Tag: Corporate blogging

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Why a Company Should Have an Official Blog?

Sometime earlier I attended a blogger’s meet-up organized by Hewlett Packard. By the end of the day, what I was taking away from it was a nice T-Shirt with their insignia, their new product HP Mini Notebook review brochure, and many ideas for corporate blogging. Since then I was musing about it so I induced to give them a proper shape and now here is what I came up to.

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Content Based SEO | Part 8

This school of thought adopts the principle that the content of your website is what really matters. This could be described as the "purist" view which assumes that if people develop high-quality websites, they will be rewarded with high-quality search rankings. Read more

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Target Keywords | Part 4

This is the most important and critical part of SEO. Selecting targeted keywords is as important as setting a strong base of a tall building. Today I’ll teach you how to select targeted keywords for your blog or website according to your niche market. So lets start today’s learning In order to get your site recognized by search engines you select Keywords or phrase. A common mistake is to target the wrong keywords, or worse, no particular keywords at all. When you optimize your website, you are optimizing for target keywords. This means creating a list of specific words and/or phrases which you know people are searching for, and making sure that when these keywords are searched for your site will be in the result pages. So generally how to select keywords? Finding this answer ask yourself these questions:

1. First of all, will people actually search for the things you have at your website? If not, you're wasting your time.
2. If so, exactly which words will they be searching for? You need a specific list of words and phrases - these will become your target keywords.
3. How competitive are your target keywords, i.e. how many other websites are targeting the same keywords? Be realistic about targeting highly competitive keywords - you may be better off targeting less popular ones.

Finding Keywords

The easiest way to find keywords is to use one of the online tools available. These provide a list of popular keywords associated with a particular topic. An example is shown below - try it! If you are really serious about finding the best keywords to target, you will need to pay for a serious tool such as Wordtracker. This is a powerful and comprehensive tool which will definitely give you an edge. Payment is by subscription (a free trial is available). Besides this there are number of free keyword search tools available as well. Google provides a very authentic keyword research tool for its organic search. Click here for Google Keyword Research Tool

Your Business Name

A very common mistake is to assume that the keyword you need to target is your own business name. For example, a business called "Wee Care Furniture" might spend all their effort making sure their website is the #1 result when their name is searched for. Once this is achieved they think the job is done. The problem is that, whilst this will be helpful for those customers who already know about you, it will not attract any new customers. If a person has never heard of your store (or can't remember your name), he will not search for "Wee Care Furniture". They are going to search for more general terms such as "furniture", perhaps with the name of their city or the particular type of furniture they are looking for. Let me take another example and explain accordingly. Suppose you are “BestMark Management Consultants” in Islamabad and you give management services and trainings. There are two parts. Identify your basic keywords like “BestMark”, “BestMark Consultants”, “BestMark Consultants Islamabad”, and optimize them in the search. The other part is competitor keyword analysis like “Management Consultants”, “Management Trainings”, “Management Trainers in Islamabad”, “Management Trainings and Services” and so on according to the search trends and optimize those keywords for your search engine results will bring you more and more customers. Think like a potential customer who doesn't know you. Instead of targeting the keywords you would use to find your own website, find the keywords your potential customer will search for. I hope it gave you an insight for your keyword research. If you still have any questions about this particular topic you can shoot here in the comments. I'll try to answer them in the best of my knowledge. Okay guys the training is still on and the next topic that I'll discuss in the next part will be on some Basic Technical On-Page Optimization of your business website or blog. Stay tuned!

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Top Ten Reasons for Corporate Blogging

This is Part 2 of Corporate Blogging series. In part 1, I just tried to sketch some tremendous features that corporate sector can cash just f they jump in it. Okay, as for me, I see the following top ten reasons why companies should have a corporate blog. I’ll be addressing companies directly, as if they can get any good reason to start their corporate blog after reading this.

• Transparency: The first reason why you should start a corporate blog is to become completely transparent to the readers. You want to be as open as possible by your business practices that how you are doing things, so that your readers should trust your brands and you can talk directly to them. This increases the possibilities that they get more confident buying your products and services.
• Getting Ahead Of the Curve: The second reason you should have a corporate blog is to go ahead of the curve. Right now 9% of the fortune 500 companies have a corporate blog and it is expected that by the mid of 2010 almost 15% of the companies will have one. Now a few years down the road when it will be about 50% of the fortune 500 companies that will be having their corporate blogs to stay ahead of the curve, the competition will start getting brawny too. So here is a hint for you: “Start your corporate blog now.”
• Client Communication: The third reason you should have a corporate blog is that it allows you to have informal discussion with your clients or customers. More you understand your customer – more you can come up to the mark with the products. Blog is a nice central hub of attention with lots of discussions and FAQs.
• Build Hype: The forth reason you should have a corporate blog is that you can create hype early. Like for example Google (http://googleblog.blogspot.com) has a corporate blog and it takes advantage by announcing the testing product phase months earlier before actually launching them. So, they can let know the people about their product and create the buzz and required hype. Recently Google is doing this with “Google Voice” and “Google Wave”
• Gather Opinions: The fifth reason you should have a corporate blog is that they can generate opinions. You can ask questions on their blog, generate new ideas, test them and see what your clients/customers want. You can know the dynamics and responses on your products early before you even take product to the market.
• Word of Mouth: The sixth reason you should have a corporate blog is to have word of mouth opportunities. Blogging is really a viral idea. People like to read and then share it and blog about it and so on. So your product gets viral so very quickly. That’s what Apple (http://www.apple.com/iphone) did before they were launching iPhone. They used blog as a showcase of the big features of iPhone and that way it went viral in very short time.
• Easy to Setup: The seventh reason you should have a corporate blog is that blogs are super easy to setup at a very low cost. Most of the time its nearly free or just a cost of a designer.
• Cater to your Clients Need: The eighth reason you should have a corporate blog is to allow you to cater with the needs of target market. You can announce new features, new products, services, public opinion, contests, setbacks, milestones, your tips and tricks about your niche or even about reviews of competitors or compotator analysis. People who follow your blogs along everyday want to hear everything related to the company.
• New marketing opportunities: The ninth reason you should have a corporate blog is cash in new market potential. With a blog, you create lot of new content, lot of new pages. Those pages and content can be promoted in a lot different ways that the websites are capable of. Even if you have super competitive industry, you with your blog as a marketing tool can generate many different streams of traffic towards your main website.
• Search Engine Optimization: The last but not the least, you should have a corporate blog for a reason that in my opinion is the most important, that is for Search Engine Optimization. With a blog, you are frequently updating a lot of content, creating lot of new pages for Google and other search engines to visit and reach one of the pages linking back to your home page, promoting your content and services. With more content you write with more links of your products and services that Google is going to find, you are actually doing an optimization for your main website. So just updating your blog as frequently as possible, you are promoting your home page indirectly.

I want you to remember two keywords for this article. The first one is TRAFFIC. I am not referring this as the traffic in the peak hours in Rawalpindi. I am referring to traffic as the number of visitors on the blog. If you are not getting traffic, doesn’t matter how attractive your website is, how pretty it is, it will never going to work. The second word that I want you to take away from this article is BRAND. Blogging will help you to build you brand. There are people who are brand conscious i.e. whatever the brand will do they will follow it. Though blogs may not always yield immediate growling results, they can be part of a “halo effect” that ultimately gives a business a bigger online presence…

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Why Professionals Should Blog?

This is part 2 of the featured article about Professional Blogging. In Part 1 I discussed some observations and findings about "Why Professionals Don't Blog?". In this part I will be discussing some points on the bases of which I think that our professionals should blog. So lets jump straight in the topic discussion. How To Convince Professionals “Start A Blog” Now that we know what causes professionals not to blog, we can take steps to convince professionals to start blogging. Truth be told, starting a blog is not as difficult as they think it is. All it really requires is a domain name, a content plan and a platform and a professional’s brain! So here are some points on which you can convince them to start their blogs:

• Remove “Should” and “Have to” from Your Vocabulary – “Should” and “Have to” are actually giving me a view that somebody is forcing you to start a blog. Whereas blogging counts on passion, self-determination and consistency of the work. I suppose instead “I should blog” and “I have to blog” one should use “I want to blog” or “I must blog”, this gives a conscious belief that you are sure and confident enough to start a blog; it’s not being forced on you.
• Give Up Perfectionism – Nothing is perfect in this world. No matter how hard you work you will never be perfect. We can just idealize it and just try our best to get closest to that ideal situation but we can’t ever get the ideal results.

So rather than berate looking for perfection in everything just believe that life and blogging is a journey. And every journey starts with a first step! So why waiting? Start a blog now. The best way for that is to adapt “Trial and Error” method; gradually you’ll come to know your mistakes. Remember that mistakes are gifts in disguise. Because each mistake you do is like learning how to tackle it next time.

• View the Project in Pieces – It’s impossible to start a blog and have its all pieces together in one day. It takes time to get to some level step by step. You have to come up with strategies for the blog content and establishing a relationship within the niche market. So it’s all about taking one piece at a time, working on it, keep making it mature through a proper execution plan.

It sure can’t be done overnight. Take it as a puzzle where you put every piece on its slot one after another and then you get the whole picture. Best way is to break process into steps and plan a solid strategy to execute it. For example, Choosing a domain name, then the right platform, then the content strategy, then its marketing strategy and then finding ways to make money from your blog, and so on.

• Feel the Fear and Do It Anyways – You all might have heard this phrase lately but here is what I call its true implementation. Starting a blog sure is scary in a sense to put yourself out there and share your thoughts. People may accept your thoughts or may reject them as well. And your blog may not be perfect too. But by the end of the day you have to accept and understand this fact, and start you blog anyhow. Don’t compromise on what you truly want.
• Train them embedding their profession in their blogs – It’s a myth that starting a blog is like putting more weight on head. Professionals feel themselves engaged 24/7 in their work so they more likely don’t want to blog. However, believe me it’s just a myth. Blog is not at all like adding up an extra hour work in your busy schedule rather it is to help you in your work. They just need to figure a “how to” factor and there you go. Blog will act like an assistant in their work.
• Make It Fun – It was not until I started a blog myself when I figured out how much fun it actually is. So stop fearing of the unknown and start a blog!

These are just a few of the convincing points that I discussed in this post. Pakistan has tremendous talent in her soil. What if all professionals get a platform to show their real skills and that intern represent on international level. In the next part I'll be discussing Return on blogging (ROI). You may add more of the convincing points here in the comments and we can discuss them further. Stay tuned!