Z-Blog

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In a recent post about bad blogging habits I touched on the subject of conversion. This is an important issue for any business blogger, so let’s examine it in a little more detail.

Every business blog should have a conversion plan. It’s really as simple as figuring out what type of response you’re looking for, and then crafting deliverables that visitors can act on. Strategic goals and deliverables are limited only by a blogger’s imagination; here’s a short list of possibilities to serve as a starting point for some brainstorming.

Strategic Blog Conversion Goals

• Generating orders (sales)
• Setting up meetings (lead generation)
• Encouraging social shares (referrals, brand awareness)
• Improving search rankings (SEO)

Conversion Deliverables

• Order forms embedded in blog posts, limited time offers (sales)
• Webinar scheduling, white paper downloads (lead generation)
• Strategically placed social share buttons, social media contests (referrals, brand awareness)
• Keyword research, content optimization (SEO)

The two points I want to stress:

1. Always have strategic conversion goals and deliverables to support them
2. Don’t rely solely on brand awareness and SEO — as so many bloggers do

Why do so many bloggers shy away from conversion and instead operate information charities, giving away great content and getting nothing in return?

Well, I can’t speak for other bloggers, but I can summarize the things that interfered with my ability to achieve business goals with my business blog, to develop a conversion mentality. Does any of it sound familiar?

Eliminate the Build-It-and-They-Will-Come Mindset

All content needs to be marketed, pushed, promoted. Big media outlets have big marketing budgets: if advertising is good enough for The New York Times, it should be good enough for us, too! The fact is there’s a wealth of great information being promoted online. It finally dawned on me that no matter how valuable my posts were, I’d have to compete for attention.

Overcome the Fear of Selling

Even though I have lots of sales experience, I feel awkward going into sales mode in social media — probably because social media is so informal, conversational and relationship-oriented. If I’m reluctant to push myself and my services, I can only imagine how difficult it must be for bloggers who have never sold anything. The best way I’ve found to overcome the fear of selling is to start doing it. Thinking about it doesn’t get you anywhere, but practice really does make perfect.

Package Up You Services

It took me a while to figure out how to bundle up my services into packages that can be effectively promoted on a blog. This involves things like writing and designing an attractive whitepaper for download, creating a polished presentation for a webinar, building out a formal, written training curriculum, etc. People are more inclined to say “yes” to a tangible, well defined product, service, or consultation. Calls to action that are vague, such as “contact us to learn more” or “let’s talk about your needs” don’t provide sufficient motivation.

Brad Shorr is Director of Content and Social Media for Straight North, a Chicago SEO and digital marketing agency. The firm specializes in helping middle market B2B firms, with clients that do everything from vehicle tracking devices to dust exposure monitoring. Brad has been blogging since 2005 and writes frequently on social media topics. Follow Brad on Twitter and connect with Brad on Google+.

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We love our users! Michele Neylon of Blacknight and his team published this great post about Zemanta:

Use Zemanta To Improve Your Blogging

Personally I love blogging. I write for the company blog on a regular basis, but I also write on several other blogs. However I’d be the first to admit that I am not afraid of taking advantage of whatever tools I can find to help speed up the process and improve it.

via: blog.blacknight.com

One of the reasons I’m a big fan of Zemanta is that all the content we publish on our blog gets recommended to other bloggers who are actively covering related topics. It’s a totally white-hat way to grow your audience, and build quality links to your blog without much effort — well, other than the significant effort required to publish compelling content in the first place.

From an SEO standpoint, links make the world wide web go ’round. Inbound links are a major factor in how well your site ranks in search engines — and search engines drive the vast majority of web traffic.

Great content will naturally attract quality links — the kind of relevant, trustworthy links search engines like best. You can help your blog attract those quality inbound links using Zemanta, of course. Here are five others ways you can use your blog content to attract natural, high-quality, relevant inbound links.

1) Invite Guest Bloggers

The typical approach to guest blogging is to go out and try to publish a post you’ve written on a popular blog in your niche. Here’s another approach: Try inviting bloggers and experts — ideally with significant followings of their own — to write a guest post for your blog. Just as you’d promote your own content, they’re going to promote the guest post they wrote for you across their network. They’ll link to it from their own sites and blogs, and share it with their followers attracting likes, tweets, and additional links resulting from the extra exposure.

Amanda Record at ThunderSEO offers some great advice on how to launch this type of guest blogging program.

2) Create a Team Blog

An extension of the strategy above is to create a team blog, with regular contributors publishing content, sharing it with their networks, and linking to the blog from content they publish elsewhere.

The Content Marketing Institute and SEOmoz both have awesome team blogs that now serve as the foundation for their vibrant and growing communities.

3) Conduct Interviews

Most companies have a media page, or will promote media coverage and interviews via their company blog. If you can get an industry expert to participate in an interview on your blog, you’ll likely receive some great links from that person’s company website, personal blog, as well as shares across his/her network. Your post will also become a source for other outlets looking to cover that person or company, and could be quoted or linked to dozens of times.

Over at the SixEstate blog, we conducted an interview with Unthink founder and CEO Natasha Dedis. Not only did this interview earn dozens of shares, it got a link from Unthink’s media page, and was cited at Digital Trends.

4) Link Out Often

Linking out to relevant content you cite or quote on your blog is a great way to get noticed by those sources. Most bloggers, journalists, webmasters, etc. will know when they receive an inbound link. If you link out, there’s a good chance you’ll get some link love and social shares in return. This doesn’t mean you’ll get a link from every source that you link to, but over time you’ll be rewarded.

Linking out also makes your content more credible and authoritative to begin with — which is the best way to build an audience.

Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz, presents five reasons you should be linking out from your site, and refutes some of the arguments against linking out.

5) Outreach & Promotion

In addition to standard social promotion for blog posts — like tweeting new content, sharing it on Facebook, etc. — I like to do some personal outreach, as well. I’m not talking about spamming everyone you know and telling them to read, share, and link to your fabulous post. I’m talking about reaching out with a personal email or DM on Twitter to select people you know will be interested.

A good candidate, for example, would be someone you’ve just cited or quoted in a post. They’ll likely notice this on their own eventually, but why not shoot over a quick note while the post is still fresh? This can also be a nice “in” to request an interview.

David Reich is CEO of SixEstate, a content marketing company fusing professional journalism with intelligent SEO to help brands establish dominant thought leadership positions around their most important issues and causes. SixEstate manages a growing network of experienced journalists with writing credits from such outlets as The New York Times, SELF, Glamour, and many other renowned publications and news sites. We’re always looking for talented writers and editors to join our team. Follow David on Twitter.

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Tumblr has carved out a unique but very important niche in the blogging ecosystem. Here’s a great post from iCrossing’s Content Lab on why it’s crucial for marketers to embrace it:

Six reasons why your brand belongs on Tumblr

A unique, vibrant social community filled with creative minds, sharing millions of photos, and posts every day doesn’t have marketers knocking down the door to engage with all those users. Why? Because marketers are afraid to take chance at something they’re not used to, something they may fail at. That’s Tumblr’s story.

via: thecontentlab.icrossing.com

If you are not using Zemanta on Tumblr yet, please consider trying it out via our browser extensions.

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We caught up with one of our earliest users, Michele Neylon of Blacknight, Ireland’s only ICANN accredited registrar and the country’s largest hosting and domain provider. Michele blogs at http://michele.me/blog/ and http://b.log.ie/.

What do you blog about? 

It depends on the blog and its audience.

I blog for business on a couple of blogs, so the content there would be a mixture of marketing information about our new products and services as well as articles about internet news and policy. However I’m also a very active blogger in my spare time and I write about a wide range of topics including technology, entertainment, weight loss (I’m currently on a diet) and travel.

When did you start using Zemanta?

Shortly after you initially launched I think. I didn’t realize at the the time and only found out that I was quite an early adopter when I got to know Andraz

How does Zemanta help you blog better? 

It helps me to take my blogging to the next level, while also speeding up mundane tasks. I use the image options to add both my own photos and those from your sources to blog posts and give them a visual “lift”. The tagging options help speed up what could be quite a boring and time-consuming task. Using tags helps generate “related articles” as well as helping both users and search engines to navigate a site’s content and discover your “long tail”. Zemanta takes the pain out of the process, so that adding tags to posts is quick and painless and thus makes the entire experience better for me, as the author, and for the audience that hopefully consumes the content.

The related articles options help me to suggest relevant content from both my own trusted sources and ones that Zemanta “discovers” based on my writing.

Do you have a power user tip that you can share with our users?

Take the time to setup your Zemanta account and fill out the preferences as completely as possible. By setting up your own profile you can improve the relevancy of the service’s suggestions while also saving yourself time.

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