by Brandon Cornett

Most business blogs are created around a certain objective. This objective usually involves visitors taking some form of action – reading, clicking, subscribing, downloading, purchasing, etc.

You can increase the chance people will perform the desired action by making it very easy for them. In web terminology this is known as usability, and it has everything to do with your business blogging success.

Tips for Business Blog Usability

1. Limit the number of posting categories to reduce confusion. Most business blogs can get by with a handful of categories, if they’ve been properly planned out. More than ten categories on a blog, and you begin to create an information-overload situation.
2. Add links to the blog’s home page, “About” page and “Contact” page (when applicable). Regardless of where somebody enters your blog, they should be able to find the home page (to get oriented), the About page (to learn the blog’s purpose), and the Contact page.
3. If you want people to subscribe to your RSS feed, create a “subscribe” button and link it to a page that explains RSS feeds, the benefits they offer, and how people can use them. It might be a good idea to include a subscribe-by-email option as well. You can get a free RSS-to-email program from a company like Zookoda, and there are many paid versions as well.
4. Reduce clutter any way you can. Some business blogs have so many RSS buttons, graphics, advertisements, and other bells and whistles that they become an absolute mess. You can avoid this by cleaning up your sidebar area, using a supplemental menu area when necessary, grouping things logically, and removing anything that doesn’t need to be there.
5. Conduct a simple usability test. Ask a friend or colleague to visit your blog, and see how quickly they can (A) find the main menu, (B) determine the blog’s theme and purpose, (C) find contact information, etc.

Conclusion
When it comes to business blogs, usability has a direct impact on profitability. Keep you blog clean and easy to read. Web readers and researches are skilled at hopping from site to site. They don’t need much of a reason to bail out on you, and they’ll do just that if your blog is hard to navigate. Make blog usability a top priority when creating your business blog.

 by Brandon Cornett

The business blog can take many forms and support many objectives. That’s part of the beauty of using a blog for business purposes. But sometimes the many uses of a business blog can overwhelm aspiring bloggers, making it hard to decide on a particular blogging strategy.

If you have been meaning to start your own business blog, but you’re not sure how to start, consider one of the following five strategies.

1. Instructional Business Blogs
Instructional blogs are extremely popular, and they come in many flavors. If you can teach your audience about a subject that’s important to them, you have what it takes to develop a popular instructional blog. For example, if a company sells accounting software, it might develop an instructional blog to teach readers about accounting methods, technologies and best practices. This would help the company develop readership and interaction, while also educating readers toward its products.

2. Controversial Business Blog
Controversial blogs can bring in a big readership. But the trick here is to avoid being controversial just for the sake of controversy. Some companies / niches are naturally controversial, and their business blogs are an extension of this. For example, a business that sells political merchandise (shirts, stickers, etc.) could use a blog to generate legitimate controversy of a political nature. This could help generate buzz, readership, and sales.
 
3. Entertaining Business Blogs
People love to be entertained, and some companies are able to tap into this for business-related purposes. For almost every product or service, there’s an audience who finds it entertaining. This is especially the case with the hobby industry and niche products / services that have a devoted (almost “cultish”) following. In such industries, a company might use its blog to educate as well as entertain its audience.

4. Behind-the-Scenes Business Blog
This approach to business blogging gives your customers and readers a behind-the-scenes look at your products and services (and to a certain extent, your company itself). When done well, this business blog strategy can help the company foster trust among its key audience. When readers learn about the people behind the company, and how they go about their work, they are more apt to trust the company on a whole.

Microsoft is probably the best example of this. For many years, Microsoft has had a perception problem with both consumers and the media. In the past, many people have viewed it as a secretive and soulless company bent on world domination at any cost. In more recent years, this perception has begun to soften. Many current and former insiders of Microsoft have attributed much of this perception shift to the company’s various blogging campaigns. Suddenly, the public gets to know the people behind Microsoft products. And trust begins to grow where there was a real lack of it before. 

5. High-Value Business Blogs
Naturally, people are naturally attracted to things of value. We seek value constantly in both our personal and professional lives. As such, a business blog that offers value in some form will eventually attract readers. Those readers will become advocates of the blog, happy to share its value with friends or colleagues.

Value comes in many forms. Information can be valuable, if it helps us perform a task, save money, live a better life, etc. The greater this value, the more people it will attract. So a business blog that helps its audience succeed in some way has great potential for growth and popularity.

Conclusion
There are many ways a business blog can support your company’s goals. The blogging strategies listed above only scratch the surface. What ideas and strategies can you come up with? How might you use your business blog to turn strangers into readers, and readers into customers? There is no limit to the possibilities.

Inbound links are important for good search engine ranking / blog visibility. An inbound link is simply a link from another blog or website to your business blog. Creating resources is a good way to acquire inbound links. When I say “resource,” I mean something truly helpful and informative that other bloggers would like to share with their readers (by way of linking to the resource).

An informative blog series is one type of resource you can create. If the series is exceptionally entertaining, engaging or educational, other bloggers in your niche / industry will be likely to point it out to their readers (often with a direct link as well). This can increase your business blog’s traffic and visibility.

Example of a Blog Series
There are endless ways you could create a series for your business blog. Start with a topic you know a lot about, and then break that topic into a lot of “bite-sized” chunks. For instance, I publish a real estate blog. Over the past few months, I’ve been using it to educate real estate agents on successful blogging.

As a result of these efforts, my series on real estate blogging / Internet marketing has helped me acquire inbound links, blog traffic, and even a few clients along the way.

Ask yourself: “What aspect of my business do I know a lot about? Which topics are most interesting to my target audience? How can I divide my knowledge into a logical series of blog posts that my audience would find helpful?”

If you’re looking for ways to personify your company by showcasing the people within it, look no further than the corporate blog. Business blogs, corporate blogs, CEO blogs … these are all great tools for showing the personal side of your company (and, by extension, evoking a personal connection from readers and customers).

Take the Kodak blog for example. Here’s a great post that shows what I’m talking about. Here you have a person (the post’s author) writing about another person (the designer in the spotlight) to a large group of people (the blog’s readers). Suddenly, Kodak is not just a large corporation. They are collection of people with passions and opinions, just like the rest of “us.”

These days, it seems the larger a company becomes, the more impersonal it gets. Consumers think of large corporations as single-minded entities, not as a collection of people. Anything you can do to change this perception is a win for your organization. How are you using your corporate blog to accomplish this?

~Brandon

eMarketer.com has an interesting story today about Web 2.0 communications within corporate America — specifically, how companies are using applications such as the corporate blog to have improve their communications programs.

It also cites data from a study of corporate communications folks, regarding their use of social media tools such as blogs and social networks. For instance, “public blogging by Fortune 500 firms has actually doubled since April 2006.”

Read the article here

I was just over at CEO Blogger’s Club and found a great post from December 2005.

It’s a good overview of the challenges CEOs face with blogging, and also offers some good technical instruction on the many aspects of blogging. This latter part worth reading not just for CEOs, but for anyone who wants to understand how the technical advantages of blogging can bring results in your communications program.

Here’s an excerpt where the author, Linda Zimmer, is explaining the benefits of tagging:

Now, by simply being able to scan through your tags, you are giving everyone in your organization a window into not just who you are, but the things that drive you, your decisions and your vision. How much more impactful is this than your once a year or quarterly address; or your blog posts that are, by their nature, excruciatingly narrow?

Read the full post here

Many CEO and corporate bloggers realize the intangible, immeasurable benefits of blogging. In fact, these are often the reasons they blog in the first place.

They know that a first-rate business blog can improve their customers’ perception of the company, increase trust, foster interaction and more. And while these things may not be directly measurable, they are obviously beneficial to the company.

But these “immeasurable” benefits of business blogging can have a measurable effect on the company’s success, namely through an increase in sales. That’s the subject of a new article posted to CEO Blog Watch:

How Business Blogging Can Cause an Increase in Sales