Online Marketing Blog

With millions of blogs and other social content to compete against, the challenge of standing out can seem overwhelming for business and personal bloggers alike.

But it doesn’t have to be a mystery for customers to find your corporate blog. If you have interesting and useful things to say, there is an audience seeking that very information.

The connection between social media and blog promotion for companies is logical: Publish a blog post and then tweet it out or post a link to Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.

But there’s more to making your business blog findable than just sharing links through social channels. That’s why focusing solely on the promotion of blog content after it’s published is like a hamster running on an exercise wheel. The ideal is to be intentional and planned yet also opportunistic. And to scale those promotion efforts, it’s essential that two or three times as much time is spent growing social networks than actually promoting content to them.

When talking with TopRank or M&O Account Teams about new clients, it is inevitable that I will ask if there is a blog involved. There are simply too many advantages to enabling a web site with fresh, themed content that is well structured for SEO benefits and that also offers a great platform for creative promotion, not to consider it in the online marketing mix. However, the mis-perceptions about what a blog is and is not abound, even with self-described “blogging experts”.

Despite that, I think it’s a perfectly reasonable question for a company to ask: “Why should we have a blog and what will it do for us?” Answering that question in the most effective way possible starts with understanding the business and marketing goals of the company. Too many SEOs and blogging consultants focus on the mechanical capabilities of a blog and not on the business goals that can be met.

One of the resources we often use when promoting blogs and RSS feeds is directory submissions. There are many kinds of directories to submit blogs to. There are blog-specific directories like Technorati and Best of the Web blog directory. There are also RSS specific directories and search engines like Feedster. Google blog search is a RSS search engine, but you cannot submit the blog directly. You can however, ping Google blog search, but pinging is only relevant for RSS feeds.

Besides blog and RSS specific search engines and directories can also submit blogs to regular directories that have categories for blogs, such as Yahoo.

A while back Thomas aka Twistermc, whipped up a handy tool for creating RSS subscription buttons to place on blogs. This makes it easy for the reader to subscribe to the blog using their favoriate RSS reader or aggregator. (See the buttons down the left side of this blog) This particular tool has been very popular and is the source for many, many links to Online Marketing Blog and to the blog marketing tools page over at TopRank.

I was checking out some of these links and noticed that some pretty interesting referrers. There are quite a few prominent SEOs using the RSS Button tool including: Mike Grehan, Rand Fishkin, Jim Boykin, Dan Thies, Kim Krause and several others. I think that’s pretty cool actually.

Recently I fielded an emailed question from a reader as to which is better home for a blog: as part of the company web site (www.company.com/blog/) or as a separate domain (www.companyblog.com)? I get this question often and see it mentioned in the forums as well.

There are many factors that influence whether your blog should be part of your site or it’s own domain name including:

• Branding
• Hosting platform
• Blog application (software or hosted)
• Resources for promotion
• Resources for content production
• Purpose of the blog
• Timeframe for expected results
• Target audience