Put Some Sizzle In Your Business Blog- 10 Tips From Foremost Media

A business blog should strike the right balance between information and promotion. Blogs should answer questions, be interesting, discuss trends – the good and the bad – and dispense tidbits about your company and what you can do.

It should be an extension of your marketing strategy and it needs to pack enough pizzazz to keep readers coming back. And, it should be a done on a regular basis.

Here are 10 tips to put some sizzle in your blog:

1. Write “how-to” articles. They put you out there as an expert and give the consumer confidence in your business. Include a tip list; they punch up an article by giving information in short readable pieces. If you are having trouble getting started – think of the most common question a consumer or potential customer might have and answer it.
2. Use an event in the news as a jumping off point. Does that event affect your customers or will it have an impact on your business? Is there a myth or scam circulating on the internet or social media that concerns your business or the industry – write about it.
3. Keep posts timely – don’t write about winter car care concerns in the beginning of summer or talk about spring spruce-ups in October.
4. Start a debate - A friendly debate about a product or business policy shows you are willing to discuss all sides of an issue. It also can demonstrate your knowledge and dedication to your business or craft.
5. Go multi-media – use a slide show to demonstrate something or how about a podcast? Make a video showing a step-by-step creation of a product. Use humor – but use it wisely – off color jokes or making fun of a business competitor is never a good idea.
6. Get People Talking- Generate a buzz about something coming up by writing a “sneak peek” post. As an added bonus, it will keep intrigued readers coming back.
7. Use graphics and fact lists. Posts containing graphics, fact lists and polls with results are great for generating shares on Facebook as well as on other social networking sites.
8. Interview customers and share customer feedback. Testimonials and success stories connect you with your audience.
9. Talk about charity work or volunteer work. Profile an employee who is very involved in charity work. Make staff profiles a regular feature because they give a human aspect to your company.
10. Reward your readers – offer a product giveaway to blog readers or promote a new service or product to blog readers before the general public.

Google

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Email Marketing Outperforming Social for Driving Sales

Email marketing is simply the most cost-effective digital marketing channel for your business.

That's not really news to us, but we always like to see data to back it up. Wired has a nice look at some new data released by Custora, a predictive analytics platform.

The report shows that while social channels get all the hype, "it’s a relatively antique tech that appears to be far more important for selling stuff online. . . Over the past four years, online retailers have quadrupled the rate of customers acquired through email."

The number of customers earned through Facebook has stayed small and flat and Twitter, meanwhile, doesn't register at all, according to the report.

Customers acquired through email opt-in are also more valuable — they buy more and more often. Organic search and paid search scored higher than email, according to the Custora data.

In late 2012, Bloomberg noted all the reasons email simply can't be beat for retailers.

What does it all mean? Social channels such as Facebook and Twitter definitely have a place in your marketing toolkit. But when it comes to earning new customers and driving revenue for your business, email remains a top digital channel and one whose power seems only to grow.

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Understanding Duplicate Content

"A client asked me the other day about duplicate content and how it would related to the SEO of their site. Duplicate content refers to content on your website being found to be very similar to content on another page, either on or off the site, and then penalized for it by the search engines. The client was concerned about the percentage of duplicate content on their site, as it related to category pages using bits of product pages as their content. The funny thing is that most SEO's think in terms of only percentages when it comes to duplicate content. It actually doesn't work that way anymore.

Prior to 2011, the algorithms were much simpler in how they operated and scanned for duplicate content. At that time, you could avoid any duplicate content penalities just by making sure your content was 30% unique or more. This seemed to be the cut off at the time. However, after a number of algorithm changes by Google, this all changed.

I'll use made up phrases as an example.

On page 1 we have the following sentence: "The [sick] [dog] went to sleep."

On page 2 we have the following sentence: "The [ill] [canine] went to sleep."

I put terms in parenthesis that are similar. So, the old algorithms would consider both of these sentences to be 33% unique, which would have been fine, because 1/3 of their text was different from each other. The new algorithms would look at it a little differently. They would pass by both pages and note the percentage of difference and similarity in the content. They would then use their latent semantic index engine (essentially an intelligent synonym database), to catalog the terms in both sentences. Next, they match the terms against their existing database to determine if "sick" and "ill" are synonyms. After that, they use assigned "similarity scores" that influence how unique the content is perceived to be to help score the content overall. For instance, the terms "sick" and "ill" might be considered very similar to each other, whereas "sick" and "flu" are perceived as less similar to each other. These individual synonym scores influence the algorithm's perception of the "uniqueness" of the content. Even more interestingly, the semantic database changes daily, and so do the "similarity scores". Google might have learned 100 new synonyms for a word tomorrow, and this will change everything having to do with that word set in the database.

Google will also catalog the different parts of the site. The algorithm is intelligent, and it is very good at understanding the structure of your site. So, for instance, you don't have to worry about the content in your navigation bar being perceived as duplicate because Google knows that it is common practice for websites to have the same menu/navigation across multiple pages. Another example is that if you cite something from other websites or people, the citation will indicate to Google that the content is SUPPOSED TO BE duplicate content. You still won't want your whole page to be citations, but a little is ok. Your primary concern should be the uniqueness of the "body" of the page and making sure that you write it from scratch.

Google made these changes in order to combat marketers that were using small synonym databases to "spin" content in order to produce vast amounts of content without having to write it. This is great news because it means original content is worth even more than it used to be, because the "cheaters" can no longer easily cheat. The bad news though is that Duplicate content issues have become far more prevalent. Make sure you consulting your SEO professional so you don't have any duplicate content issues. Even now, this is one of the most widely ignored aspects of SEO."

About The Author:

Nick Fitzgerald - Vice President Of Online Marketing at Foremost Media, Inc
Nick handles the implementation of Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Management, Reputation Management, and Online Advertising Management for Foremost Media Customers. Nick is an expert in the fields of search engine optimization, online advertising, and reputation management.

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