What Makes a Good Corporate Blog

When I talk with new, existing or potential clients about blogging or content marketing strategies, many of them are confused about how to run a good corporate blog. How do they write about things that customers and potential customers will find interesting or link worthy without being too salesy or too pushy. In this post, I’ll take a look at what I consider to be some bad examples and, more importantly, some good examples.

they educate me or make me want to experience something without hard selling me the way a timeshare salesman does …

It’s no secret that I play in the travel space myself and for a few clients, and I read quite a few travel blogs. In my example, one of the worst travel blogs comes from Orbitz. They have post after post filled with nothing but self referential sales posts. Do people want travel deals where they save money? Absolutely. But let’s be honest: the Orbitz posts are hardly deals. IMHO they are a textbook 101 case of brands abusing authority status and wrapping links around unexceptional, thin content.

What’s an example of a good travel blog? British Airways. What makes it good? Posts like this about historic bars in Amsterdam. They do an excellent job of highlighting the reasons why I would want to travel to Amsterdam and what will be interesting and exciting to see when I’m there. Simply put, they educate me or make me want to experience something without hard selling me the way a timeshare salesman does.

It may be easy to romanticize travel to places like Paris, but what if you sell an informational product? Some of my favorite informational blog include 37 signals, GTD Times blog, Evernote, and Trendwatching. In the case of the first three, they mix in posts about life/work organization, optimization, and productivity with some very light selling. Another important aspect of these blogs is the real life examples, case studies, or uses. There’s an old saying, “let one thousand flowers bloom”: in this case, it means that when you let your customers use your products in ways you didn’t expect or intend, sometimes you get amazing results. For example, I doubt Evernote thought a street food cart vendor would use their product when they built it, but the cart vendor did, and Evernote featured it on their blog.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What if you sell a product, a completely boring, unsexy product like flour? Look at what the folks at King Arthur Flour do on their blog. It would be easy to write simple product descriptions and maybe offer a coupon or sale for the product. Instead, they take an educational approach. One of the core concepts of the blog is recipes and showing people how to cook better. Flour is primarily a baking product; however, look around the blog and you can see that they talk about all sorts of recipes, even ones that don’t include flour … like ice cream.

So what are the takeaways from this post on What Makes a Good Corporate Blog:

• Use your company blog as a way to reach your customer, not just sell to them.


• Use your blog to teach your customers about what they gain by using your product or service.


• Show them how your product or service can make their lives better or easier.


• Tell a story, don’t just pitch your product.


• Don’t be afraid to showcase unusual or unexpected uses.


• Educate and inform first, sell as a secondary function.

photo credit: Country Boy Shane

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What Makes a Good Corporate Blog

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Dear Raven, What types of keyword traffic can I report?

Dear Raven,

“I am creating an extensive keyword report and I was wondering, what is the difference between the following two options for showing Google Analytics under the “Ranking: Keyword History” module?

1. Show Matching Engine Traffic


2. Show All Search Traffic

Thank you!

— Thomas R.

Thomas R.,

As you know, here’s how you can report the history of a keyword’s search engine results:

1. Go to Reports > Wizard.


2. Add or edit a report.


3. Add a “Ranking: Keyword History” module.

If you have Google Analytics synced for a Website, in the “Ranking: Keyword History” module there will be a “Google Analytics” menu. This is where you can opt to include Google Analytics keyword data alongside your keyword search engine ranking data.

In Metrics > Google Analytics > Keyword, you can can click on a keyword link for more details. This is where you can see how the visits for a keyword break down per search engine.

As you pointed out, the “Google Analytics” menu in the “Ranking: Keyword History” module allow you to either “Show Matching Engine Traffic” or “Show All Search Traffic.” Below are example of these options applied to a report.

Show Matching Engine Traffic divides up visits per search engine. Notice how the the two traffic graphs vary.

Show All Search Traffic shows total keyword visits for all engines in each ranking report.

If you want to learn all our Report Wizard can do, check out the reports section of our Knowledge Base.

Thinking of you,

Nate

Our Dear Raven column needs your love

In our Dear Raven column, each Monday we respond to love letters from users and address common issues to keep you informed of the best ways to use Raven. Know you can contact us within Raven or email us at support@raventools.com whenever you have a question about how to use our tools or have a feature request. But if you think others might have your same question or want us to publish an answer in this column (or just send us a love letter!), email DearRaven@raventools.com. We promise to love you back.

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What could the new ICANN domain names mean for online marketers?

The Board of ICANN made two major announcements yesterday:

1. They work on weekends and holidays.


2. They are expanding the Top Level Domains (TLDs) available.

What that means is, if you have at least $185K you’ll be able to get a domain like .travel or .toyota or whatever your heart desires. But what does that mean for online marketers?

Courtesy of Melbourne IT DBS

SEO

As Danny Sullivan has already said, the use of a TLD like “bank” probably won’t affect your actual rankings. But what about click-through rate?

Put yourself in the eyes of your average search engine user (i.e., someone who isn’t an online marketer). If you saw a search result that had the TLD that matched your search, in addition to a solid title and description, would you be more inclined to click on that result? After all, it adds authority to your result that most of the others probably won’t have. Before you even get to a site you can tell whether or not it is on topic to your search based on that TLD.

Couldn’t it also confuse users, too? We’re all trained to go to .com or .org—will not seeing one of the traditional TLDs associated with the domain make it seem spammy? After more details are released about the new TLDs, it would be interesting to conduct a survey of what the average search engine user will think when they see a branded TLD.

This all, of course, assumes they even look at TLDs to begin with. They could very well care less about them.

PPC

While I don’t profess to be a PPC expert, I have to imagine including a brand-specific TLD could help improve your click-throughs. That’s what I asked Kate Morris of Distilled who speaks often about PPC:

No, I actually don’t. No more than they do now. I think they might over time, but that’s if the brands play along and the public is educated about what they are. This is going to be a small thing for some time, but it ultimately might mean more trust. I am not sure this is the best thing for good small businesses. It’ll really just free up three characters.

Who could benefit?

The new TLDs that will be created as a result of yesterday’s announcement seem poised to have an impact a few years from now. They actually won’t even be fielding applications until the beginning of next year. However, it does create a cool way to create branded domains for the big spenders out there. Think of the cool marketing opportunities that’ll be created—both online and offline. Picture a magazine ad for a new Toyota car that has a domain like “rav4.toyota” on it.

At this point, I could see it benefiting the tech-friendly brands the most. Even for Raven it could be a great way to hand out promo URLs. Say we have a special offer at a conference we are sponsoring, we could use a domain like “pubcon.raven” on our promo materials. I would imagine that would be much easier to remember than a subdomain. (Though it might still confuse the hell out of the average user.) But as I mentioned, I want to know if it has any impact on click-throughs for both SEO and PPC before making any changes.

One final area it will be interesting to keep an eye on is around new business ventures created off of the generic TLDs that will become available. While this release is more geared towards brands, the opportunity to create an social-network type site is on the table. Say if you bought the TLD “.family”, you could then turn around and sell domains off of it where people could connect with their family members (like pratt.family).

You could do the same thing with a TLD like “.news” and sell of domains like tech.news to various tech news sites like Technorati or Gawker Media.

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned in my time in this industry, it’s that it is full of some very smart and innovative people. What new business ventures that come with these new TLDs will be a perfect example of that.

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This Is What Google TV 2.0 Will Look Like (GOOG)

After lackluster reviews last year, Google TV is due for a refresh.

Google announced that it was adding its Honeycomb OS to Google TV, allowing it to run apps and adding a fresh look.

That was all we heard.

Geek.com just scored some screenshots from a limited developer release of the next Google TV. Apparently, Google has seeded about 50 Google TV boxes running the new OS to select developers.

It looks like a slightly tweaked version of Honeycomb for tablets.

Check out the screenshot below to whet your appetite.

Now head over to Geek.com to see the rest of the screenshots >

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Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Can The Kindle Be Dethroned? Here's Our Ultimate E-Reader Showdown
• The World's Most Powerful Computer Equals One Million Desktop Computers Tied Together
• Android Tablet Sales Stink So Manufacturers Are Doubling Down On Smartphones

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What Does A Russian Startup Look Like? Just Like One In The Valley

Russia’s startup scene is still growing but with a potential market size of 170 million users in the next 18 months, it’s white hot. There remain hurdles – like payment mechanisms and door-to-door delivery in a market known for corruption in the postal servce. But these are gradually being eroded by entrepreneurs.

Yesterday I had lunch with a VC who hits Moscow once a month now, such is the potential for even ‘normal’ business models like old fashioned e-commerce. Meanwhile, there are lots of categories in Russia waiting to be filled and one of them is travel.

Ostrovok.ru is still being built right now, and remains in private beta. Its aim is simple – to be the most convenient online hotel reservation platform for Russian users.

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