IN THIS ISSUE:

 

Better Blogging Tips
Jing for Screen Captures
Blogging Book Review

Newsletter Archive

the B2B Marcom Mind
June 2009

We're on the verge of summer, my most favorite season of the year - long days, weekend hikes, barbeques with friends. I actually find the outdoors both refreshing and inspiring. Hiking gives me a chance to think bigger picture about what I want from my business and from my life. What's your favorite season?

Lately I've been talking to some of my B2B clients about starting a blog. They're afraid of what they don't know so I wrote my 10 best blogging tips for corporate blogs. I always like to include new and cool tools I find and am sure you will really like Jing. Lastly, for those new to corporate blogging, I review one of the first books written on corporate blogging which you might find helpful.

As always, I enjoy hearing from you. I'm just an e-mail away, so drop a line and say hello. Love to know what inspires you!

See you next month,

Terri Rylander
LinkedIn B2B Marcom Group Manager
Freelance B2B Marcom Writer

"Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up. "
~Oliver Wendell Holmes

10 Tips for Better Blogging

It seems like everyone is blogging these days. Blogging is a great way to put a personal face and voice on your business, and helps build your reputation and relationship with your customers. You may be asked to manage and write a blog for your corporation or ghost write for your B2B clients. If you’re considering writing a blog, here are a few tips to help you be successful:

1. Have a strategy – Decide up front what you would like to gain by writing a blog. Do you want to drive more people to your site? Are you hoping to reduce customer support calls? Who is your ideal reader? How often will you post? What voice and style will be used?
2. Use sound technology – There are great tools out there like Wordpress, Typepad, and blogger.com that allow you to get started right away. However, if you can install and manage a blog application on your corporate site, you have more flexibility to customize it and make it an integral part of your branding.
3. Provide value – In order to keep your readers coming back, you need to offer them something of value. This includes posts that provide humor, industry insight, opinion, company news, product info, or product support.
4. Keep it short – Today’s readers are busy and don’t have time to read long posts. If your post is long, they’ll probably skip it. Keep your posts short – about 500 to 800 words. Use short paragraphs, bullets, and bolded text to break it up visually.
5. Link often – No doubt, your posts will include information you found externally. Do your providers and your readers a favor and hyperlink back to your sources. Also link liberally to your internal content to lead readers to other helpful information.
6. Blog regularly – Another way to keep your readers coming back is to keep your blog fresh. If it’s been a couple months since the last post, readers will assume you’ve given up and they will move on. At a minimum, update no less than every other week.
7. Allow and respond to comments – A blog is not a one way dialogue, though it may seem like it at times. Readers want and sometimes need to reply. Not all comments will be positive or even accurate but you need to keep the lines open and respond calmly when necessary.
8. Promote your blog - This is not an exercise in “build it and they will come.” People will not know you have a new post unless you get the word out. With the increased use of social media, you actually have many more avenues. Post your blog link in your LinkedIn group news, Facebook updates, and Twitter. Also look for industry site aggregators that you can cross-link with. Lastly, keep those readers coming back by having an RSS feed.
9. Monitor blog analytics – If you are hosting your own blog application, get to know and start using Google Analytics. Which posts bring more visitors? Where are visitors coming from? Which pages are they clicking through to? How long are they staying on your site?
10. Read and leave comments on other blogs – Get out there and make sure you’re reading competitor blogs, analyst blogs, industry blogs, and other relevant blogs. Leave articulate and thoughtful comments and become part of the overall conversation. Your readers may also be reading these blogs and will see that you are a player in the industry. As a bonus, many blog comments have a place to link to your own blog which will bring visitors back to your site and increase your search engine ranking.

Share Screenshots Instantly!

Ever needed to quickly share something on your screen but struggled to do so? Wouldn’t it be great if when you were talking to tech support, you could send them a link to a picture of your screen? Well let me introduce you to Jing.

No more hitting the ‘print screen’ button, opening MS Paint, pasting in the full screen, cropping the screen, saving it to a file, and emailing it to someone. Now, with Jing, you can draw a box around what you want to share, hit the ‘capture image’ button, and then privately upload to screencast.com which will then put the URL in your clipboard for you to paste into email, IM, Twitter, blog, or other communication. You can also save it to your computer to access later.

Highlighted area for screen capture

Jing also lets you create videos up to five minutes long. This can come in very handy when you need to demonstrate how to do something. If you have a microphone, you can also add narration. Once you’re done, you upload your creation to screencast.com and you’ll get the code you need to embed your video into your website or blog.

With your screen captures, Jing gives you tools to add text boxes and symbols (like arrows) so that you can annotate your images. Jing also integrates with its sibling applications like Snagit and Camtasia Studios.

I guess what amazes me most is that Jing is free. It pretty much does everything you need, though for a nominal $15 a year, you can upgrade to Jing Pro and have the ability to use it with your webcam and/or upload directly to YouTube. Give it a try – I think you’ll find it really useful.

Book Review: The Corporate Blogging Book

If you’re just getting started with blogging or helping your company get started, you might consider reading Debbie Weil’s “The Corporate Blogging Book” which is one of the first and most complete books out there on corporate blogging. The book opens by explaining what blogging is all about and why corporations should get engaged in the blogosphere. Elementary for some I’m sure but the book moves on the address the challenges with blogging including legal issues.

The book offers advice on how to use a blog, whether the CEO should blog, how to measure blogging success, and how to create and present a business case for corporate blogging. In addition, the book also touches on blogging tools and technology and 10 tips for writing a successful blog. I recommend this book to those who are new to blogging and those who would like to start a corporate blog. Probably not as helpful for those already pretty familiar with blogging.