WSI Marketing, Surf, Search and Social

With only a week left until our free webinar, we have just released the supplementary whitepaper “Blogging to Build a Reputation Online.” As we all continue to witness the rapid evolution of technology, blogging is proving to be more and more essential in order to establish a web presence. A company blog is undeniably a digital marketing tool that your business cannot afford to ignore.

Prepared by Eric Cook – a Certified Internet Business Consultant with WSI,  who is also hosting the free webinar of the same topic – this complimentary whitepaper will take you through the Ins and Outs of leveraging a blog to enhance your company’s image and solidify your expertise with your online customer base. A blog can give you, your employees,and your consumers the opportunity to post thoughts, share experiences and showcase what you know. You don’t even have to be a ‘webmaster’ to master the technique of blogging. It’s all about interacting with your audience to develop a relationship and build your brand’s credibility. Considering that many believe that “your reputation precedes you,” blogging is an outstanding way to ensure that your company’s reputation is a positive one!

Some key highlights of this whitepaper include:

• How-to’s for promoting reader engagement
• Tips for dealing with both the good and back feedback from your readers
• Techniques for measuring your blog’s return on investment

Click here to download your complimentary copy of our whitepaper “Blogging to Build a Reputation Online.”

Companies that market to small businesses should focus on creating a social media strategy as a way of promoting their services and be open to trying new methods of prospecting. Companies that are marketing to this sector should have a strong presence at the top or on the most relevant social networking sites. Especially since this is an excellent way of getting the word out about your business.

Here are some other ideas that you can add to your digital marketing strategy to try to increase your online visibility:

Product Reviews and Ratings

When someone is deciding whether to buy something online they will nearly always look for reviews or testimonials; they provide great input to the decision making process. Make sure prospects will find great reviews of your products or services.

Podcasts and Webinars

This year has seen a dramatic increase in the use of podcasts and webinars as a way of educating your prospects as more and more managers are looking online for information. Small business owners consider these as great resources for their professional development and research. They are also not time consuming, so you are more likely to get someone to listen to a short webinar than to agree to an in person meeting.

Social Media Company and Brand pages

Creating a great image on the social media sites is now a necessity for most small businesses, but make sure you also include some educational resources. Try to answer the most common questions your company is asked as a part of the profile page. Also consider adding some presentation materials; this is easily done using SlideShare which can be added to your LinkedIn profile, and optimized for search.

Company Blogs

A well written company blog can have a big impact, but this does involve a commitment to keep on creating additional content. So make sure you have a plan for this before you start one. You need both the content strategy and resources necessary to create and maintain a good one.

All of these activities act to engage decision makers in your business or brand and can set your company apart from the local competition.

To keep up-to-speed with the evolving social media technologies and techniques of today, take a look at our Social Media Strategy Kit.

If you have been monitoring the blogosphere closely and someone has just slammed and posted negative comments for your brand or your blog, how do you handle this? In short, helpfully, honestly and diplomatically. There’s really no fast and hard rules, but here’s a couple of tips that you can follow.

Wait and watch

Take a little time so that you can watch and gauge the reaction. If you confront the situation by just jumping in on someone’s comment that is just blowing off steam can create a major controversy. If no one is really commenting or paying attention to what has been said, it might be the best to let the person vent and then die out on its own. Bloggers can quickly move on to a new story that grabs their attention.

Ty to avoid rebuttals

A negative review of your services or products should not bring a strong response. By directly attacking the blogger will always bring others to their defence and just inflame the situation. Never try to take a strong position to bully the blogger.

Be concerned and helpful

If you are entering a blog as a guest you must show respect. This will result that you get respect in return. Always avoid sarcasm and try to always be genuine and helpful. A negative review should always be treated as constructive criticism. You can offer to help resolve the issue and to listen to the complaints. How you handle this situation can convert a foe into a helpful friend.

Be impartial

Try to stay away from arguments and negative opinions. Always use objective information where possible and third-party statistics and data to show your point of view. Links to other sites than your own can be very good convincers.

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

It goes without saying that Online Reputation Management (ORM) is a very important thing to consider for yourself and your company. More and more people are doing research online, and more specifically the search engines, before they do business with a company or individual. Just as shoppers utilize review sites and comparison shopping engines, HR departments utilize Goolge search.

Follow thru

If you make promises and commitments, always follow through on what you have promised.

Did you know that your blog can be a powerful business tool to influence your customers? Blogs can build interactive conversations with targeted readers. Blogging for your business can get faster results than traditional internet marketing.

To blog or not to

A blog is an excellent tool to boost your online brand, increase your website’s rankings on the search engines, reach new potential clients, communicate with current customers and to publicize information about your company.

There’s 3 main factors you need to take into consideration if you want to start influencing people with your blog posts.

Build relationships, selling your ideas and leadership.

Build relationships

• Positive: Always avoid criticizing others and being negative. You can focus on how to do the best with something and by building others up. Give advice, solutions and tips.
• Interested: Always be genuinely interested in your readers and on their perspectives. What do they want to know? What do they find interesting?
• Solutions: Talk about solutions to problems that your interested readers might have. You can encourage the discussion by asking questions.

Selling your ideas

• Motivation: As you write each blog posting you should always consider why your readers would want to do something that you are saying.
• Explain your ideas: Real life examples and effective story telling can help to make your ideas visual and memorable.
• Arguments: Always avoid arguments even when your readers are making negative comments. Stay objective and to the point. Be thankful for new ideas, opinions and be respectful.
• Agreement: You can respond to comments by first identifying all the areas of agreement. Try to view things from your reader’s perspective.

Leadership

• Mistakes: Admit your mistakes and be open on how you solved your problems. This can be a motivating factor to others that are facing the same problems so that they can see what didn’t work and what did.
• Questions: Try suggesting alternatives and ask questions instead of telling people directly what they should and shouldn’t do.
• Benefits: Focus on the benefits that your readers might receive from your ideas.
• Respectful. Be respectful of your readers capabilities and their situations and how you can help them to succeed. You can encourage them to try new ideas and to empower action.

Successful blogging takes time and dedication any way you look at it. Not only can your blogging influence people, but you can build trust and credibility with your blogging as well. Be the expert in your industry and niche and others will return regularly to your blog to see what you are saying.

Before you can start compiling your Business blog marketing plan, you should always answer a couple of questions on what you want to accomplish with your business blog. Do you want better organic search engine rankings? Increase your brand authority? Increase visitors? Sales?Find a couple of questions below that can help you with your blog marketing strategy.

At wsi-webdesign, we can get carried away by the details of what we are talking about at any given time, (we love what we do!)  so we’ve decided to change our format just a little and start by presenting the key takeaways of the post. In future, each post will present the key takeaways first in the hope that you, our valued visitors, will be able to quickly decide if the rest of the post is something of interest to you. With that..

1. Get started now on your business blog;
2. Commit a reasonable amount of time to develop and maintain your company’s blog project;
3. The 3 main areas for blog posts are a) General industry commentary, b) Customer service related discussions, c) Information related postings;
4. Use appropriate social media vehicles to promote and amplify your message;
5. Be certain that your posts are optimized so that search engines will pick up your content;
6. Provide your visitors with the opportunity to engage further through some sort of offer using landing pages;
7. Measure everything you do with an analytics package so that you understand what is of greatest value to your visitor.

5 Business blogging tips:

1. Create a list of subjects to cover- Having 20, 30 even 40 blog ideas is easy if you sit down and make a list. If this seems like a challenge, bring in your associates (sales, customer service, administration etc.) and brainstorm;
2. Pre-write some blog posts- When an idea hits you for a blog post, write it and save it so that you have something ready to go for a day when you’re drawing a blank or just don’t have time to create a new post;
3. Use your entire team for blog content development- Too often the blog is given to one person as a responsibility. Sometimes this works but often it’s a little overwhelming. Empower someone to manage the blog who will be a regular contributor, but will also engage your whole team in creating blog post offerings;
4. Invite industry partners and clients to guest blog- Does your company have key industry partners? What about customers who are really happy with your solution? Inviting them to post to your blog can give your company a really interesting blend of perspectives on your solution!
5. Repeat pertinent topics- If you think you can say something once and get your message out and received by your entire target audience, think again. Remember playing “Telephone” around a campfire? How the message got misinterpreted as it went around the circle? You can say one thing to ten people and get ten different interpretations, try saying the same thing ten different ways so that everyone receives the same message…it works!

Blog marketing strategy questions

Objectives: What is the most important thing that you would like to accomplish with your blog? Your objectives can include building up traffic, reaching new potential prospects, open communication with current customers, building up your brand name, etc. You can create a list detailing all of your objectives and then choose the most important one.

List two more of the objectives that are important to you. This will give you a total of three objectives. More than three objectives can be difficult sometimes to focus on. Most of the activity on your blog should be focused around the primary and most important objective.

Visitors: Who will be reading your blog? This should always be your targeted audience. This should also be the same as your targeted customer if one of your main objectives is to increase sales or business leads.

Time: How much time can you commit on your blog? Usually to reach your objectives you will need to commit solid time on your blog. This could either be your own time or the time of one of your employees.

New trends in online marketing are constantly popping up

Trends are getting more savvy and unique and include Internet-video marketing, Internet-social network marketing and many more. Many experts advise that blogging is the most important of these trends and if not included in your Internet marketing strategy, you are missing out on an extremely important part of your traffic building opportunity.

Here are a few tips on how you can implement blogging to its full prospective within your Internet marketing strategy.

The key is to make blogging work for your business by understanding who your target market is.

Implementing blogs should make you more flexible and the objective is to encourage additional traffic to your website by providing information to a wider audience then you would normally reach.

The first tip is, ‘Make your blog interesting’.

Insure you use engaging headlines on your blog. This makes your blog more searchable. When your post has a memorable and engaging headline, you engage the interest of many web users. With that, the user will find your blog and pick up more about your products or services.

Once catching their interest, they hopefully will make a purchase and you will have a new customer. The key here is to use a memorable title to entice prospective customers to your business. Blogging as a part of your Internet marketing strategy might seems easy, however, you will need to quickly determine what works and what doesn’t.

The second tip, ‘Keep your blog short and simple’.

Blogs should not be story-like or boring. Choose your words carefully, use bullet points and  be honest. Provide benefit after benefit on your product or service. Web users want rapid gratifying differences that convince them to purchase your product and require reassurance that their buying decision is correct. With a simple, popular and obvious blog post, you are able to increase traffic to your website that should naturally lead to more business.

The third tip, ‘Words are powerful’.

Do not use egotistic and hard-to-understand words. Be aware of your customers and the language that they will understand and respond to. If you intend to attract customers globally, you must be aware of the limitations in the basic understanding of the message that you are trying to convey.

Use elementary English words that explain clearly and are accepted by many. Do not use conditions that users cannot understand. Enormous or complicated words that are hard to pronounce do not assist with brand recognition or create an affinity for your product or service.

Write your blog with a personal touch. Write as if you are talking to someone. Write in a simple yet interesting manner to gain the attention of your prospective customer.

The final but most important tip, ‘Imaginatively make use of graphics’.

If you wish customers to purchase your product, they must identify with your products ability to satisfy their need. In order to do so, customers must be able to see your product or service. Add cinema and or radio to the mix and be honest. If you are marketing clothing online, ensure customers are able to see what they are buying and also freely obtain what they see.

Many valid studies with regard to online purchasing, conducted over the years, confirm the large number of complaints received from disappointed customers who have been lost to this particular channel through misleading copy and advertising. Add fun and engaging graphics to your blog.,but do not over-crowd it as it is the clean look that counts when communicating visually.

‘Blogging is not only popular but is proven as a valid Internet marketing source of additional traffic and new business’.

Blogging only functions when you implement its limitless potential. So, if your intention is to take your business online or expand your online presence, strongly consider including Blogging as a communication tool within your Internet marketing plan.

After all, you have nothing to lose by trying it!