Guest post by Susan Daniels

When most people think of blogging, they don’t conjure up images of brand blogging. However, even Coca-cola has a blog to further empower its brand. Brand blogging helps your business out in two ways: it gives your customers a sense of community and it allows you to gain greater online visibility.

But starting a brand blog doesn’t simply mean writing an article every couple of days or so. To make your brand’s blog successful you need to incorporate the following into your every day posting:

Media

A brand’s blog should never be text only. Images and videos including the brand should be integrated throughout the blog to make it more appealing to readers, and you don’t need to hire a creative agency to create these for you. You can easily take and create them yourself; however, if you aren’t competent with your video editing, hiring a professional may be beneficial. Including images and videos also give you a greater chance of a post going viral which can greatly increase your PageRank – and thus, your overall online visibility.

Relevancy

One of the most important aspects of blogging is content relevancy. If a soda product is your brand, then you don’t want to be writing about dog food. Instead you want to be writing about anything and everything that pertains to your brand – the people behind the brand, different flavors being released, projects you may be involved in, and any other interesting tidbits.

Hype

When you have a blog that is focusing on a certain brand, you want to make sure that you are able to create hype through your posts. If you are improving a brand or making changes to products and services, you want to give your brand loyalists little insights into doing so. Not only will this get them excited and coming back for more, but this will also keep them from panicking when an updated product or service is released that may be slightly different from the old ones.

Creating an image of a company is hard, and trying to get as high as you can in the search engines is no easy feat. However, blogging can greatly help you attain new customers, engage the old, and manage your online reputation – all of which are needed if you wish to remain successful.

About the author
Susan Daniels is a freelancer writer that specializes in business and technology.

A while back I was discussing how the ability of driving traffic to stories is nothing new for PR professionals. Actually, I strongly believe being able to generate buzz and traffic around a story published in the media about a client is something journalists should consider when covering a topic. In the current background, it seems that this ability of PRs will prove to be worth quite a bit in the business world.

We all know that blogs and online news outlets usually give bonuses to their writers based on traffic, engagement or shares that help spread the word. It’s not unusual for a writer to make more just because his or her story gets tons of retweets or Facebook shares or because it brings in thousands of visits.

What’s even more interesting is that this trend will soon move to media outlets that made a name in print and have online editions. Rumor has it USA Today is considering giving traffic bonuses to writers. As public relations professionals pitch stories to the very same journalists who will earn more based on traffic, how good the PR expert is at helping out on this matter will count.

And it should count! All news outlets are businesses. The numbers matter to them as the matter to other types of websites. I don’t see this as a new trick to pull to get some coverage. The way I see PR and journalism is as a collaboration, mutual help. The journalist gets a good topic to cover and information helping him get a broad picture, plus the traffic required by their supervisors, the PR pro gets coverage for a client, which translated into traffic and hopefully sales for them and an ongoing contract for the PR consultant.

The million dollar question for PRs right now is can you drive traffic to stories? If not, are you planning on learning how to soon? Now it’s the time to do it!

A while ago, I tried to access a website I like to read, home of the odd and unusual, offbeat news, with plenty of gorgeous pictures to support the content, and flawless copywriting. To my surprise, Google had blocked the site in my browser, because it contained malware. This happened because of a flaw in MediaTemple’s security patches for sites built on WordPress, that allowed hackers to insert a malicious script. It had to be there, unobserved, for quite a while, if Google decided to block the site.

To my knowledge, many MT customers who host there blogs, have to pay enormous sums, sometimes ridiculously high, for hosting, bandwidth, etc. A popular site like Life in the Fast Lane has seen, no doubt, bank-breaking bills. The price would be well worth it, if the site owner had peace of mind. But if it happened once, who says that it will never happen again.

MT assumes no responsibility whatsoever for WordPress-based sites hosted on their servers. This, in my opinion, doesn’t justify the high prices paid by their customers. Some bloggers are not IT experts – a hosting company has to provide a level of support that gives these website owners security and confidence.

Luxembourg-based Stidia is such a company.  Stidia’s IT engineers actively monitor logs, server access, website uptime, and fluctuations. In addition, they also simulate full scale attacks on Stidia servers and client websites, and apply the fixes without disturbing their customers. The monitoring is on-going, the highlight of this company’s offering, human powered service versus automated security patches.

I am not aware of their prices – the services are available, apparently, only for Stidia’s corporate customers. An amateur blogger cannot always afford the price of safe hosting like this. But for Life in the Fastlane, this could be a better choice than MT – and who knows, even cheaper? Although server-location could be an issue: Life in the Fastlane would become a Canadian website hosted on a Luxembourg server. Server location would influence search engine positioning for the site, probably not in its owner’s best interest. On the other hand, it’s always better to be a few positions lower in the search results, than not appearing at all because of a Google ban.

So if your website is in need of desperate attention, Stidia’s engineers might be the answers to your problems. Or some other company that offers actively managed hosting. If you can think of any, list it in the comments, and don’t forget to add server location for us.

Disclosure – Stidia is a Pamil Visions PR customer

The past couple of weeks have brought in quite a few articles and blog posts about driving traffic as the new leverage of PR professionals. Pitch the story and have the traffic to back your pitch. But is this practice really new? Haven’t PR professionals already been driving traffic to online stories? I know I have and I doubt I’m the only one.

What stories do we drive traffic to? Well, almost anything showing up online.

Product/service reviews – all independent reviews, neutral and positive, are a gold mine for PR and Marketing pros. They are seen as objective points of view by customers and the bigger the publication, the more valuable the endorsement. Reviews are usually posted in a special website section, added to newsletters, used as literature to close new deals, twittered and blogged.

Interviews, press release coverage, other articles – these are also sent out to partners and customers. They are a great way to support the company’s image and the team’s values, and their being made public through media coverage gives them more credibility. If CEOs are interviewed and also have twitter streams or blogs, they will be advised to mention them and link to them. If not, the corporate blog will do. There are also media sections on most business sites linking to all these stories.

Blog reviews – these are sometimes promoted as much or even more than the magazine/newspaper reviews for a simple reason: they are personal. They are sometimes more vivid and describe a real life experience, sometimes with much detail, less focused on steps and stages than those written by journalists who have done dozens of reviews in the past month alone.

The reasons to drive traffic to all stories published online is simple: it helps build trust, it helps position products and services in a certain way, it boosts your partners’ efforts to promote your offers as they are definitely reliable and well received by the media (and they surely see a possibility for local media to cover their company’s stories if their valued partner is such a hyped up topic). Other than that, all interviews make the company representatives identifiable and thus make the business look human. It’s no longer a faceless entity; there are people all customers can approach, even if only in theory.

As I said before, this is definitely nothing new. Some of us have been doing this for a while. But I doubt we have properly used it when reaching out to journalists. Saying something like “publish my story and I’ll get hundreds of readers who are genuinely interested in the topic for it” sounds a bit like forcing their hand. Yet is it so? If the product is no good, if the story isn’t interesting, they won’t bother. But if they incline to publish it, the idea of incoming traffic might just suddenly make the story more important. The more words they publish, the more chances it would be an important enough coverage for the PR professional to promote it.

It sounds devious. But is it? Journalists and bloggers alike already publish stories based on what they can bring to their websites. Would the story interest readers, would it bring new ones? They have a clear picture of what there is for them to gain from each story they run. They are not in the business of making anyone favors. The bigger your brand, the bigger the coverage, even for lousy stories (and I can give you a few examples if you’d like), just because readers are interested in such brands, not to make said big corporations happy. So why not finally admit what a company can do for a certain medium, old or new, is important? Why not be open about it and state you, as a PR professional, can and will drive traffic to a published story?

I love reading SEOBook and from the SEO perspective, I think Aaron Wall is quite the guru. I also think he’s got very cool marketing and business development insights to share. But it seems Twitter is where our opinions start to differ. According to his post about Twitter, this microblogging platform is a big page rank waster, mostly because of the no follow links. True. He also seems to think there’s little to gain from using Twitter. Aaron also quotes Seth Godin on the fact that, just like the phone, Twitter is only a connecting medium, not a marketing medium.

My question to you is: if you could (legally ) listen to people’s conversations on the phone, hear them when they mention your product or service, if you could start your own conversation with them, wouldn’t you be all over the phone? I know I would!

Twitter might be nothing more than a connection between many dots, but it’s an extremely transparent one. You can literally watch thoughts spread through word of mouth. Tweets and retweets and the circle keeps growing.

And don’t forget the ROI you get from investing in relationships! I’ve seen this idea in the post’s comments, but I feel it needs to be stressed out. Twitter is a great place to meet interesting people. You might have hobbies, passions, causes or business in common, no matter which, this limited characters outlet is a great place to build a meaningful relationship.

Does it generate value for your business? Let’s see, you learn new things, you meet key people, others spread news, reviews and quick notes on your products or services, you interact with business partners and potential clients. Isn’t all this valuable?

I’ll use myself as an example: I’ve found inspiration for my business blog on Twitter, I’ve found resources I would have otherwise missed, I’ve been exposed to innovative ideas and picked up some new tricks on the way, I’ve met some potential clients, but most of all, I’ve built relationships with truly amazing people.

Yes, Google ranks might suffer because of Twitter. But is rank the only thing that matters? I think I’d take a few people talking about the services I provide and driving new customers my way over half a point of Google PR any day! Especially if those doing the tweeting are key influencers for my potential customers.

I won’t deny it, it’s easy to get lost on Twitter at times, it’s hard to keep it strictly business. It’s better defined as chit chatting with friends, plus some other benefits.

What do you think? Can Twitter create enough value for you business, to be worth integrating Twitter strategy in your overall business and marketing plan? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section!

What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

I’m extremely happy to welcome you to the first Monday Reading Roundup after our big move that kept me quiet for longer than I wanted . So without any other service interruption, here’s my list for today.

Have you always wanted to know what the secret formula to a successful business is? Your search has ended: Cath Lawson’s just made it public knowledge.

While so many out there have proclaimed print newspapers dead and burried, Shel Holtz has identified 10 changes that could save them.

If you have a site or a blog or both, you monitor your traffic. And admit it, higher numbers make you happier. But are you also mislead by traffic and driven to monitor the wrong metric? Dawud Miracle warns us against being tricked by the wrong numbers.

Ian Lurie is at it again and brings you a fresh and funny lesson on internet marketing. It’s about big crowds and how they don’t always have the smart solution.

We’ve all made mistakes. In business, these mistakes cost us our customers’/clients’ trust. Liz Strauss described the kind of apologies that help rebuild this lost trust.

In the end, I’ll spice up this weeks edition with Karen Swim’s reading recommendations. It’s a list of 5 wonderful blogs that I’m currently exploring (except the first one, that’s already in my reader).

Don’t forget to add your own suggestions to the comment box! See you all next week!