Understanding Business Blogging

The Advent of Blogging: Personal Blogs

Blogs became popular during the late nineties. They started as little more than online diaries, and the first blogging platforms positioned themselves accordingly with names like Open Diary, Live Journal, and Typepad. They gave regular people like you and me a way to share our opinions and perspectives with the World Wide Web. Mommy bloggers blogged about being moms. Tech bloggers blogged about the latest gadgets and operating systems. Political activists rallied the troops around their favorite causes and candidates. It was citizen journalism exemplified, giving everyone the ability to state their claims and have their say about the things they found interesting.

Today, dozens of blogging platforms exist to continue this tradition. The most popular include Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr, and SquareSpace.

The Birth of Business Blogging

Business blogging didn’t start to emerge until the early 2000s, when offerings like WordPress made it easier for companies to self-publish. Both WordPress.org and MovableType.org began providing open-source blogging platforms that companies could download, configure, and manage on their own. Due to the manual maintenance that came with Wordpress.org and MovableType.org, many companies were forced to hire outside consultants to manage their blogging efforts.

We’ve come a long way since then. To shed a little light on the growth and acceptance of blogging, let’s get technical and chart-ey for a second. Technology-monitoring firm Gartner creates an annual Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies. According to Gartner’s proven system for predicting success, if a new technology has any promise at all, it quickly receives a great deal of hype and rides the “Peak of Inflated Expectations.” Once the initial buzz is over, the technology slides down into the “Trough of Disillusionment.”

The true test of a technology’s success is whether or not it can make its way out of the “Trough of Disillusionment” and work its way up the more stable “Slope of Enlightenment.” When users fully understand the benefits of the technology—and the resulting return on investment (ROI)—that technology begins its ascent up the “Slope of Enlightenment,” thus resulting in rapid, widespread, and continued adoption. By the “Plateau of Productivity,” mainstream adoption occurs with better defined customer expectations for what “good” looks like. The focus of the market is not so much about if the technology makes sense; rather, it’s about how to make the technology as productive as possible.

So, let’s compare where corporate blogging is on Gartner’s Hype Cycle for 2009 vs. 2010. In 2009, corporate blogging was early on the slope of enlightenment. In 2010, corporate blogging is climbing the slope of enlightenment and approaching the plateau of productivity. What does this mean? It means if your business isn’t already blogging, now is the time to start. Businesses now have the tools and know-how to make their blogs as productive as they want.

Adapted design of the Gartner Hype Cycle of Emerging Technologies. www.gartner.com 

Now, let’s be clear: the purposes of a business blog are inherently different from the purposes of personal blogging. Business blogs aren’t online diaries. Rather, when executed correctly, business blogs are  revenue-generating marketing tools with many uses. Here are a few:  

Blogs give a human voice to your communications. Online brownie retailer FairyTale Brownies uses its “Brownie Blog” to showcase and provide context around its delicious offerings. 

Blogs help you establish thought leadership. Alloy manufacturer Indium uses its blog to connect its employee engineers with customer engineers. Thoughts and experiences are shared on their “One Engineer to Another” blog, creating an unparalleled resource for anyone in the alloy-manufacturing field. Chief Content Officer called Indium’s blog one of the top 15 most innovative content-marketing projects in the world. 

Blogs facilitate the sharing of news and current events. Through calls-to-action and posts, blogs help you inform readers about your upcoming events. ExactTarget uses its blog to keep readers excited and up-to-date on its yearly Connections conference. 

Blogs help you solve your customers’ problems more easily. Easy Care, a horse-products manufacturer,  combines its customer-generated stories, its employees insight, and its customer service Q&As to create a robust “Customer Help” category on its blog. 

Blogs help you acquire new customers. Consumer-electronics retailer hhGregg uses its blog to make consumers aware of its products and expedite purchase decisions. Through calls-to-action, customers are able to locate local stores that currently have their desired gadget in stock.

Even with all of these great uses, blogs are still a  severely under-used marketing tool, with only 51 percent of businesses actively using one (Source). What’s the holdup? Maybe some businesses think it’s too hard. Maybe they think blogging is a fad. Or maybe they don’t fully recognize the benefits of business blogging. Let’s see if we can help.

Why Your Business Should be Blogging

Because we’re the biggest business blogging platform this side of eternity, we have a lot of insight into the key advantages that blogs offer to organizations. After digging into our data, we were able to distill the top six benefits of business blogging. You can quote us on them.

Blogging is conversational. Blogs will humanize your marketing efforts, giving you a medium to discuss your business’s thoughts and ideas, while simultaneously solving your audience’s problems in a more natural manner.

Blogging improves search. Every blog post that you write becomes a new entry point for your prospective customers to find you via search engines. By creating frequent, relevant, focused content, you’ll have more opportunities to provide value and create relationships with the people who need your business’s help.

Blogging demonstrates thought leadership. You hire smart people, and those smart people know a lot about your industry. A blog is a great way for your employees to share their expertise and ideas with current and prospective customers, shortening sales cycles in the process.

Blogging is linkable and sharable. Blogs provide your audience with a tried-and-true place to find your resources and offerings. They also give you a platform for promoting your content to social networks.

Blogging is a more permanent repository for social media marketing. When social media campaigns are centered around your blog, they are permanent—that is, they don’t disappear in a Twitter timeline or fall below the fold on a Facebook newsfeed. By using your blog to manage your social media marketing strategy, you’re taking control of your content and allowing your efforts to pay dividends for you days, weeks, months, and years down the road.

Blogging facilitates the re-imagining of marketing materials. Take your press releases, brochures, sell sheets, and other business documents and transform them into online content. A five-page white paper can become five blogs posts, while five blog posts can become a brand-new white paper. Online to offline. Offline to online. Blogs make it easy to give your existing content new life.

Breaking Down the Blog

Understanding the common features of blog will help you start thinking about your own business blog. Most blogs have these common elements:

Header. This section is found at the top of every page of the blog. A header can feature a call to action, branding, navigation, information about upcoming events, or anything else that you choose. You can even change the header and experiment with dynamic calls-to-action.

Body (Post Area). This section includes blog posts with titles, dates, authors, share buttons, and commenting tools.

Sidebar. This section houses calls-to-action, helping readers click through to purchase or conversion as they engage with you. Sidebars usually contain a search function and category organization.

Footer. This section contains copyright, software source, contact, and disclaimer information.

Subscribe Function. This section could offer email-newsletter signup, RSS feed information, or even links to social media accounts.

What It Takes to Get Started

Getting started is a lot easier than you might think. Work through these four steps and you’re basically there:
 
1. Establish a strategy and objectives for your blog. Consider the purposes we described earlier such as thought leadership, solving customer problems, and acquiring new customers. The key is to think through and write down what you hope to accomplish.
 
2. Map your content channels. Your content can come from a lot of different places: employee bloggers, customer stories, new or existing photos and videos, FAQs, existing marketing materials, feedback from customer satisfaction surveys, etc. The sky’s the limit. So, it helps to think through where you want your content to come from. (Be sure to look for places where content already exists!)
 
3. Pick a business blogging platform. There are a variety of choices here. You can download freeware, configure it yourself, and then maintain and update it yourself. Or, you can find a consultant to do those things for you. Another option is to consider a hosted business blogging platform like Compendium (you saw that coming, didn’t you?). You tell us what you want your blog to do, we’ll set it up, configure it, share best practices, maintain it, and even innovate new features for you. We make your business blogging both IT and Worry Free.
 
4. Identify metrics to track and monitor your success. Because blogs are multi-purpose, there a variety of ways to measure success, including the blog activity that you undertake, audience activity in terms of traffic, audience engagement, and even audience conversion to your calls-to-action.

Can Compendium Help Me Get Started?

You bet! If you’re ready to start business blogging, you can contact us at 317-777-6100 or shoot us an email. If you're not ready to talk, download our Getting-Started Guide to Business Blogging for more blogging info.