Your Blog IS About Results;

We Are Driving Ourselves Mad

Content Curation, Original Content, Re-purposed Content, Purchased Content, Content Yada, Yada, There sure is a lot of fodder these days about how to slice the Content Pie, from bloggers, clients, side liners and such.

What is a Business To Do?

How about starting with what you always do when operating a business, Look at The Numbers. If no one is reading your blog, what you are doing isn’t working. How the content is labeled has little bearing on the success of your blog.

There is an underling current surrounding original content, and sometimes folks get stuck on always wanting original content on their blogs. That is a flawed approach. As an example, a good friend of mine, Erin Rose runs a local news blog  Positive Detroit,, now a couple of years running was just voted as The Best Local Blog in SE Michigan by our local media, Real Detroit. Erin does an outstanding job curating content, but guess what friends, none of her content is original!

The point here is this, Erin has a keen understanding of what type, and feel of content her Circle of Influence wants to consume, and she satisfies that by filtering through localized content for her readers and following.

Focus on Results

If you are using your blog for your business, it IS about driving leads. Marketing has always been about selling more stuff to more people for more money. If you are using new media, social media or whatever the buzz word of the day is, Focus on the Results. Nothing else matters,

Alone and No Visitors Have Arrived: Creating Engagement in Business Blogging

So you have started your company or apartment community blog, and you are posting away, but you look around only to discover you are Alone and No Visitors have Arrived

Now What

Well, according to the American Marketing Association, you aren’t really alone. When tasked with the question, Are brands providing meaningful and engaging experiences to their customers through their online communities, the answer is a somber no.

Our research on 135 online communities representing 45 major brands indicates that, with few exceptions, the answer is no.

Nearly half of the brands in the study were still in the social marketing experimentation stage, showing fairly robust levels of activity but lacking an integrated strategy across multiple communities and social media. Almost one quarter of the communities were “ghost towns,” mere facades with little or no member participation.

So if big brands can’t get it right with engagement, what doe the small business do who has jumped in with both feet. There is a great discussion going on over at our good friend, Jason Falls blog on a post titled Corporate Blogging Success Starts and Ends With Business Metrics.

The social media purists will tell you that a corporate blog serves as a community hub for your brand. They say it gives your customers a connection point to your company and engenders a sense of community. In some cases that’s true, but you’re going to see me exploring corporate blogging a lot more this year to follow up on a theory that your “community” or “audience” for your blog isn’t what you think it is. That, and the ultimate judge of a corporate blogging effort must be more closely tied to success metrics than making everyone feel good.

Start With a Corporate Blog Purpose

With our blog for our own small business, Urbane Apartments, and our blog The Urbane Life, our first goal was to create SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and web traffic to our UrbaneApts.com web site, for the sole purpose of Renting More Apartments. While there are a lot of little pieces and parts to the puzzle, our blog was and is the highest driver of leads for us. Our combined blog and web traffic for our small business will exceed 17,000 views this month, and 51,000 page views.

We went on to create Engagement next, and have enjoyed the benefits of that evidenced by increased resident retention. But it took awhile to enact engagement, but after 467 posts and 1,851 comments, our blog is humming along nicely.

All Blog and No Comment Makes For Slow Growth

When we started our blog at our small business, it didn’t do so well. The fist set of posts went up in February of 2008. We did what we thought you were supposed to do, we provided regular content, (at least what we thought regular was at the time, we since have increased “regular) we posted relevant content to our business, and we had a pretty good writer with a journalism degree doing the posts.

Dribble, Dribble, Dribble

I love to do marketing experiments to test what works and what doesn’t work, and see our own small business as a “laboratory” to test ideas before bringing them to our clients. So, that is partly why we started blogging in the first place, to see what worked. I actually hung with the blogging test with lackluster results for much longer than typical, as by August of 2008, some seven months after the blogs launch,we only had about (35) monthly visitors. Frankly, most of the ideas we test fail, and so I was ready to pull the plug on this one too, as just being some type of fad for folks drinking the Social Media Kool Aid.

It Is All In The Comments

So, in September we made two significant changes to our blogging approach,

1. We added Guest Bloggers, which later became staff bloggers (more on that in a later post)
2. We required the Guest Bloggers to leave 3-5 comments on like other blog posts for each blog post they did for us.

An array of pretty interesting things happened from this turn of events, but the most significant was that our monthly blog traffic took off like a rocket. By March of 2008, monthly visitors to our Urbane Life Blog had grown to over 4,500 unique visitors.

Slow But Steady

Social Media Today penned a post recently titled Comments Have More Value Than Tweets, which tends to support this commenting theory.

If a person blogs and uses a commenting service like Disqus, you’re pretty much guaranteed they will receive your comment. Email gets ignored. Calls go straight to voicemail. Comments get responded to.

Commenting on someone’s blog accomplishes so much:

• you engage someone on their turf and in a very non-invasive way
• comments tend to have a high response rate, it’s likely you’ll get a reciprocated comment back
• comments let you showcase critical reasoning and smarts
• regular commenting is a sign that you value the other person’s opinions; that won’t go unnoticed

But here is the rub, and we speak this from first hand knowledge,  Blogging is Fun, commenting can become work. We typically get push back from bloggers and folks starting out blogging, as everyone wants to create content,which is good, but Social Media at its core is about connections, and leaving thoughtful, relevant comments on like minded blog posts is an excellent strategy.

How about you, what has worked for your blog growth,

Digital Marketing; Want More Business-Start Blogging

So, How much data do you need to start blogging?

I am a big fan of what the folks over at Hub Spot are doing, and they continue to provide actual results as to what is working for their clients. According to a study of 2,300 HubSpot customers revealed that businesses that blog witness their monthly leads rise by 126% more than those who don’t.

According to the folks at Hub Spot,

We compared leads last month with leads two months ago for 6 consecutive months, and the result shows that blogging businesses, whether or not they use the HubSpot platform, experience a 165% lead growth, a much larger increase than that of non-blogging businesses, which experience a 73% lead growth.

So, How long are going to wait to start a blog for your business? No time for that, let us here at Digital Sherpa help, we do blogging you, in a big way, and we can help you move the Google Needle! This stuff works, and IS how we grew our own small business, It will work for you too.

Google Juice and Social Media Marketing

A proven strategy for Moving the Google Needle is Consistent Content, which starts with a Content Strategy Plan. Dan McCarthy in his post titled A Case Study in Building Google Juice lays out how consistent posting, with relevant copy can and will  serve up some of that famed Google Juice.

Dan points  out some flawed thinking surrounding the Google Juice and Internet Marketing debate;

Say the words “Google Juice” and people are likely to nod their head knowingly. Getting Google Juice is a dark art, easy to understand and hard to execute. People hear Google Juice and they think, Page 1..

These conversations are flawed. Google Juice is an ongoing by-product of a consistent content strategy that connects with a specific audience. As my colleague Todd Dubnerpoints out, when you try to game Google, you end up gaming yourself. But when you try to serve a market with consistent content, even with a marketing emphasis, you’ll accrue a natural level of Google Juice that will differentiate you from the market.

Content Strategy

Valerie Maltoni, over at Conversation Agent lays out a the importance of a Content Strategy.

Static and often stale Web sites have been in dire need of evolution for a long time. Content formats shared in social media and networks suit the way we evaluate, talk, and socialize our decisions about products and services better, at this stage.

Although we all know that it’s still very early days. We’re trying to retrofit how we think and organize our knowledge, recombining and building on information, as well as out humanness, in a medium that has a long way to go on mapping to either one. Content comes close, but only when it’s activated with engagement.

Just like TV didn’t kill radio, the company Web site still plays an important role in the digital marketing mix. Razorfish highlighted the importance of Web content to provide experiences in their 2008 FEED report.

Instead of building a site around an organization chart, which in many ways mirrors the company’s hierarchy, we should build the context around customer needs in two areas of browsing:

(1) search – for answers
(2) sharing – of stories

These two desires and functions are the bread and butter of blogs, where more recent, or shared trump content win. Plus, blogs help with the relationship thing in ways that Web sites don’t – by humanizing the interaction with your company through conversation and relationship building.

Blogs Are the Cornerstone of  Your Digital Footprint

As both Valerie and Dan point out, a company blog is an excellent tool to Expand Your Digital Footprint, and create Google Juice. While your individual approach for your business may differ, the fundamentals are mostly the same.

Think about this, most companies create a web site, and then sort of forget about it. That doesn’t work for Google, as they are scouring the web for fresh content regularly. A blog, which is just another web site allows you to easily update content easily.

We would love to here what is working for you, and what may have been a challenge,