Brand building is the only route to business success in the present global market scenario. Sales alone cannot make a business successful since they do not increase until the brand becomes a forceful tool that will launch the business into the big league. Brand building is a tough task needing an investment of a lot of time and money, and every step needs to be done right. Even then, something may hold back the branding initiative.

In such a scenario blogging may prove to be savior in helping in the branding exercise and making it successful. Blogging can help in various ways, some of which are discussed below:

• Build an online image through blogs- Part of the branding initiative includes the addition of a jingle or a catch line that is so catchy that it stays in consumers’ minds. This is often to such an extent that the very mention of the brand first brings a very distinct image of the brand and then anything else. This has been termed as creation of a “franchise” in the mind by experts, and companies spend billions to create this mind franchising exercise. One last effort can be to use blogging for increasing the branding endeavors, which will definitely help in creating an online presence for the brand and the products associated with it. Also, blogs are an open, free for all board where your brand stories can be narrated time and again, new thoughts added, and updates that help to keep the reading public in the loop. A blog is like a guided tour that continues over time. A personal perspective for a brand is possible only through blogs, and it makes people warm up to it.
• Blogs for initiating conversations- Blogs need not be a one way communication channel. It is a great way to initiate a conversation with consumers, get their views, feedback and recommendations. Often it is the end user who is able to point out flaws and drawbacks that can be rectified to improve the image of the brand and the products attached to it. Personal interaction helps to develop a personal rapport and with it comes faith and trust in the people behind the brand. A personal angle to a strictly professional or business relationship only adds to the advantages without any negative effects.
• Blogging helps in marketing by word-of-mouth- Blogs have a double effect. Besides opening a communication channel between brand owners and brand users, it also helps to create a network involving people connected to users, since all people talk to each other about good products and services. This can easily have a viral effect, since path breaking innovations will reach all the networks of the people you interact or communicate with. This word of mouth marketing is perhaps the best marketing tool there can be.
• Using connections for brand building- Blogging helps to build connections and these connections pay off in promoting brands. Blogging makes it easy to become powerful through knowledge and expertise in your field, and sharing this with others makes them see the extent of your knowledge. Once the target audience realizes this, they begin to accept your influence and warm up to the brand you promote. Connections are easy to make through this knowledge route. Being honest, letting your true self come out in your blogs, adds life to a few lines and the reading public loves that. Blogs thus become a perfect medium to showcase honesty, sincerity and expertise in your field, without any need for rhetoric or flowery writing styles. Connections will then naturally follow.
• Create communities on social networks through blogs- the impact of blogs can be extended to social networks like Facebook and Twitter as well. With shared interests the viral effect of a blog can do wonders for the brand a sword spreads, and so does the name and fame. Additional layers can be created through message boards, review sections, customer profiles and so on to form a whole community for a brand. This is assisted by social network platforms like Ning, CrowdVine and KickApps, which serve precisely this purpose.
• Using Cost effective brand building exercises- Brand building can be an expensive exercise and companies that have no dearth of resources go all out to spend on brand initiatives. However, this is neither warranted nor a necessary rule of thumb. Brands can be built on shoe string budgets, with little spending or none at all, as is the case with blogging. Many blog platform come free of cost and knowledge of blogging can improve over time to yield the best results.
• Partnerships help in reinforcing brands- Modern brands are based on the concept of distributed power. Brands are less an in-house brand expert’s forte and more can be gauged from the interactive consumer platforms where a true, unbiased picture emerges. Using these inputs to restructure and improve the brand and its image subsequently, are the way smart companies work. Partnership with meaningful participants helps. Blogging is one effective way to initiate partnerships that will help the brand.

According to Brian Solis, a famous media expert and business blogger, a humane blog with genuine and helpful advice combined with the ability to cultivate relationships and sustain them helps to form good connections, improve customer service, revise perceptions and improve the reach, resonance and loyalty of the brand in question.

About the Author

This is a guest post by Neil Jones, who Specializes in launching ecommerce sites, he is currently plying his trade as head of marketing for eMobileScan. With 18 websites based all around Europe they are on course to be one of Europe’s largest online retailers of Industrial handheld computers and label printers like the Motorola MC75 terminal or the Datalogic Memor. Neil has been an online marketer for the past 6 years and in that time he has owned and run a range of sites all built around the ecommerce platform.

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

A few months back I was invited to attend, as a speaker, an event on corporate blogging where the people in the audience were mostly PR Managers for different companies in my country. Along with the PowerPoint presentation, I have decided to also give those who attended the event more information on corporate blogging through an eBook I wrote at that time.

The following post is the first chapter of that eBook, translated into English. The rest of the chapters will be also published, over the next few days, except for the weekend. Now, let’s see what corporate blogging is about and if it is the right tool for you and your business.

1.1 Blog, Blogging, Blogosphere

The term blog, contracted form of weblog, defines a certain type of website where texts, photos, audio or video content are published in chronological order, much like an online diary.

The first blogs date back to 1993 when the term was first introduced, but they only started to be used more frequently in 1998 when the first blog community, Open Diary, appeared.

The true hit of the online mainstream happened around 2002-2003, when the first blog reactions regarding the Iraq war were published and when Google acquired the Blogger.com platform, which allows any person with Internet access to create and maintain their own blog.

The Blogosphere comprises all public blogs and is defined as a community based on the theory that all existing blogs are somehow interconnected, often through blogrolls or links inserted in their content.

A blogroll is a list of links, commonly displayed in a blog’s sidebar. The links usually point to blogs the author deems relevant to the content of their own blog or simply wants to recommend to their readers.

Therefore, through blogrolls, it is believed that any two blogs can be connected through one or more intermediary links.

Blogs allow publishing content in a wide range of types and formats, and these types of content lead to a first classification of blogs:

1. a. Classic blog – text content
2. b. Photoblog – publishes photo content
3. c. Videoblog – publishes video content
4. Audioblog (podcast) – publishes audio content

Microblogs and tumbleblogs, both defined as blogs with extremely short entries, are two other blog formats gaining more and more popularity in the past few years.

Regardless of information format, the online publishing of content through blog platforms is called blogging, and the author of a blog is called blogger.

1.2 Corporate blogging

Once they have hit the spotlights, the blogs’ potential to communicate effectively was immediately noticed by companies.

Initially seen as a mere tool to promote products and services, blogs gradually became part of a company’s brand. Aside from placing a name and a logo on them, blogs granted companies a persona they could be associated with. In short, they made them human. The corporate blog managed to break the barrier between the “inaccessible company” and its customers.

The true value of a company is undoubtedly fueled by its employees’ individual values. But how exactly can these values be expressed? How can they be best presented to the world?

Blogs allow companies to position their employees as industry leaders through the opinions they publish, through the breakthroughs shared on the blog, all in a human, personal form that eases communication with customers.

A few companies that have successfully adopted the concept of blogs are:

Adobe – http://blogs.adobe.com/
Microsoft – http://www.microsoft.com/communities/blogs/ and http://blogs.msdn.com/
Google – http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

The benefits of a well crafted and maintained blog are plenty, but is it the right tool for companies? Find out in the next chapters.

Other chapters of the Corporate Blogging Guide

Chapter 1: Introduction to Blogging (current)
Chapter 2: Critical Questions Before Launching a Corporate Blog
Chapter 3: Setting up Goals and Blog Positioning
Chapter 4: Types of Corporate Blogs
Chapter 5: Blog Editors & Editorial Policy
Chapter 6: Blogging Tips to Get You Started
Chapter 7: Blog Performance Tracking Tools

Photo credits to Peter Nielsen

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

I believe that educated clients, who understand your job as a SEO specialist, are good clients. That way you avoid misunderstandings, many frustrating situations for you and your client and you may work more efficiently.

A client that nods their head just to get rid of you. on the other hand, needs more time to work on, more time to explain anything and thus, you lose time that you could spend on implementing the SEO strategy. And even then, you are never sure if the client actually agrees with you or still wants to get to their own business. You simply waste time and money with that kind of attitude.

Teaching your clients about SEO

That’s why, before starting a SEO campaign, you should educate your client in SEO/SEM. I’m not talking about deep training, basic things should suffice. If you don’t work directly with your employer, but with a certain team (marketing or web design agency) you should focus on giving them a glimpse on what SEO is (and what is not).

You may prepare a document describing SEO, that you will deliver to those involved in the project, and especially in the SEO process. Keeping it short and simple should prevent people from taking it lightly from not reading it.

You may also spend 2 hours to meet them in person and talk about the SEO strategy. Now, that is much better as they will interact with you and ask questions if you manage to startle their interest. They will be also happy to have 2 hours off work, when you do the job and they listen. Get some cookies and coffee, make them feel relaxed, not stressed. You don’t want to scare them with your knowledge or with what you have to say.

Don’t talk too much about details, but if you see they want more, go for it. Explain them what they need to know and of course, what they should know about SEO.

If you are working as a freelancer or on distant location, do a phone or Skype conference. A video conference is even better as you may see your audience and they can see you. Discuss the benefits of having a SEO strategy and make them feel involved in the process, just as if you were a team.

If your client is a hopeless cause, you need to find a way to reach him/her; and since all clients are different, you’ll need to come up with different approach techniques. Don’t try the same tactics and expect them to react the same way. You need to be active and creative about delivering information and knowledge about SEO.

Good luck!

And now, how do you deal with your clients? Do you educate them? Or maybe they know what SEO is and there is no need to get into details?
Share your experience with us!

About the author

Paweł Szulencki is a SEO/SEM certified specialist and the owner of the Search Engine Optimization & Marketing blog SEOBlogr.com. Make sure you visit his blog for more information on SEO, Marketing, Google and all things search engine related.

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

Many bloggers fail when it comes to building a better blog. Making your blog stand out of the crowd requires a strategy, just like a business. Even if you’re not part of an affiliate program of selling your own products through your blog, think of it this way: You’re selling yourself, your knowledge, your writings.

And if you’re selling those, in the end, what are your readers if not your clients? That’s why a reader-centric strategy is a must for everyone looking to grow his blog into a successful one.

Customer/Reader Relationship Management

In business terms, we’re talking about the Customer Relationship Management (CRM), a process that requires a good, two-way, level of communication between the business and its customers, in our case, the blogger and his readers. The role of CRM is to provide the business with more accurate information about the needs and wants of customers.

As a blogger, having a reader-oriented strategy can generate a bigger exposure and of course, blog loyalty. While applying SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques you can gain a lot of new readers for your blog, using CRM-like methods will help you in learning more about your current readers, and how to turn them into loyal ones, even promoters of your blog.

These readers are the ones that link back from they own blogs, comment heavily on yours, submit your articles to social bookmarking websites, and let’s face it, sometimes, relationship marketing and promotion by word-of-mouth does a way better job than paying hundreds of dollars for services like Google AdWords.

Reader-oriented Strategies

While businesses have to pay huge amounts of money for CRM specific software, us, bloggers have all we need at our fingertips: Our blog. And if we blog for money, our blog is our business.

Take your time to go through your comments, visit your readers’ blogs, analyze your statistics for keywords, popular articles, ask questions and find the best strategy to engage your readers in being an active part of your blog’s community.

Some of these strategies include competitions with prizes for the most active people, implementing readers’ suggestions or writing about what your readers specifically ask you to. Some bloggers use Twitter’s services to establish a quicker way to communicate with their readers, without having to post short articles that otherwise wouldn’t add much value to their blog. The great part is that the readers’ response to those short Twitter posts can generate great content and blog affinity.

A great example of reader-centric strategy has been recently implemented by Darren Rowse of ProBlogger with his “Speed Posting” series: 1 reader question, 3 minutes to answer. This strategy has generated a huge response in his community, a lot of new content and hundreds of comments spread over a few 3 minute-posts.

Final Thoughts

Your blog can only gain from a strong, smart, reader-oriented strategy and always remember that a good blogger should be a good manager of his business – his blog.

Over to you, what reader strategies have you successfully implemented on your blog, so far?

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive