BlogKing June 25th, 2007
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Abhijit Nadgouda wrote a great post on the benefits of Word Press as a content management system:
Pages and Posts
WordPress supports two basic types of content - Pages
and posts. Pages are used to hold information that is valid for a bigger span of time. For such content, a change overwrites the earlier content. Posts are used for content which is more dynamic, like news and updates. In stead overwriting with changes, such content builds an archive.
Now, any web site that represents an entity - company, product, educational institution or an individual, at least in today’s age, has both such types of content. Providing news and updates helps keep the readers and customers uptodate through subscriptions.
The recent versions of WordPress also lets you set one of the pages as the homepage.
You can do away with the blog and archives look and create a corporate user interface. In a blog the posts take over the entire web site, whereas in a non-blog web site the pages get more dominant.
Categories
Sometimes you might have more than one content types for which posts
are suitable, like news and articles. In such a case you can use the categories to differentiate between the two. The categories can be hierarchical and there is no limit on the number of categories you have. This is one of the best tools to use for content classification.
Feeds
Feed
is one of the most used techniques by readers to keep themselves updated. WordPress generates feeds for both pages and posts and various other queries,
which you can offer to your reader and customers. It is also quite popular that these feeds can be easily converted to emails using various services. What this means is that you can reach out to the web, feedreader and email users by just publishing the content once.
BlogKing May 17th, 2007
Acording to James Lamberti of comScore, AOL gets the highest percentage of paid clicks at 24%, followed by Google at 13%, Yahoo at 11%, and MSN at 8%.
From this basic data, a high ranking for any given query in Google is worth roughly four times that of a visible AdWord link for the same query. Stated another way –
You have to show four PPC links to create click-through opportunities equal to one organic ranking.
Imagine you were trying to decide where to spend your online marketing budget – do you spend 100% of it on a PPC campaign (arguably predictable, more measurable, and guaranteed) or do you balance it with alternative SEO expenditures to create organic results.
Imagine though you could create tens of thousands of unique key phrases that rank organically high. Could you achieve the same in a PPC campaing? Probably not, and if you could, what would be the true cost of such a plan?
Blogs tend to create tremendous visibility in the long-tail by helping authors focus on specific subjects for each post. Indeed, they are one of the best solutions to creating organic visbility. And for every way that your blog posts can be found (and are found), they are roughly four times more valuable than PPC equivalents.
Read more at Blogging for Organic Visibily vs PPC Campaigns
BlogKing May 4th, 2007
Reading books in your field is an important trait of leaders. The same applies to business blogs. The greatest business minds are sharing their knowledge for free. Smart competitors are constantly reading more and therefore learning more. What about you? Are you reinventing your knowledge continuously or is your intellectual capital getting staler by the month?
Seth Godin elaborates.
BlogKing April 30th, 2007
Fallacy #1: I can get all the SEO benefits from a blog without doing any work (creating content on a consistent basis). A hired blogger could be a solution but who know the business better than the principal. The “ghost” blogger would still need to be briefed weekly on what the executive is thinking and the best approach to engage the target market.
There still is no free lunch. Darn.
BlogKing April 28th, 2007
Six Apart (makers of TypePad and Moveable Type) has an interesting ongoing series of posts about weblog history and its pioneers as the medium reaches its tenth year. The lastest interview is with Michael Sippey, who helped influence some of the fundamental thinking about blogging.
I wrote a toss-off piece in 1995 called “The Three C’s of Computing,” which argued that these tools (connected PCs) are good for Creating, Consuming and Connecting. At the time we had OK tools for creation (think MS Office), a growing set of tools for consumption (think AOL), and a very nascent set of connection that wasn’t being covered by the mainstream press (boards, listservs, USENET, etc.). I wrote back then that the dream would be combining the three “into one, glorious future: creating, consuming and connecting all at once.” I think we’re starting to realize that dream with blogs, social networks, photo sharing, presence broadcasting, etc.
- What do you think are the big-picture trends for technologies like blogging? Is blogging a solved problem, like email, or are there more big leaps to be made?
Blogging is definitely not a solved problem. Go back to the three C’s. We’re getting to the point where normal people can start to use the “creation” tools…but we still have a long way to go to make it easier. If today’s RSS reading experience is the end of the line for “consumption” then someone should take our industry out back for a beating. And “connecting” is only starting to get interesting — every application is becoming social, and as a industry we’ll find more interesting ways to traverse and use the network graphs. Then take all of that and tear it away from the desktop. Here in the US we’re still remarkably PC-centric; the mobile and ambient modes have yet to be leveraged effectively. (Look, I used the words “leveraged” and “ambient” in the same sentence. Drink!)
If things were ever “solved” in the computer industry I suspect that the industry has died. The constant pushing in new directions is the very nature of it.
BlogKing April 20th, 2007
Google just keeps going and going … almost puts the Energizer Bunny to shame. Google market share gained another 2ppts in March. So here’s a question. If Google gains one more point in market share, will we lose our veto power? That’s right, for all intents and purposes two-thirds of the 6.4 billion web search queries in the US pass through the Google servers.
Read more at Compete.com
On another angle, specialized vertical search is growing.
The generic applications cover a wider spectrum, but specialized applications excel in their niche - because they have an intimate understanding of the semantics of information in their topics.
In the end, there will always be place for generic search - because it may not be economical to have a vertical search engine for every vertical. However, in major verticals, specialized search engines might take a big bite out of the generic search engines’ market share - including Google’s advertising pie.
Technorati turned blog search into a portal, a playground and an all around useful site for bloggers, techies, marketers and statisticians. You can use Technorati to find top blogs, links to your blog, popularity by topic and many other things.
If you like to see how the future of semantic search is shaping up check out some of the dozen or so reviewed at readwriteweb.com
So far Technorati is to blog search at Google is to generic search. The clear leader. BTW, if you like these posts, click the link in the sidebar and add me to you Technorati favorite. Thanks.
BlogKing April 9th, 2007
For those who are not that familiar with the the concept of the long tail and it’s effect on product distribution this seminal paper by Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired from December 2004 is the best easy read to get a good grounding.
A key aspect of long tail success is piggy backing on the hits. Hits are not going away. But they are not the only game in town anymore. Chris uses examples from Amazon showing how they use analysis of buying patterns to recommend other books or songs you may like.
IF YOU LIKE BRITNEY, YOU’LL LOVE…Just as lower prices can entice consumers down the Long Tail, recommendation engines drive them to obscure content they might not find otherwise.
What does this have to do with business blogging?
A key maxim of Internet marketing is to tap into what people are already searching for. Let the “MSM” or “mainstream media” generate the awareness and inquiries. That is their forte. The business blogger can find out what is hot related to their field by monitoring an alert created in Google News. If you can tie into a general news item all the better.
See, you have a secret weapon. While other SEO’s are sweating over optimizing static pages for past historical high volume keywords you are in instant karma mode. Read the news that morning, write a post in your blog about it and the relevancy to your business. Be sure to title the post using the same keywords that would bring up the original article.
Wham! By afternoon you post is intercepting the same keyword searches.
Even better, use HitTail to monitor the long tail search traffic this post generated and use its suggestions for another round.
Free organic traffic, at your beck and call.
Well we all shine on
Like the moon and the stars and the sun
John Lennon
BlogKing March 31st, 2007
Wow, what a great post over at The Marketing Excellence blog by Eric Kintz, Vice President of Global Marketing Strategy & Excellence for HP.
Technology has enabled customers to dramatically change their attitude towards marketing. As a result, they are tuning out in increasing numbers and talking back. Customers are shifting massively their entertainment and information consumption away from traditional media to the new web space.
Marketers are responding by shifting their advertising to web properties, but online advertising is struggling to gain trust. According to a recent Forrester survey of US households, only 6% trust search engine ads and 2% online banner ads. Customers trust themselves and each other in influencing their perception of a brand. Yet few marketers have embraced blogging, although it supposedly enables a more personal and two-way interaction with the brand.
So does blogging matter? Six senior marketing executives in established corporations who share a common passion for blogging lent their thoughs:
#1 - PR and Blogging – A Love Story or Peaceful Coexistence
#2 – Blogging and the “new influencers”
#3 – The role of blogging in the changing world of advertising
#4 – The role of blogging as part of an integrated web strategy
#5 – Drive Harmony in Conversational Touchpoints
#6 - Creativity, Innovation + Blogging
If large corporations are having these conversations then blogging for business, both large and small, is here to stay. The only question is… when will your company join the conversation?
BlogKing March 30th, 2007
A really cool recent find I’d like to mention is MyBlogLog. You can find it in my sidebar on the right. How it works is that you sign up for the service(free) and list your blog(s) and post a picture or avatar of yourself. Then you drop the code snippet into your sidebar. When visitors who are members visit your blog their picture is added to the display. As new visitor get added, older ones fall off.
Now for the first time one can see the faces of your visitors not some anonymous entry in your web analytics program. I don’t know about you, but that moves the friendliness of the blogosphere up a giant notch.
Seeing the picture of my visitors really makes me curious. I just have to click. That takes me to their MyBlogLog page where I can see their blog site(s) and visit them. If I like what I see then I can join their community. Nothing like getting the approval of your fellow bloggers.
In a few weeks I have discovered many excellent bloggers that I would never have know otherwise. That is the breakthrough feature of MyblogLog. It make it so easy to met your virtual neighbor.
And that is what blogging is all about; creating community.
MyBlogLog is now a part of Yahoo.
Cord Silverstein has written an excellent primer on getting the most out of MyBlogLog, entitled MyBlogLog 101
Let me know of your experience with MyBlogLog.
Technorati Tags: MyBlogLog
BlogKing March 7th, 2007
Alister Cameron has a great summary of why internet marketers should be taking to blogging.
Let’s explore how blogging positively engenders credibility and trust, and in turn influences each of the above “numbers”:
- Blogging generates leads.
Internet marketers whom we at Alliance Software have introduced to blogging are telling us that they’ve entered a whole new world of
lead/traffic generation strategies. PPC is not under any immediate threat, nor is SEO, but social media marketing is booming! Lead generation here is closely aligned to bookmarking, linkbait, viral strategies and a great way to effectively access the “long tail” of search engine and directory traffic. I don’t have room here to unpack all this, but Darren might, on the day 
- Blogging can increase your conversion rate.
The jury is in: the long-form salesletter sells, but the conversion rates are very very rarely extraordinary. However, this morning I was on the phone to a top-gun internet marketer discussing my ideas for this post, and he excitedly explained to me how he has seen extraordinarily high conversion rates from blogs, compared to long-form salesletters. He attributes this order-of-magnitude increase in conversion rate to the much greater credibility and trust levels he and his business partner have established with their target market, thanks to the highly relational and transparent conversational style of their blogs.
- Blogging can help you sell more stuff to your customers.
I asked this same marketer about sales volume, and he explained that his customers were happy to pay a premium price, if only they could gain greater “access” to him and his business partner. (My client sells educational products to the personal investor market.) What a perfect justification for blogging, as a means of delivering greater value to your customers, who are asking for ever more value (in this case, access to/dialogue with the “gurus” themselves).
- Blogging helps you sell more expensive stuff.
There are few more effective ways to engage your customers, survey them, and determine what premium product/services they’re willing to pay for, than blogging. There can be challenges to keep your eavesdropping competitors out of the most valuable and juicy conversations, but that’s usually a price worth paying, I think. Blogging can also function as a very effective “suggestive/up sell strategy” in the form of case studies, customer interviews/ testimonials, etc.
- Blogging is dirt cheap and highly effective marketing.
Finally, blogging costs remarkably little. Frankly, the biggest cost is time, not money. As blogging proves its worth to internet marketers, we will see them diverting internet marketing expenses away from SEO, PPC and banners to social media marketing (SMM), which includes blogging, as well as bookmarking, participation in effective marketing spend may well deliver sizeable savings, even in the short term.
Again, it’s all about the unique value that blogging and online social engagement has in building credibility and trust with our marketplace.
Technorati Tags: internet marketing, leads, conversion rate,
