If you are an avid reader of The B2B Lead, you know that we are all about targeted marketing, specifically targeted lead generation. And I have said before that having a targeted blog can support lead generation better because it is focused on a specific audience so targeted messaging will resonate better. I recently created a mission statement for The B2B Lead to help focus our blogs to topics most relevant to our customers and prospects as well as in line with our in house expertise. Our mission is to share B2B Marketing best practice ideas and tips with our customers and prospects - enabling them to drive the most ROI possible from their lead generation initiatives.

There are lots of good examples of good mission statements out there that have driven a company to success. Southwest began as the low cost airline; every decision they made came back to that mission. Herb Kelleher would not have implemented any new program unless it helped Southwest to be THE low cost airline. It seems to have worked. Southwest does have a new mission statement these days and is the driving factor that helps keep them successful even when most other airlines are failing.

Once I created the mission statement I was able to sit down and create a list of more focused topics. This helps keep our whole team of bloggers on task and hopefully will help us to create more relevant content to help our fellow B2B Marketers drive increased results from their lead generation initiatives.

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Last week, we hosted a B2B Marketing Roundtable in Austin on Social Media. It was great to see what other marketers are doing with social media. Some were very advanced with huge customer communities while other were still trying to figure out how best to integrate social media into their overall marketing strategy. It seems, overall, executives are aware of social media but do not completely understand it. If you are feeling pressure from your bosses to start a blog or user community because it is the hot thing right now, you should really sit back and analyze what tactic would be best.

One attendee said she was supposed to be starting a user community but they only have 70 customers. For most companies a user community is a lot of time, effort and money for only 70 customers especially when you consider that only a fraction of customers will actually be active in the community. Knowing your customer is also something to consider when deciding to start a blog. Some companies believe that blogs today are what websites were 5 years ago, you just have to have one. The truth is they are a lot of effort. If your customers and prospects are not active online, starting a blog is probably not a good idea. The point?  Research and know your customers’ behavior before launching any social media program.

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Companies create blogs for different reasons. Some use it as a tool to communicate with their customers. Others try to leverage their blog for lead generation. Some use it to supplement their PR strategy. Whatever the reason, all companies should have set metrics to follow in order to track the effectiveness of their blog. I just read a great MarketingProf’s article by Mack Collier (this one does require a premium membership, but I highly recommend it).

To give you a recap of what Mack suggests, there are three major metrics to track:

1. Traffic
2. Feed Subscribers
3. Links

Traffic can be easily tracked using a tool like Google Analytics. You can use traffic measurements to help you determine what subjects are being read the most, what days of the week you get the most traffic and if outside activities like a press release or commenting on another blog gave you a boost.

Feed subscribers are different than traffic and will not count as part of your traffic. You may actually see your traffic decrease as your readers find your content to be valuable and subscribe to your RSS. Feedburner is a tracking tool for feeds and offers a few other benefits as well. (Just as an FYI is owned by Google now.)

You can track your links through Technorati or Google Blog Search. This will help you determine which topics resonate the best with your readers and will help you to create relationships with other bloggers.

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Attention Conservation Notice: The following post shares a few counter-intuitive tips for getting bloggers to write about you.

Cory Doctorow – the genius behind Boing Boing, and the inspiration behind ReachForce’s attention conservation notices–has shared more of his brilliance in 17 TIPS FOR GETTING BLOGGERS TO WRITE ABOUT YOU.

If you can get past the InformationWeek’s annoying, in-your-face advertising and survey requests, you will find several great nuggets in this post. Many of which will really throw most marketers for a loop. Here are a few of the more interesting suggestions:

• Have a permanent link. Don’t just change the front page of your site every time a new speaker for your speaker-series in announced. A blogger who links to the front page of your site today in a post about the upcoming address by Philo T Farnsworth, wants that link to stay good for in the future,
• PDFs stink. It’s not a Web page (see “Have a link”). It’s hard to copy and paste out of. It doesn’t show up in browsers half the time. The Web is made of HTML.
• Put your URL on your images. If you’ve got cool photos or other images up on your site, stick your URL in unobtrusive type at the bottom of it.
• Forget the “copyright protection” Javascript. Some sites have bizarre Javascript that pops up snotty little copyright messages when you try to right-click on an image to save it. OK, we get the point: you don’t want people to copy your images. We’ll just move on. Enjoy your obscurity.
• Enough with the legal boilerplate. If every page on your site ends with “(c) 2008 Paranoid Co Inc, all rights reserved. No part of this site may be reproduced without permission,” then bloggers may just take you at your word and write about someone else’s site.

The world of Marketing has changed drastically in the last few years and it’s time for B2B Marketers to question the status quo (and their legal counsel) and make some changes to thrive in this new world.

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I was cruising through my Google Reader (one of the best things I could have ever set up as a blogger) and stumbled upon a great post about blog writing on Diana Huff’s B2B MarCom Writer Blog. She suggests that bloggers have a beat just like journalists. If you are just starting your own corporate blog, this is a great tip to help you figure our what to write about. If you can define your “beat” then you will find yourself soaking up everything you see about those topics and inspiration will come more easily.

Also, if you are one of several contributors to your blog, each writer having a unique beat will help each author to be differentiated from the others.

I’ve always loved the saying “a jack of all trades is a master of none.” If you can really narrow your focus, you have a better chance of positioning yourself as an expert in that area which will increase the quality of your content and hopefully your readership.

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All marketing initiatives need to be targeted. Spraying your message to as many people as possible and praying that it will resonate with the right people just won’t cut it. This is no different when you are planning to start a blog. And for a corporate blog to be successful, you do need to plan ahead of time.

• Determine your focus and have a good grasp of what you are all about.
• Ask your customers what they would like to hear about, and the answer is probably not just your latest product updates (unless you are Apple).
• Find that niche where you can stand out from other blogs in your space (namely your competitors) and don’t try and be everything to everyone.
• Learn about your customers and cater to their needs.

You don’t need a lot of readers; you just need the right readers.

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While I may be the blog master of ReachForce, I am definitely not the most technically savvy. I let my web guys handle the technology side of our blog. But, as a marketer, there are some technical decisions that need to be made when starting a blog. There are many great applications like WordPress and TypePad that make starting a blog easy but have you considered what the best url is for your blog? Mike Volpe at HubSpot dives into the advantages and disadvantages of each choice. This is great information I wish I would have had when I was making this decision.

Originally, The B2B Lead was a folder in our corporate site, but we wanted to make it distinctly clear that it is a thought leadership blog and not a sales pitch. We soon moved it to its own url. While I think we did gain points for differentiating it from the corporate site, Mike is right that it is a lot of work to build inbound links. In retrospect, I think I would have also considered making it a subdomain of our site. The point of starting the blog was of course to help boost SEO but more importantly to create great content that would be appreciated by other smart B2B marketers.

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Here is a great blog post from Opinionated Marketers I found today about social media and leveraging it for lead generation.

I struggle with this issue on a daily basis. As a B2B marketer at a small start-up, I have to use my budget wisely, which for me means all of my activities need to generate leads in one way or another. Social media is so prevalent that I feel as though I have to be a part of the movement, but is it ultimately doing anything for the bottom line?

Is social media like traditional PR? You have to do it, but there is no way to measure the results. You spend time and money trying to get something out of it but it is hard to see the ROI. I keep trying to master having a blog, creating a presence in the right Facebook groups and leveraging twitter, but how do I keep my job if none of this ever results in real leads?

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I was catching up on my blog reading today and found a great post on Seth Godin’s Blog. It read:

The more people you reach the more likely it is that you’re reaching the wrong people

Who vs. how many.

I think this is brilliant on several levels. First, from a bloggers perspective, he uses as few words as possible to get his point across but still provokes thought and leaves you wanting more.

Secondly, I am a firm believer in what he is preaching. At ReachForce, we call the concept Godin refers to as spray and pray. That is, traditionally marketers have sprayed their message to as many people as possible and prayed that it will reach the right people and stick. With industry response rates at 1-3%, this methodology obviously isn’t working.

Targeted lead generation, however, can yield response rates of 20-30% or higher. If you focus your efforts on a smaller, more targeted group, you can send a more relevant message that has a better chance of resonating with your audience.

You can read more about this concept in our eBook, Funnelnomics.

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Attention Conservation Notice: The following post provides an eight-point litmus test that B2B marketers and bloggers can use to evaluate their blog posts for Search Engine Optimization and relevance to business objectives.

I’ve stepped in to blog for Network Performance Daily recently since our full-time blogger was vacationing in New Zealand. For the 99.8% of The B2B Lead readers who live outside the network engineering universe, Network Performance Daily is the NetQoS corporate blog. It’s rated in the top .99% of all blogs and received great coverage including this piece in Computerworld. And, it’s also driven a great deal of interest in and revenue for our company. So, we must be doing something right.

One thing we haven’t done right (until recently) however, is to stay on track with our core audience and our company interests. Blogging is, after all, a conversation and conversations often stray off track. The allure of technological innovation was just too great at times and we were sucked into the dazzling world of iPhones and flying cars.

Clearly, it was time to get the blog content back on track to share network engineering tips, news and analysis with our core readers so that we could improve our sagging reader loyalty numbers. This was my goal when I stepped back in to blog for NetQoS, but what I discovered was there were far more benefits to staying on track with the content than just improving readership.

Of course, I knew there was a strong connection between the blog and SEO ranking. I also knew the blog was a great tool to attract readers and prospects to download content from our web site. But, until I actually dug in and crafted my own posts, I didn’t really understand the “magic” and how to create a repeatable process to boost SEO rankings which inevitably drive demand and brand awareness. So, with a few posts under my belt and a dramatic boost in SEO rankings for a couple of valuable keywords, I put together this quick litmus test for ALL future NPD posts.

I know that most blog and social media purists will violently disagree with these tips. They will argue that one should not be blogging with marketing and sales interests in mind. Last time I checked, however, I didn’t live in a Socialist country. And, my ego isn’t important enough to spend hours pontificating about topics without at least something to gain. We are all blogging with an objective in mind. I believe they key is in the “intent” of the post. If your goal is to be found, to educate and to attract a following of potential new customers without making false promises, then the following litmus test should help you to keep your posts on track with objectives:

1. Topic must be relevant to your target audience and—even better— to our company and product or service offerings.
2. Topic should be educational, controversial, timely or related to a news event. Bonus points for link-bait articles like posting a list of valuable resources, expert interviews, how-to’s, special reports, etc.
3. Post must begin with easy-to-understand and keyword-rich title (not just a cleverly worded headline). The goal is to communicate what the story and takeaways are about before the reader has to read the story.
4. Must contain links back to prior blog stories, an important corporate web page, press release or a white paper with more information. The exact keywords that are linked to those pages should correspond with the SEO terms for which those pages are optimized.
5. Post must be tagged with right keywords for SEO and content so that it can be categorized and found.
6. Posts should include our thought leadership messages where appropriate.
7. Post should include a list of tips that can be linked to from within the blog.
8. Post must challenge readers to take action in the last sentence—ie. continue the conversation, seek more information or spread the word.

So, that’s my quick list. I’m sure there are more. I’m sure some of these may become too cumbersome to apply. But it’s worth a shot. I mean, what is the value of a Google Page 1 listing to your company? With 80 to 90% of buyers starting their search on Google, I’d recommend giving it a shot.

I’d like to hear about your experiences with blogging and SEO. Importantly, what has been your success in achieving the coveted Google double listing?

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