How to Leverage your Corporate Blogging Strategy
I came to blogging in 2003 the way most marketers did. I was looking for something to build my personal credibility as an expert in my industry. I wanted to get speaking engagements at conferences, be a voice for best practices in my industry, and if I was lucky, get invited to write a book.
By 2006, all of those things had come true. I was presenting at nearly 50 events a year and was invited by the Wiley publishing company to write a book, “E-mail Marketing By the Numbers.”
The blog was very helpful to me personally, and the industry visibility clearly drove more opportunities to my company. But along the way, I found a benefit to corporate blogging that was unanticipated and much more powerful.
The blog ranked well in organic search. Not only did it rank in the top of search results for select keywords, it also converted at a higher rate than the ads my organization was paying for.
The reality of blogging is this: The more you do it, the more opportunities you have to engage in dialog. This is the epiphany that led me to study blogging as a measurable marketing tool.
Generally, as organizations come to realize the SEO benefits of blogging, blogs will move from a C level activity to something that is widely encouraged among all employees.
This influx of human generated content will help with search optimization by creating increasing volumes of fresh, updated and keyword-rich content. Widespread employee blogging also helps increase conversion. If the social networking phenomenon has taught us anything, it’s that people want to deal with people a lot more than they want to deal with institutions. Of course empowering employees to blog has an element of risk that will need to be controlled, and that might ruffle some feathers of more traditional bloggers.
In the short history of blogging there has been almost a snobbery of what the right way to blog is.
What’s right for citizen journalism, however, is rarely right for organizations. The real challenge will be whether corporations can take a tool like blogging and adopt what’s right and good about it (as well as unbelievably effective) without corrupting it into just another spamming tool.
Chris Baggott is an award-winning blogger and the co-founder of Compendium Blogware, an Indianapolis-based company that helps organizations improve their SEO through its simplified blogging software. He can be reached at [email protected].
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