Search Engine Optimization is a big reason why a lot of companies start blogs in the first place. Make sure you are doing everything you can to optimize your blog. Start with having unique page titles. The following links will tell you how and why to have unique page titles for your blog posts:

http://www.socialpatterns.com/search-engine-optimization/writing-better-titles/
http://www.bloggingblog.net/the-importance-of-titles/
http://www.betterbusinessblogging.com/seo-in-blogs/basic-seo-in-blogs-important-title-tag/

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If you feel like you are completely lost when it comes to blogs, here is a great post on the basics of blogging from VR Marketing blog.

Here are some key takeaways and a few of my own thoughts:

• Be sure to link back to your corporate site, this is especially important if your blog has its own url. (One major reason to start a blog is because it can increase your search engine ranking)
• Tag each post with categories. This will help your readers find what they are looking for and help boost your search engine ranking as well.
• Blogs are a great medium for customer feedback. Write a post that gets your customers talking (and commenting) or put a poll on the blog to survey readers on a specific topic.
• Always moderate your comments. There is a lot of SPAM out there and you want the comments section to be a true dialog that is not interrupted by SPAM. It is ok if someone disagrees with you, do not block that comment because it can get people talking. Comments are boring if everyone agrees and there are no new ideas.
• Avoid “shameless self promotion.” Blogs with interesting, relevant, and up-to-date content will gain a loyal following. Don’t try to trick your readers and sneak in a sales pitch. Be transparent or risk loosing readers.
• Be sure to include keywords in titles and within relevant content for search engines.
• Your blog can be a great supporter for your PR efforts. Post an excerpt from a press release on the blog or reuse blog content for PR ideas.
• Don’t just put your blog out there and expect readers to come. Be sure to leverage your database of customers to let them know about it.
• Make sure your posts are up-to-date. They recommend twice a month but I would say at least twice a week. In a world of instant gratification, we are used to getting what we want when we want it. If your most recent post is two weeks old, I probably won’t be checking in again anytime soon.

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While this may have been true for Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, this is not true of blogs. With quite a lot of blog clutter out there all competing for attention it can be difficult to get traffic to a new blog. However, there are a few ways to get more traffic to your blog. The first is to start off commenting on other blogs relevant to your industry. The goal of commenting is to get other blogs to link to yours so that their traffic becomes your traffic. And be sure to return the favor by linking back to those blogs that link to you. (NOTE - this should be obvious, but don’t waste your time linking to or commenting on blogs that are not related to your own)

Another way to gain traffic is to leverage your current customer base. An advantage that companies have over people is that most people don’t already have a brand they can leverage, but you do. If you already communicate with your current customers (and you should), include a blog promotion. If you do not currently have a newsletter or some other communication with your current customers, you can pick and choose the best blog posts and serve them up to your customers’ inbox via a blog newsletter. Of course, none of this matters if you do not deliver relevant content. The only way to gain a long term blog following is to deliver up-to-date, compelling content that makes ‘em want to keep coming back for more.

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When I started at ReachForce in July 2007, I was tasked with managing the blog. The design had been finalized and we had a few posts ready to go, but no one internally really knew much about blogging. As the younger member of the marketing team it was expected that I knew all about the latest in social media, since it is my generation that is driving most of it. While I do have a Facebook profile (mostly due to much peer pressure), I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, an expert in social media. Immediately I began to read everything I could about blogging and tried to figure out what would work and what wouldn’t for The B2B Lead.

If you are planning on heading down the path of starting your own company blog, you will find as you read everyone’s opinions on what a corporate blog should be that they are in fact opinions and there is no right answer, and actually a lot of disagreement on the subject. At ReachForce, we decided that our blog would be a collection of cool and crazy marketing ideas that we have come across or developed ourselves, it will NOT be our laments on how great ReachForce is. We hope to be a source for marketers to gain and share ideas on how to be better marketers.

Back to my point, you need to decide early on what the environment of your market is. You need to recognize who your intended audience is and create the look and fell as well as the content around that. A blog for bankers will be different than a blog for high tech CEOs.

Expert I am not (hence the title of this series), but I hope that you can learn something from my mistakes and successes.

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