WebSite Marketing Strategy

Okay, it’s not really what you think; like a newsletter or magazine. POST (aka: the POST Method) is really the most effective acronym ever invented; ever since the four P’s of marketing. It’s a four-step approach that helps marketers define a social media marketing strategy for their business and/or clients. It’s been talked about for quite sometime, but I think it should continue to be drilled in the hearts and minds of marketers who either work in the social media space or are just thinking about it.

P equals people, “assess your customers’ social activities” – difficult in some organizations, easier in others. This really goes back to mapping your customer segmentation to Forrester’s “Social Technographics” which are behaviors displayed on a ladder with six levels of participation within social media.

It’s a year old but still very relevant and applicable today and I am sure it will live a long time. The graph helps you determine the social media usage models that you can map your customers (or target audience) to. Here is another resource to help you figure all that out since this is probably the most important step of them all.

O equals objectives, “decide what you want to accomplish” – this is really simple I guess. I assume that most medium sized to big companies define objectives before launching something. As Forrester explains, “Are you starting an application to listen to your customers, or to talk with them? To support them, or to energize your best customers to evangelize others? Or are you trying to collaborate with them?” The key takeaway from this step is to take your time and first figure out your objectives. I have worked for companies in the past that determine objectives after launch … probably not a smart move.

S equals strategy, “plan for how relationships with customers will change” – what’s your strategy? Are you integrating other elements of your marketing mix with social media? Are you involving the right people? If you are launching a blog or community to help address customer service complaints, are you getting folks from your customer service org involved? Another element in this step is measurement; and you plan on measuring the effectiveness of your campaign.

T equals technology, “decide which social technologies to use” – is it a corporate blog, wiki? Is it hosting a community on domain or participating in a community off domain? The reality is that once you figure out who the people are that you want to talk to; mapped out the objectives and strategy, you can then focus on which tool (or tools) to use. It’s all gravy from there!

POST is the heart and soul of the book, Groundswell, written by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. I have yet to read it but my colleagues and friends say it’s the Bible of social media, so I am off to Amazon once I finish up this post. Groundswell, along with the ClueTrain Manifesto and Naked Conversations are all great resources to help you maximize your social media strategies. These three books should be on every book shelf within corporate marketing.

The POST method is something we take very seriously at Intel. It serves as a guide to help us determine the right strategy for the right audience. Hopefully, your company following the POST method because it works.

Tags: Groundswell, Cluetrain Manifesto, Naked Conversations, POST Method, Social Technographics, Forrester, Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff

There seems to be a growing trend towards having more than one writer on a blog these days so a blog metrics plugins sounds ideal. It seems that groups are being established with the sole aim of writing across a dozen or more blogs, rotating between blogs on a daily basis. It would be nice if you could track each writer’s impact on each of the blogs.

With the Blog Metrics plugin you can do just that. To quote from Joost de Valk’s site:

“…it calculates how many track-backs you received on average per post, and does a better job of calculating comments. But that’s only a small part of what’s cool in it, the coolest part, is that it now generates stats per author as well!”

This blog metrics plugin is handy for determining how often each writer publishes a post, the average length of each post, the number of comments received on posts and the number of words per comment.

You may wonder about the number of words per comment, however this help to distinguish between posts that receive discussion type comments and those that receive ‘nice post’ type comments. Blog Metrics plugin is useless for blogs with only the one author as it is designed to track several writers.

If you have more than one contributor to your blog and you want to keep a track of their activities, the Blog Metrics plugin may be worth considering. It would certainly be worth a test.

… at least on Cafemom it is.  Those were the words from Andrew Shue, Founder of Cafemom at Agency Bootcamp in Chicago. It was his response to my question to the panel:

There is a lot of talk in the industry about the concept of community.  What is your opinion of “community” and is it just a fad?

He went on to say that it’s natural human behavior to form, build and live within a community; and that this behavior dated back centuries when cavemen lived within some form of communal standards.  He also said that “online communities” will increasingly grow and that these communities will HAVE to be even more relevant if they want to succeed. I couldn’t agree more with him and I think Cafemom is doing a great job at being relevant! I was also quite impressed with Andrew’s knowledge in this space. Perhaps playing an Ad Exec in Melrose back in the day helped him out a bit.

Since the topic revolved around community; I brought up Dell and how they are building community on Ideastorm.  Tom Arrix, Vice President of Media Sales from Facebook said that he didn’t think it was a good strategy; and that the only time someone would go to Dell.com is when they are ready to buy a computer.  He believes that building community is more effective in an “already established” community; perhaps he was insinuating that doing so has more credibility (in the consumer’s mind) than a community hosted by the company or brand. He does have a good point. I believe that both strategies are important; but the objectives will probably be entirely different.

Overall, I think the event was a huge success.  It was great to catch up with my buddy Ted Murphy (Founder of IZEA); and meet Andrew Shue (founder of CafeMom & Billy from Melrose), Kent Austermann (Sales Director from Bebo), Tom Arrix (Vice President of Media Sales from Facebook), Robert Palma (SVP Sales from CafeMom), Sara Maters (Sales Planner from CafeMom), Bryce Emo (Sr. VP of Sales from Myspace) and Wailin Wong (Reporter from the Chicago Tribune) who was nice enough to introduce herself to me after the event.

Looking forward to the next one.

If you use WordPress for your blog then you are going to find that you need to update your blog plugins fairly frequently. Rather than update them, it can often be a good opportunity to check out what is available and whether or not there are better plugins available to do the same job.

WordPress.org is the home of many of the blog plugins available, particularly for the latest version of WordPress. The only trouble I have with visiting this site is that I often come away with far more than I went looking for.

One of the blog plugins that caught my attention today was PodPress, which as the name suggests, is a plugin that provides a range of options for publishing your podcasts including download stats. It can even manage your video podcasts as well.

WPDigsby is a blog plugin that allows you to place a widget on your sidebar. Through the widget you can communicate with others using MSN and ICQ. There are other instant messenger services covered as well.

This one large respository of blog plugins (over 2200last count) so there will be a plugin there somewhere to do the job you want. Either that or at least an upgrade to what you are currently using.

What better way to know what goes into a good blog than by getting inside the minds of the biggest bloggers in the universe! Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World’s Top Bloggers by Michael A. Banks is a book involving influential and successful bloggers who write about various topics such as parenting, business trends and more. Such bloggers have been featured on NPR, MSNBC, 20/20 and more. Through intimate interviews, Michael A. Banks is able to get these bloggers to share their philosophies, their personal secrets for success and everything else that comes to mind.

With this, you are able to learn from the masters of blogging on what works and doesn’t work – straight from their own mouths! These bloggers have loyal followers and are passionate about the subjects and their ability to blog. These are the 30 most successful bloggers in the United States and truly are the cream of the crop.

Whether you already have a blog or are merely even thinking of starting one, this is the perfect book to get true insight on the industry and the success stories within it. The list of prominent bloggers include Mary Jo Foley from All About Microsoft, Peter Rojas from Engadget, Rebecca Lieb from ClickZ, Eric T. from Duct Tape and 26 more!

The good thing about this book is that it interviews both professional bloggers who are paid to blog and other ones who merely do it as a hobby. Both have become successful in their own right and are certainly worth reading about. In the book you will learn the various motivations and factors that were vital in driving the success of these bloggers. After reading, you will have a very thorough list of things to do if you want to start your own blog and make your current blog even better.

BUY THIS BOOK NOW

Some blog directories are better than others when it comes to the amount of traffic they generate. There are hundreds of directories available and some of the niche directories may bring even more traffic. I have stuck to the more general directories in this listing.

Number 5: I Blog Business - This is a really good directory if your blog is a business blog or if you run a small business. There is no spam on this site due to the hand selection of listings.

Number 4: Blogoozle - Plenty of categories to choose from and a nice & easy interface. Featured blog of the day and blogs sorted by PR. If you are looking for high ranking sites, this one place to easily find them.

Number 3: Technorati - Many would place this at number one. Very popular and placing a social media button on your site helps. Reasonable traffic depending on the subject.

Number 2: BlogHub- Another popular directory that works like a social bookmarking site. Get active in the community to get extra traffic.

Number 1: blogFlux - My favorite. For some reason this directory seems to send plenty of traffic, depending on the subject matter.

Everyone has their own favorite blog directory; often it’s the first directory they joined. If you find a directory that is sending you good traffic, have a closer look and see if you can determine why. You may be able to repeat it later.

What comes first, blog SEO or Blog design? An argument that has done the rounds for a long time so I am not going to enter into it - at least not in this post.

Where blogs SEO and blog design do clash is where the design defeats the SEO processes. A good example is where poor code prevents the search engine spiders from reading your complete site.

When a spider comes to visit it reads your site page by page following all the links that they are allowed to follow. As it comes across content, it reads and indexes that content so that it can be found by a searcher. The page also starts to develop a ranking that will determine its place in the search engine results pages.  Your blog design needs to facilitate the work done by the spiders. Your blog SEO provides the links and keywords that you want the spider to concentrate.

If your blog design has any code problems then it is possible that your content will not get read and consequently not get indexed.  Not only that, the spider will probably not continue on to any of the other pages so they will not get indexed either.

There are two solutions to this problem. The first is to check to see if your site is W3C compliant. This checks the code of the page to see if there are any problems with the blog design. The second option is to use a spider simulator. This is a software program that displays a copy of your web page as the spider sees it. You can see whether or not the spider can read the whole page or if it, and where, it  breaks down.

Part of your blog SEO strategy should be to run regular checks on your pages for both compliance and spider readability. If your blog design is good, your site will pass both checks.

This is a question that all bloggers will need to face at some stage in their blogging life: Do I or do I not monetize my site and try to derive some blogging income from my blog?

The bottom line is why not? The question often raised is how.  Whether or not you run ads on your blog is always going to be a personal decision. The reality is, until you can generate a ton of traffic you are not going to generate much in the way of blogging income anyway.

One of the clever ways to generate blogging income is by not generating income at al - at least not initially. As you are not going to earn much, leave the ads out for starters. Over time, as your blog starts to get more and more traffic, start to incorporate ads - ads that are relevant to your site.

A good form of blogging income is through affiliate links. You can often find affiliate links to products that are closely related to your site. As you incorporate these ads, don’t be afraid to market them yourself either through direct blog posts or by highlighting the affiliate links.

Blogging income is a personal decision that should be made taking into account your blogs overall aim and whether or not you can incorporate ads that do not conflict with the sites overall look and feel.

Notice the headline said to promote yourself, not your blog or website. This blogging tip is designed to promotes yourself to the socialites around the various social sites.

All social sites provide a way to promote yourself through profiles. They may even provide a page that you can tart up to look fancy and maintain your complete bio. However, if you are active on a range of social sites then it may become a pain having to go through all of them to make updates. This blogging tip may make life a little easier.

When completing profiles on social sites, submitting to directories to creating a profile box for article submission, include a link to your ‘about me’ page on your blog. If you wish to keep your about me as a more formal page, then one blogging tip is to simply create a dedicated social media landing page. This page could contain all the pertinent information about you along with links to your profiles on each of the social sites you are on.

If anyone ever asks, ‘what sites are you on’, just send them to the landing page. There they will find all your social links in the one place. If you ever add more networks to your activities, you only have to update the one page. Likewise, if your details change then you can simply update the landing page first, and over time slowly go through the other sites.

A simple blogging tip that would take about an hour to put together but could make life so much easier for all your new friends through the social networking scene.

Despite a lot of negative publicity surrounding the release of WordPress 2.5, it is still the number one blog software package in use at present. Like all things new, WordPress took a lot of flak for the massive changes it made to the popular blogging product.

Now that the dust has settled, a lot of users are coming to terms with the changes and even admitting, somewhat grudgingly, that most of the changes have been useful. There are still some areas that concern users, particularly the widget interface that has lost its drag and drop function between sidebars. Only one sidebar can modified at a time in the new version of the blog software package.

Positives that are being talked about are the built in plugin update function that enable quick and easy plugin updates. The inclusion of video and picture uploads are also a welcome addition. Overall, the initial poor response has been replaced with an acceptance of the new look. WordPress has little in the way of strong competition when it comes to blog software packages. Whilst the new version has done little to enhance its position, it has not hurt its overall position either.

With version 2.6 expected in the coming months, developers have assured users that some of their concerns will be addressed with improvements to the widget interface and the dashboard likely. The real downside to using WordPress as a blog software package is the constant need for updates. Having included internal plugin upgrades with version 2.5, perhaps version 2.6 could include auto updates for the blog software package itself. That would certainly help.