusted resource; a resource they’ll share with others.

4)  Want to help others. Blogging is a lonely pursuit. When you press the “publish” button, the black hole of cyberspace takes over. If your intention is to help others, answer questions, guide visitors to quality resources, you will be rewarded in surprising ways.

There are excellent write-ups on creating a blogging content strategy, but after five years of blogging, I think that following this blogging advice, borne from hard won experience, will serve you over the long haul.

Tags: business blogging

Tags: Investor Relations

Bing will soon be powering Yahoo! search results, leaving advertisers with just two search networks from which to drive traffic. The European Union and the U.S. Department of Justice, by eliminating one of the Internet’s biggest search competitors, have ignored the costs this decision will impose on businesses as they continue to acquire new customers online.

On one hand, I suppose this is good news for search optimizers because now we have only two search engines for which to optimize. While the vast majority of B2B marketers use Google, driving more advertisers into fewer networks increases the price of traffic acquisition. Bidding wars over finite inventory were a complaint in the early years of paid search. I suspect we’ll hear howling soon.

It’s consumers and businesses, small business especially, who really lose. Consumers lose a unique Yahoo! search brand and point of view and the cost to market online can only increase over time.

The days of 10-cent clicks are long gone. To compete effectively online requires not only the internal fortitude to embrace the new, but also an understanding of the underpinnings of the Internet.

Links = Relationships

The rise of social media underscores the importance of developing relationships online. It’s no surprise that Google and Yahoo! have started indexing content from Facebook and Twitter. Those links to and from followers, bloggers and websites represent millions of conversations. I don’t think people will stop using search engines any time soon, but I do believe that with the Microhoo deal, we’ll see search market share decline and with it profits. When you take away choice, consumers can be fickle.

People, through their desire for connection, have provided an avenue for businesses to reach out like never before. Will the day come when companies will reach out to online communities directly and bypass the search engines?

We may have come full circle in our sales and marketing efforts. Every business is now a door-to-door salesman: engaging prospects, building rapport and following up.

Is your website up to the challenge?

Source: SEO Theory

UPDATE: Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft, states at SMX West that Microsoft does *not* now intend to “kill off” Yahoo! Search – he further stated that within the deal agreement, Yahoo! may increase their search share via a wide number of initiatives.

Thanks to Chris Smith for the counter argument.

Tags: Branding, online marketing

Super Bowl Sunday is supposed to be one of the biggest pizza-consuming days of the year. Unless all of these advertisements have been lying to me, you’re supposed to eat pizza today. A lot of it. And for some reason, $10 is the sweet spot. Did you order pizza today and contribute to keeping this economy afloat?

So, how is Domino’s Pizza Turnaround campaign going? Well, it depends on who you ask. In the end, it looks like they’ll measure the success with the same store sales numbers. Boring. Personally, I would like to see them correlate the positive and negative mentions on their social media sites as well. It would be great to know if a certain “sentiment” ranking could be tied to the numbers.

This excerpt really sums it up:

Truly engaging in social media necessitates this kind of imperfect back-and-forth. It requires that companies hand over some control over their brands to their customers publicly. There are enormous benefits to doing so. Endorsement of a product by a large group of strangers, or, better yet, people whom you know, is arguably much more valuable than a one-sided advertisement. But with the advantages of social-media engagement come the downsides. For example, when a customer rants about what may be an isolated incident of lousy service on that company’s Facebook wall, everyone can see it. When a bunch of people don’t like a new product or policy, they can rise up against it together.

Part of Social Media 101 is that when you ask for comments, you will get some negative comments, but you can’t ignore these.

Sidenote: I actually did have pizza last week, but we ordered it through an iPhone app. Again, Domino’s where is your app? As one of my co-workers put it “lazy pizza lovers” like me are looking for this type of service.

Tags: #newbrand, Domino's, social media engagement, social media roi

As one blogger put it: “Who cares where they rank (sic), if the #1 rank is below the fold?”

With the advent of Universal Search and now Real-Time Search, we can look fondly back to the time when competing for a page one ranking seemed comparatively easy.

Every business is now competing with

• Paid listings
• New product listing ads
• News
• Organic results (1-4)
• Shopping sites via Google Merchant
• Video via YouTube
• Organic results (5-10)

The above list reinforces why it’s so important to know how to promote your site, products and services in all the areas included on a page one result. Traditional search engine optimization (SEO) has morphed into “search optimization.”

Although on-page optimization is still important for effective crawling and indexing of your most important Web pages, it’s no longer enough if you want to be competitive in today’s market.

As Google continues to acquire even more data from mining Social Data Sources, they will be increasing their knowledge about a business ten-fold over the next few years.

This data will eventually be significant in how they rank Web pages not only in Local Search but in Organic Search as well. And we haven’t even factored in Mobile Search.

As detailed in a recent Webinar, the time to develop an holistic engagement strategy is now. Reputation management will be critical to the ongoing survival for any business.

What are the positive online signals your company is sending?

Tags: communication trends, SEO, social media