Building Business Blog Bridges

As I was updating WordPress for a client, I saw that someone had “discovered” her blog.  This is not necessarily a bad thing – but this person had decided to try to use the comments section of various blog posts for HIS sales message.

I can understand why he’d like to get his message out on her business blog. Years ago when we launched her blog, I worked extensively with this client to target the keyword terms which her prospective clients might use to search for information online.

We formulated a plan and she began blogging for her business.  Today she’s enjoying enviable SERPS which are the result of YEARS of consistent effort on her part.

Then this guy comes along and drops a few “turds” in her comment section.  Just because he left his name and URL doesn’t make his behavior any less “spam like” and doesn’t mean she should approve his comments.

How can you avoid committing this business blog faux pas?

So let’s say you have a business that needs some serious marketing help and you don’t want to work for YEARS building a business blog. I get it.  You’ve invested your blood, sweat and tears into launching this business and you need to see results like yesterday.

While it seems like a sure fire shortcut to success to hijack the comments section of a business blog with enviable SERPS… you’re more likely to burn potential bridges than build them.

Here are three easy steps to building bridges with successful business bloggers… and possibly EARN a chance to introduce yourself to an A list business blogger’s audience.

1. Launch your own business blog.

Every successful business blogger can remember a time when he/she were pounding out blog posts that no one was reading.  Believe me, you’ll be in a stronger position to ask for a “favor” if you’ve already demonstrated that you’re more than willing to go through the motions of building your own blog audience.

In my own personal experience, I’ve found that comments and guest blog post requests from business owners who are NOT actively blogging tend to fall into the “shamelessly self promoting” category.

See, a business blog post is not place for a “one call close”.  Your business blog is a place to woo consumers an to educate them.  While your ultimate goal is to seduce visitors into becoming your customers – you first must strive to earn their trust before you ask for their business.

That’s the nice thing about business blogging – it allows you to find the right “voice” while building an impressive library of useful web site content along the way.

Once you’ve launched your own business blog, determined your marketing strategy and created enough content to showcase your your own unique and authentic voice, then you’re ready for the second step…

2. Leave PITHY comments on other blogs.

Pithy means concise and expressive.  Your goal should be to add VALUE to the conversation at hand in the post – not to hijack it for your own sales pitch.  You’d be surprised how much “traffic” can come your blog’s way with a well reasoned comment or two.

Leaving regular, pithy comments on other business blogs is a great way to pave the way to the third way to respectfully use other business blogs to promote your own business….

3. Guest Post

Guest posting has the potential to be a “win-win” situation for both the blog owner and the guest blogger.  In my client’s case, if the author had launched his own business blog to promote his book – he could have contacted her and asked for an opportunity to guest post on her blog.

Assuming this author can write well – my client would get the double benefit of someone ELSE creating content on her established blog.  She gets a break from blogging AND still gets to offer fresh useful content to her readers.

Of course, if he has a history of leaving pithy comments on my client’s blog – this author would find my client is much more receptive to his offer to guest blog post.  By previously contributing to the conversation on her blog previously – this author would find my client more than willing to allow him a place to promote his point of view – and his book.

It’s a win – win – but only if the guest blogger has his own blog and has proven his ability to participate in a polite “blog style” conversation.

Guest blogging can be a GREAT way to introduce your products or services to a new audience.  On the other hand, it’s WAY too easy to delete shamelessly self promoting comments.

Business blogs are not SQUEEZE pages… don’t try to treat them as such!

Increasing Blog Traffic: Trolls and Drive By Readers

attracing blog readersThere’s a new “increasing blog traffic” tactic being touted (I wish I could remember where I read this now) where leaving troll like comments is being encouraged as a way to increase blog traffic.

When I use the word “troll“, I’m not talking about a fictitious, mythological creature who is obnoxious, hideous and dedicated to achieving evil ends.

Instead, I’m talking about someone who fits this description of a troll at Wikipedia

An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang, is someone who posts controversial and usually irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the intention of baiting other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.

In essence, an internet troll does share the mythical creatures bent for evil, but it’s important to remember that a troll is not offering his/her authentic opinions, which may or may not offend someone. Instead of commenting to share an opinion, the troll offers comments with one intention – to stir the emotions of other readers.

While troll like behavior is being touted as a great way to increase blog traffic, I’d have to guess that instead, this kind of post just merely creates Toxic Conversation.

The quality of readers you attract with troll like comments are what I call “Drive By Readers”.  They may subscribe to your RSS, but they provide little value to your blog other than boosting your RSS subscriber count.  If they came as the result of your troll comment, they’re seeking emotional juice.  They’re at your blog to see more of what you delivered via the comment section they just read.  They’re at your blog with the purpose of seeing who you shredding now.

If your goal is to be a Blog Shock Jock, then leaving troll like comments will be a great investment of your time.

trollHowever, the other side of that coin is the blog owner where you’re making those disruptive comments.  As a blog owner, it’s hard to know what to do about Trolls. Defining troll like activity is the first step and sometimes that’s the hardest step of all.   Wikipedia has an explicit DNFTT (Do Not Fee The Trolls) policy.

Trolling is a deliberate, bad faith attempt to disrupt the editing of Wikipedia. Ignorance is not trolling. Genuine dissent is not trolling. … They are only trolling when they are motivated by a program of malice rather than ignorance or bias. This requires a judgment of the personal motivation for another’s action.

And that my friend is the problem with defining a troll.  A troll is defined by his/her INTENTIONS and usually it’s hard to determine those intentions with a single comment.    Is the person leaving frequent comments really a troll, or just someone who needs educated?

The advice I frequently share with clients is this: your blog is YOUR playground.  You provide the playground so you can make the rules.  If you think someone’s comments are troll like, then it’s your right and privilege to enforce a strict DNFTT policy.  In other  words, if you think it’s a troll, then it’s a troll.

Have you had problems with trolls on your blog yet?   If so, how have you handled it?

Do You Need a Blogging Absence Excuse Letter?

It happens to everyone who maintains a blog… life happens and your blog goes on a temporary “hiatus.” Often, the blog owner will issue a “blogging absence excuse letter” which goes along the lines of:

  • “I’ve been really busy… too busy to post to my blog”
  • “I’ve been really sick… too sick to post to my blog”
  • “I’ve been traveling… so I couldn’t  post to my blog”
  • OR.. the absolute WORST Blogging Absence Excuse Letter I’ve seen:

Dearest Blog Readers:

Sorry there have been no posts lately. I have been out of town all week learning (oddly enough) to blog.  Look for new posts, material and blog responses soon!

I’ve change the content to protect the blogger’s identity, but this post is currently the last post to the blog and it is dated February 2008.  By the way, there were only a couple of posts to the blog before this one!

BORING!  BORING!  BORING!!!  These blogging absence excuse letters are boring and destructive!!!

According to Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger.net, writes in his post Excuse Posts- How to Let Your Blog Go #6

The problem is that when you post a few posts like in a row it has an impact upon your readers and any sort of momentum that you might have created on your blog.

He also writes:

While I occasionally include a little personal information in my posts this information is generally shared in a ‘by the way’ type form or as an illustration to an ‘on topic’ post. As a result if something happens in my life that prevents me from blogging then I generally don’t post a post about it (unless it’s a very major thing – something that hasn’t happened yet thankfully).

Darren goes on to give you several tips for how to blog when you can’t blog.  It’s a great post, a must read for most bloggers!

Most of the time, if you aren’t able to blog you probably don’t need to offer a public apology.  The exception to this rule is if your readers begin to email you to see why you’re not blogging.

I have a client who lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa who hasn’t posted to her blog in a few weeks.  I know darned well why she isn’t posting… her entire town is under water!

When she gets dry and has power again, she’ll be able to regale her readers on her experience of surviving the great flood of 2008.  Meanwhile, her priorities are to get her life back to a semblance of what it was pre-flood.

However, maybe you don’t have a good reason for why you haven’t been posting to your blog.  You haven’t survived a flood, a hurricane, a tornado or any other natural disaster.  Then I encourage you to at least make up a good story before posting your blogging absence excuse letter.  Rather than offering the lame excuses offered above (including taking a class on blogging), try the following:

  • “Sorry I haven’t posted.  I’ll be posting ALL the gory details of my Alien Abduction (complete with pictures) after the nice gentlemen at Area 51 return my cell phone.”
  • “I forgot to bring in the Sunday paper last weekend. When I found it on Monday, I thought Monday was Sunday.  I’ve been running behind ever since!”
  • “My time machine is malfunctioning.  My trip to 2030 did not return me to my exact time of departure as I had planned.   By the way, sell all your stocks and buy jars of chunky peanut butter and brownie mix.  Turns out, the currency of the future is rare food.”

If you have a great blogging absence excuse post  that you’d like to share, PLEASE feel free to leave a comment with your best.  (I’m sure you can do better than I did above!)

Alexa’s New Ranking System Hurts Some and Helps Some

Alexa is a “traffic spying tool” used almost exclusively by web savvy tech professionals to see how much traffic a particular site is receiving.  Until recently, Alexa gathered their data exclusively from an optional toolbar which at first could only be installed in Microsoft’s Browser, Internet Explorer.

So, when a web savvy tech professional would visit a web site, the firs thing they would do is look in their Alexa toolbar to see how the web site was doing.  The problem with this is that the toolbar would only measure traffic to the site with toolbar installed.     So, if your audience wasn’t tech savvy and didn’t have the toolbar installed, your Alexa ranking suffered… sometimes greatly.

So this morning, Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger announced the change in the way Alexa computes  its rankings. You can read the Alexa Press Release here.

Amit Bhawani did some research to find out how the change has affected some of the big blogs on the internet and found many blogs rankings dropped dramatically.  According to ShaMoneyMaker, the impact will be felt most by those who do paid reviews.

For those of us who write for a non-technical audience, we have seen a drop (which is good) in our Alexa rankings.   For those whose focus is on the technical web audience, there is no joy in this anouncement.

I have to wonder what the REAL reason is behind the switch at Alexa.  Could it be that Compete.com is putting pressure on Alexa?  Then again, Alexa is an Amazon creation… and things have been pretty messed up over at Amazon.

Maybe this is evidence that things aren’t going well inside the hallowed halls at Amazon….

The Search for Quality Content…. Search Engine Journal’s Guest Blogging Contest

This is truly inspired way of promoting a blog!!

The Search Engine Journal has announced that they’re launching a guest blog contest.

The contest means everybody wins.  The Search Engine Journal gets submissions of the best bloggers have to offer. Bloggers get additional exposure for their blogs. The winner will be chosen by a multi-tier process looking at social media voting, reader voting, traffic of the individual posts and links to the posts.

The contest, which offers $9,000 in prizes, will help to build and promote the Search Engine Journal’s blog on many levels.

  • INCOMING LINK BONANZA: Winners will be determined in part by the number of incoming links to the blog. Bloggers who submit articles will be encouraged to create incoming links from not only their blogs, but they’ll also encourage their blogging “buddies” to create links as well. Search Engine Journal wins with an incoming link frenzy.
  • QUALITY CONTENT BONANZA: Bloggers are going to submit their best work which will live forever on the Search Engine Journal blog…. again, content which is generating LOTS of incoming links.

Bloggers who submit work will benefit as well.

  • Bloggers get exposure of their expertise to readers of the Search Engine Journal blog.
  • Bloggers gain exposure for their company or blog. Search Engine Journal will add a bi-line an linnk at the bottom of the post.
  • Bloggers gain long term benefits as the post will be indexed in search engines and housed on the Search Engine Journal authority site.
  • Bloggers gain exposure to the Search Engine Journal’s RSS subscriber base of 15,000+
  • All Entrants Will Receive a $100 VIP Coupon for SponsoredReviews.com!

All in all, it’s a GREAT opportunity to gain additional exposure for your blog.  While it’s probably going to do the most good for those who want to speak to the “search engine specialist” audience, they’ve opened the contest up to everyone on any topic.

Read more about it here: SEJ Guest Blogging Competition : Win Over $9,000 in Search Marketing Prizes