Generate UK Tips for Marketing Your Next Seminar

Wednesday Aug 27, 2008

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There are many ways to market your seminar, it largely depends on they type of event you’re planning to run, who your audience is and how they tend to take in their information. For example, if you’re targeting people within the IT sector, it is a fair bet that they have access to the Internet and emails. If you’re targeting building site foremen, then email might not be the best way to communicate with them.

1. Leave plenty of time to market your event, usually 6-8 weeks is about right. You might want to extend this to 12-16 weeks if you’re targeting larger numbers of delegates.

2. Decide on what media you are going to use to tell people about your seminar. You should create a marketing schedule that will outline when your communication and advertising is planned for.

3. If you’re buying data in especially for your seminar, we recommend that you warm your list up first. If your target delegates have never heard from you before, they might not connect your company with their market or as a company they might be interested in. Warm your list up by submitting to it and offering a white paper or something that begins to add to your credibility like a case study.

4. Find out where your target market is likely to be. Is it worth sponsoring a web site that you know attracts the profile of delegate you want to market to. Are there joint venture opportunities to market to other lists in return for them speaking at your event or similar contra? Is there a governing body or a busy forum that you could use to filter information about your event? Whatever you choose, do not rely on just one method.

5. Make it easy for your delegates to book their place on the seminar. This is a crucial factor so spend some time on this. If you’re sending them an email, make sure that they can respond to the email to register their interest, many companies use a noreply email alias when marketing to their email list, this is frustrating for your potential delegates if they respond to your marketing with a question.

6. Use best practice for your seminar landing page. Provide an overview of your seminar, details of the agenda, details of who should attend and why and the option to register via the page. Don’t forget to include details of the location, a map and full address (for those using satnav) details. If you’re in London, details of the nearest tube station.

7. Consider placing a .ICS file on your event landing page. This is the standard way to install calendar information on your web page. This will allow your delegates to download a calendar entry that will populate their chosen calendar programme, such as Outlook. This is a nice way of pre booking your event in their diary and increase the chances that they do not double book.

8. Use an autoresponder to confirm their seminar place is booked, ensure that you include all of the information as it relates to the event and contact details in case they have questions or queries. Make sure the basics like a link to the address details is provided.

9. Iin our opinion this next stage is critical to the success of your seminar; staying in touch with the delegates who have registered. We would suggest that from cold list to seminar attendee you will need to touch your contact a minimum of 5 times, obviously this changes depending on the circumstances. Below is our touch process when using email marketing for seminars:

l Warm up the list, initial offering of case study or similar.
l Additional touch designed to show your expertise in a specific market.
l Market the seminar
l Autoresponder thanking those that register
l A follow up email with a slight change to the agenda (optional)
l Phone call to establish what the delegate is looking to learn
l Final call to check dietary requirements and attendance plans.

The above list is useful because it provides you with a number of different interactions with your delegate. At the same time you are constantly qualifying them, did they respond to your initial offer, did they register for the seminar, did they show an interest when you spoke to them, were you able to arrange some one-on-one time with them? All of this is great and will allow you to have a better picture of your delegate and plan your event well.

The worst case scenario here is that you have had a number of opportunities to find out the potential number of attendees. If through your calls or emails you realise that you have more people coming than than space in the room, you have an opportunity to do something about it.


Increase your seminar attendees with our seminar marketing guide

Wednesday Aug 27, 2008

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Seminar marketing is an exceptional way to deliver your message to multiple qualified prospects. By attending your event and taking time out of their day, your delegates are sending you a strong message that they are interested in what you have to say. The universal challenge with seminar marketing is in ensuring that the right number of delegates attend and getting enough bottoms on seat to justify the expense and effort of creating a seminar.

This guide runs through the steps we take when marketing a seminar for ourselves or on behalf of our clients. We may tweak the process slightly depending on the market sector we’re targeting, in the main though our thought process will be much the same.

Whilst this guide focuses on seminars, it can be extended to other events. In fact, as a general marketing guide it can be used for any new “go to market strategy”.

Considerations for your Seminar

1. Consider the objectives of your seminar. It sounds simple but is very important. Write them down and agree what will make a successful seminar. How many delegates do you want? What profile of delegate do you want? Is it a business development seminar or an educational event?

2. Think about what you have to say or offer. In our opinion the more focused an event the better chance of it being successful. Think about the challenges that are happening right now in your customer base. Work out how to demonstrate your expertise in a way that will benefit your delegates.

3. Visit and evaluate a number of potential locations for your event. Consider whether it is large enough for your requirements Are the staff friendly and helpful? Is it easy to find and does it have enough car parking? It is important that your event has a separate registration area and a place for tea and coffee.

4. Once you have chosen a potential location, decide upon the format of your event. Consider whether you need to provide refreshments (advisable) or lunch if your event is longer. These are the times for you network with your delegates and for your delegates to network with each other.

5. There are many different styles of events you could consider. Speed networking is quite popular at the moment, which is a spin off from the more well known speed dating format, this is proven to work in the right circumstances, although we use this method with caution. We prefer a more traditional approach because we know that it works, if it helps you to differentiate your event from others it might be worth it to consider other styles.

6. Once you have decided to do an event and have chosen your location, the next important step is the agenda. We are not always in the fortunate position that our brand or profile alone is enough to attract delegates, so the agenda becomes critical. This is your chance to say to your target market “Come to our event or miss out on this very important news”.

7. The agenda is critical in the sense that it needs to be attractive and of value but also it needs to be presented in this way as well. It is no good having a great day plenned full of fantastic presentations, only for your agenda to be stale and unimaginative. This is your opportunity to use the headlines to your advantage. Tell you audience what they will get out of attending your event. If you’re showing your delegates a new release of your product that does something they have been crying out for, mention it!

8. It is easy to fall into the trap of creating an agenda that is basically a list of sales presentations, this will disappoint your delegates. To really attract delegates, you must provide them with some value. Help them to solve a challenge they’re having, provide them with something useful that will make them look good. Whatever it is, you will have already identified this at the early stages of identifying the objectives for your seminar.

9. Now that we have seminar objectives, key success factors, a location, a target audience and an agenda; we need to start telling people about the event. This largely depends on your budget, however you will want to take elements of these suggestions and work them into your own seminar marketing.

10. Consider the impact of your speakers, are they industry experts? Are they credible and are they able to deliver the message in line with your objectives. Sometimes it is viable to work with other companies to increase the value of your agenda. It is also worth considering a guest speaker or someone that you know who is well know or has a very interesting story.


Stand alone SEO is dead, long live Search Engine Marketing!

Tuesday Aug 19, 2008

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For a while now, there has been something about search engine optimisation that has been bothering me. It’s not the practise of SEO in general, it’s not even the multitude of companies popping up with their “New SEO services” conveniently added to their portfolio as the hot new thing to talk about. What is bothering me is that there are too many companies out there offering SEO in a market that does not offer an industry quality standard. They are offering a service in a market that has not really been defined.

This means that there is potential for customers to get ripped off and for SEO in general to be given a bad name, some will argue that this is already happening. I don’t have a huge amount of sympathy for companies who sign up with SEO firms without doing their homework, usually the better SEO firms benefit in the long term as companies who have had their fingers burned understand the true value of what SEO is and will make better decisions next time. The lesson they learn is that SEO should form a portion of their wider marketing objectives, SEO alone is only part of the story. A defined Internet marketing strategy that incorporates SEO and a whole host of other digital marketing techniques is where the magic happens.

This view and these comments are not typical of our industry, but they are a key mantra for us at Generate UK. This is because if you look at the average SEO key performance indicators, they do not sit pretty with what the company business goals might be. Let’s use keyword ranking as an example; this is a great metric that your SEO company will use to demonstrate to you that they have had a positive impact on your rankings. They have a clear before and after picture that can not be doubted. This is absolutely true, however would you use this metric when measuring the success of your site? If you were a business owner, would you prefer to measure the success of how high you rank for a specific keyword or how many new orders you have received? I know you could argue that the higher you rank the more targeted traffic you receive, but this asumes keyword research. More importantly, it assumes that you have a super landing page that is making the most from your visitors. Put another way, high rankings does not necessarily mean conversations.

Hopefully, this arguement is allowing us to make our point. SEO alone is not enough anymore, the real value from a digital marketing agency is that they should know how to deliver targeted traffic to your site, traffic that converts and is delivered within your budget. SEO absolutely forms a part of that, but it is not the total solution that is being pitched in our market space. Let’s look at another example, SEO firms will point to a growth in traffic via the search engines as a result of their work, it’s a straightforward to measurement and is undeniable. The question is whether or not that increase in traffic meant more sales for you, did it convert, did you receive more sign ups, if the answer is no, then is the increase in traffic worth it?

We maintain that the only way to measure your digital marketing agency, regardless of whether they are providing just SEO or the full spectrum of search marketing services is via conversions. Only then are they adding true value to your business and working in line with your marketing objectives. By understanding your marketing objectives, they fully understand what constitutes success, therefore the SEO companies can then provide you with metrics that actually mean something to you. SEO alone is a tool that might help you towards your goal, a digital marketing strategy will enable you to exceed it.


How to Optimise your landing page for your PPC campaigns

Wednesday Aug 13, 2008

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We’re having a pay per click week this week on the Generate UK blog. Feel free to look back on our previous posts about the importance of landing pages and the Beauty and the Beast of PPC. This post is about providing further details about optimising your campaign and where your thoughts should be in order to get the biggest bang for your buck.

In our opinion, the first thing that your visitor should see after they click your ad and go through to your landing page is the keyword or phrase they used. It’s well documented that your page should have a title for SEO and usability reasons, however from a PPC perspective it is a little more important because you have paid for that visitor to be there. So whatever it was that they were searching for and whatever it was that encouraged them to click your ad, you have to make sure that your landing page delivers this.

So let’s think about the heading. The easiest way to do this would be to use an example and walk through the process. Let’s use a driving instructor business for our example, obviously they offer driving lessons as part of their service. Upon completion of their keyword research and analysis, they quickly understand that locality is important to show their ads at the right time. After all, it would be a waste of money if a driving instructor from Cornwall was showing up in searches for “Driving lessons Glasgow”.

In our example, the heading should include the words driving lessons and the locality. Let’s be as specific as possible and assume our driving instructor is based in Winchester. Let’s also assume that our friendly driving instructor has a special incentive for people to click his ads. Our page title or header now becomes -

Driving Lessons in Winchester – First lesson Free

You can change the details of the offer to whatever suits you or your market. The point is that you should think about something compelling to keep your visitor on the page. If they clicked your ad and it only had “Driving Lessons”, our experience tells us that this will not be as successful a campaign as if it was ran with the headline above.

The next step is general marketing, make the offer time dependent. How do you encourage your visitor to act as quickly as possible? You could also mention that the offer is subject to space, so they need to act quickly to secure a spot.

As part of the page copy, you should include your main keyword phrase (”driving lessons Winchester”). Winchester is a big place, so you might want to consider doing the same exercise for smaller suburbs and villages that surround Winchester that you’re happy to service.

Think about what the action is on your landing page, for our driving instructor the ultimate goal is to increase his driving lesson bookings. This objective is made up of smaller goals, if people are clicking his ad then they’re interested in driving lessons in Winchester, right? So how else can they be leveraged once they are there? In this example, the instructor offered vouchers via the site as he knew that parents were often searching on behalf of their children. He also had an incentive for his visitors to sign up and receive a paper about study tips for the theory test and free mock tests.

In summary, your landing page should be as sticky as you can possibly make it, without it looking like spam. You should be relevant to the search term that you’re optimising for and provide a solution or a service that offers a benefit to your visitor. During your planning process, be conscious of the fact that you’re paying for these visitors, so give yourself every advantage to get the most from each click.

We always welcome your feedback and thoughts, please feel free to comment via the comments section below. Or you can find our details on the Contact Generate UK page.


The Beauty and the Beast – PPC Advertising

Tuesday Aug 12, 2008

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The reason why people love pay per click (PPC) advertising is that it allows every advertiser to have a fair crack at the whip and advertise their company online via a level playing field. This is the idea anyway, the small time service providers taking on and winning against the largest companies in the world. In actual fact, this is not always the case, like most things in life, money talks. This is certainly true for pay per click.

Speaking to some potential advertiser they do get put off by PPC as they feel they cannot compete with the big companies who have the big wallets and appear to have an unlimited marketing budget to attract clicks to their keywords. So whilst PPC does level the playing field, the usual rules of marketing apply.

It is important to remember that PPC is not a silver bullet, it is part of a wider strategy and the more planning, information gathering and research you put into your PPC campaign the better your results will be. For example, instead of using highly competitive keywords try using a series of phases known as a ‘long tail strategy’ enabling you to spread your budget over a longer period. Often you’ll find that if you’re found under a specific phrase the enquiry is a more serious enquiry so the conversion rate theoretically should be higher.

The trick to PPC is to encourage people to your site who are likely to be interested in your products and services. The general rule is that the more detailed the search phrase, the more targeted the user is. It is important if you are a new PPC advertiser to try different words and phrases and continually monitor your budget and success rate. I can not stress enough how important it is to research your keywords and phrases. You can find out the average traffic for your keywords and phrases by using the keyword traffic indicators when setting up your campaigns however these are only estimates and nothing beats the real thing. Don’t be afraid to use a thesaurus and definitely put yourselves in the mind of your customers who are doing the searches. Often the best place to find good keyword information is your web site statistics. (LINK THROUGH)

Another advantage with PPC is you can cap your budget, I am a PPC advertiser and limit my monthly budget to an amount my business can firstly afford and secondly what provides me with a return on my investment. You can use Google’s Budget Optimiser, which will automatically adjust your maximum CPC (Cost Per Click) according to your budget and will seek out the most clicks possible within your budget. If you’re new to PPC spend some time familiarising yourself with these types of tools and remember that ultimately Google want you to spend money with them, s don’t always do what they suggest.

Something that is often overlooked by inexperienced users of PPC is the effectiveness of their landing page. If you’re paying for people to visit your site, you have to work hard to ensure that they stay on your page and they convert to whatever objective you set for your PPC campaign. This sounds basic, yet we receive many calls a month from companies telling us they are spending thousands without a return, and when we look into it their landing page is their home page. If your PPC advertising is about green dishwashers, make sure the landing page is about green dishwashers and definitely make sure there is a click to action on that page.

PPC does work, especially in the case of an online publishing company who regularly spend £10,000 a month. This sounds like an awful lot of cash to be spending on PPC, however his returns are usually in the region of £20,000 per month, so to this company it makes absolute sense. Their focus is now on improving the conversation rate and capturing as much information about their visitors as possible, so that in future they can market to them directly via email, which is obviously less expensive.

This blog article referred to the beauty and the beast of PPC advertising. Hopefully it is clear what the beauty of PPC is by now? Just to recap, the beauty of PPC is the opportunity to quickly create targeted traffic to your web site. Now it is time to cover some of the beast elements of PPC.

In my mind, there are few areas of PPC to be cautious about… the beasts. One of these is to make sure that you do not have a beast of a landing page. We’ve covered that already in this article, more information can be found by clicking on creating a landing page. If your landing page does not convert then you are wasting your traffic and making Google (or whatever PPC engine you use) richer and yourself poorer.

Another beastly element of PPC is the potential for click fraud. This is when a user, a script or a computer programme clicks through on adverts in order to use up the advertisers budget quicker. An example of this might be your competitor clicking on your adds with no intention of buying your service. This problem does exist, you need to be aware that it exists. The major PPC providers do track the clicks, however it is very important that you monitor and analyse your own data and question any unusual click activities.

There’s also the problem of MFA (made for advertising) sites, these are web sites that have been created with the sole purpose of encouraging their users to click through on the ads their showing. The benefit for these sites is that they earn a fee every time an ad they show is clicked on. These types of sites have been in the spotlight for a few years now and I know that Google for one are doing everything to combat these types of sites. Unfortunately, the truth is that MFA sites are good for Google because they encourage clicks and therefore boost their profits. This is not always in the best interest of the advertiser though.

I’d be interested in hearing about your own pay per click experiences (bad and good) as there is some interesting anecdotal evidence that you receive a boost in the organic SERPs when you start using PPC. We’ve been testing this internally with a number of clients and there seems to be some truth in this rumour, however it is very difficult to prove.

As always, please feel free to post your comments below.


Creating the best landing page to support your PPC activity

Monday Aug 11, 2008

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This week we are looking into Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising in more detail. Since online advertising is set to grow beyond TV advertising in the next five years, there are a lot of companies out there that are going to start exploring whether they should be using PPC.

This is great news for Google shareholders and one of the reasons Microsoft fought so hard in their attempts to buy Yahoo. Their revenues will continue to grow as they jostle for supremacy in the PPC market. It also means that there will be a growth in the number of competitors for advertisers, so differentiating themselves and running better, more effective campaigns that work within their budgets is going to be high on their agendas.

The same rules of supply and demand apply to PPC, so it is a fair bet that as more companies consider moving greater portions of their budgets to online advertising, the higher the bid costs for competitive PPC markets will be.

With that in mind, we thought that it would be useful to start our PPC week by covering the most important facet of PPC. A facet that in our opinion is also the most overlooked; the landing page.

Firstly, in order to avoid confusion; the landing page is the page your visitor arrives on after clicking through via one of your adverts. The landing page is your shop window, as soon as your visitor clicks through it is no longer about just PPC, it is all about marketing and converting your visitors.

As a digital marketing agency, our role is to advise and assist our clients by identifying the right technology that we think will help them to exceed their marketing goals. When we talk to clients, we make this point more than once because in our mind Internet Marketing is a vehicle. It is a vehicle to deliver you more sales and more leads. In this analogy, PPC is the vehicle that is delivering the potential for more sales and leads.

If you take the “Internet” away from “Internet Marketing”, you’re left with just marketing. The same rules of marketing apply on the Internet as they did in the very early nineties pre Internet. The vehicle may be slightly different and the presentation may be more virtual, however the pride you would take in how your office might look to potential visitors should be the same as if the same visitors come to your web site. Perhaps more so if you read the hype about the average web user taking 5 seconds to make up their mind about whether a page or site is of interest to them before going elsewhere.

Hopefully the reason why your landing page is so important is now obvious. If not, let’s look at it another way. You spend a huge amount of time creating your online advert, you spend time researching your keyphrases and the content to attract qualified visitors, you set the campaign up and….. wait, where do you send your visitors. Your home page? Wrong answer, but a lot of people do this. Your contact page? No, but again a popular answer. Our rule is simple with this one, if you are spending money to attract visitors, make them think as little as possible. This means, make the landing page as simple and as clear as possible and relevant to the traffic.

Often what happens is companies create a hastily put together landing page. And because of this, all of their hard work and budget is very likely to be wasted. The number one take away from this article should be that the landing page is the most important part of a PPC campaign.

So now that we have covered some of the theory, let’s look at what we can be doing in order to create the perfect landing page.

Process for Creating Landing Pages that Convert

  • Identify your objective for your campaign. Are you trying to sell something, capture their details, encourage them to click through to another page? Whatever it is, take the time to fully understand what your marketing objectives are and then plan agree on what will make the campaign a success. Only by agreeing success metrics can you measure how good or bad a campaign was.
  • Do your keyword research. There are plenty of tools available that will help you and often the PPC engine provides help in this area. The keywords should be the words that your potential customers are using to search for your products or services. We’ll cover how to create keyword groups in more detail later in the week.
  • Have one action per page if possible. Try not to give your visitors too much choice. This is about having a good campaign objective, if your goal is to grow your list then your page should have one action only, encouraging them to sign up.
  • Make sure that your landing page includes the search phrase for which you are targeting. If you include the phrase that your customer used as the page header/title, they are likely to stay on your page for longer.
  • Rightly or wrongly, we all lack patience and we all seem to have lost the ability to read an entire page of text. Consider this when creating your landing pages and cater for your audience who might not have the time or the inclination to read everything. The general marketing here is “am I appealing to my audience”.
  • Carry out the “So what” test on your landing page. This is when you say “so what” to the points you make. This is a process that is designed to make you think about how you differentiate yourself and become more relevant to your visitors by highlighting the benefits and what is in it for them.
  • Check the page a number of times before going live. Is it clear? Does it describe clearly what you want your visitor to do? Has it passed the “so what” test? Does it provide enough benefits to encourage your visitor to complete your desired action?
  • Deliver what your adverts say. If you’re offering a solution to a problem, provide this information. This is about making your landing page as specific as possible, don’t make your visitors go looking for this information, this is why they clicked on your ad in the first place.
  • Take pride in your landing pages, these are important sales tools. If you’re selling third party products, take the time to rewrite the sales copy. Make your page different to everyone else and differentiate yourselves.
  • Ensure that your landing page has the ability to capture the details of your visitors. If they have clicked your advert, they are interested in the topic, take advantage of this by offering them something in return for them giving you their details. Next time you have something interesting to say, you can email market them, which is much cheaper than PPC.
  • The benefits of marketing on the Internet is that you have access to the results in an instant. Don’t waste this information, use the analytic and improve your landing pages. If your bounce rate is high, then you need to improve your message. Read through this page again and you will improve this. Try different products, different actions, lay the page out differently. Test, rinse, repeat.

We’re keen to hear your feedback, do not hesitate to use the comments option below.


What are the business benefits of blogs and blogging?

Thursday Aug 7, 2008

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The use of blogs as a personal tool to communicate is not new, there are over 100 million blogs in the so called “blogosphere” covering more topics than most of us even know exist. However it is only recently that small, medium and large enterprise customers have began to launch their own blogs. This is because they are starting to realise the value of having a blog. Not all companies have bought into this yet, so we thought it would be useful to explore what we think are the business benefits for owning a blog.

We’d like to continue to add to this list below, if you think we have missed something; please add to the debate by using our comments section.

Business Benefits of Blogging

Search Marketing purposes

By nature a blog is usually about a specific topic and is regularly updated. This in turn encourages the search engine spiders to visit your site more frequently, once this happens you are more likely to appear the organic search results, which means free and targeted traffic. The more experienced bloggers will target certain keywords and phrases in order to rank well and manipulate the search engines. Because of the flexibility of a blog, it is very quickly to launch a new post and therefore start to rank for different keywords relating to your business.

Direct Contact with people who are interested in you

Most blogs provide an option for its readers to be able to subscribe to them, meaning that every post you go live with will be sent to your subscriber base. These are people who have proactively giving you and your content the virtual equivalent of the thumbs up. You should value your subscribers very highly and ensure that you continue to provide them with content and information they are interested in. Conversely, these are the people you can test new products, seek feedback and leverage to help your provide a better service or product.

Brand Building

There are many ways to use a blog to build your brand or even to support an existing brand. In fact a blog is the perfect vehicle to use to interact with your potential customers, advanced bloggers may also use video or viral campaigns to tease their audience into coming back.

Dare to be different and differentiate yourselves from your competitors

There’s two questions to ask here; do your competitors have a blog and do they use it? And secondly, can we use our blog to add credibility to our services and solutions? For example, if you’re an IT company would it be good to have an interview with one of your customers on your blog?The answer is yes, as it adds to the credibility of your service. Likewise, you could include your views on new product launches or industry trends, all the time differentiating yourselves with other players in your market.

Build Relationships

There’s an old adage in sales and marketing, “people buy from people”. This has not changed and is probably even more apparent in tough economic times. A blog provides you with an opportunity to create relationships with your clients and prospects. There is a current trend for large companies to have a “CEO Blog”, this is where the head of the company writes a blog article once a week, which is designed to bring them closer to their target audience. It provides the reader with a feeling of involvement and interaction, especially if they are able to leave comments and respond directly to the company head.

Social Media Marketing

Most of the leading blog sites will have a social media aspect to them. They are normally visible via small graphical logos, which can be used by your readers to submit your blog post to other social media networks. The more well known social media sites are called Facebook, MySpace, Stumbleupon, Sphinn and Digg, however the list grows by the day and each will be focused on niche or have its own rules. From a blogging perspective, the reason to be aware of the social networks is because if your content is good then it is likely to be picked up by them. If this happens, it can mean a huge increase in targeted traffic.

PR & Media will find you

Depending on your niche and your content, there is every chance that you may be contacted by either local or national press. This is a great position to be in and will help you with brand building and of course provide you with some free advertising. Usually this type of contact is born from the understanding that you are an expert in your field or the topic you are discussing is of interest to their publications.

Thought Leadership and becoming an authority

The Internet has created some amazing opportunities for companies to market their products and services to a wider audience, however you could also argue that it has meant an increase in competition in almost all markets. This is why it is important to differentiate yourself from your competitors, one way to do this is to establish yourself as the de facto expert in your area. If you are an expert, tell the world. Use your blog to communicate and showcase your expertise, in a competitive market this will do wonders for your sales.

Online Reputation Management

Online reputation management is becoming big news, we have posted about this before and we advise our clients to be aware of it and proactively manage it. One of the ways to do this is by managing the content and using your blog to control what is being said. It is a little more complicated than just that, however it is better to be in control of the blog then letting someone else do it for you.

It’s really Simple

Creating and maintaining a blog is very simple. Once it is set up and designed, then your only challenge is creating the content and keeping it updated regularly. There are sites out there that post every day, whilst others do it once a week. We recommend that you find a happy medium that results in a good flow of content to keep your readers happy, without it becoming a chore.

Link Baiting

People have different views and ideas about link baiting. Often it is described as a black hat technique, whilst there are examples of blackhat link baiting, in general it is fine. The idea is that a blog post is so controversial or significant that it solicits a response from other members of the blogosphere. In turn they include a link back to your site, and you receive a boost in traffic and a short term buzz on your blog. If you’re lucky, you will keep hold of a number of your readers as well.

We want to keep growing this list, if you have any other business benefits for having a company blog please post in the comments.