4 Business Blogging Lessons From Google's Chief Blogger

Karen has worked at Google since 2002, specializing in business writing and media relations. Karen first launched Google’s corporate blog back in 2004. Today the company has digital embassies for virtually every product. This armada spans dozens of blogs, Twitter profiles, YouTube and more recently, Facebook. She also developed Google’s corporate strategy using Twitter in 2009; in the first six months, @Google gained more than 2 million followers, making it one of the largest corporate Twitter accounts.

We were able to ask Karen a few key questions about business blogging as a preview of her participation at Connected Marketing Week :

What is the most important thing a company new to blogging should do?

Read other business, news, corporate blogs to get a feel for all that's possible. Some are personal (i.e. an executive writes it), and some are collaborative. Some blogs are all about 'thought leadership' and others are more about customer service and best practices. The main thing to do is get familiar with a wide variety (there is no single right way to do this), and begin to consider what you would want to say.

What questions do good business blog posts answer?
Posts don't literally answer questions so much as establish ground for the company. Do most posts offer useful or unique information? Do they reflect the company's values and interests? Do they demonstrate the people behind the company/products? Collectively, these are the things a good company blog should do.

How do you get people from across the organization to contribute to a business blog?

You have to start with people who are comfortable with writing and editing on the fly, and who have an editorial sense. People who can think broadly enough about what content your blog can encompass. I often advise creating an editorial calendar that people can track and contribute to with ideas - customer stories, presentations from events, commentary, feedback, industry trends, etc. Generally, broader rather than more narrow is a good approach. Don't just wait till you have a big announcement. However, the more often you post, the higher the demand for resources. The people who work on it day in and day out MUST be at ease. If it feels like homework or takes too many revisions, they're not the right ones to do it.

What should be the metrics for business blogging success?

Tangibles: unique visitors, length of time on page, linkbacks, etc - these are all fine to have. I would consider adding Twitter if for no other reason than to further extend the reach of your posts - tweet each new one - but of course Twitter itself is good for much more than that. Beyond that, if comments or other feedback is enabled, then be sure to mine that and respond. The more interactive questions and calls for participation will also yield metrics.

Karen will lead a special webinar as part of Connected Marketing Week . This webcast will cover the latest trends in corporate blogging, Google’s unique take on blogger messaging , and Karen will give webcast participants opportunities to ask her their most pressing blogging questions!

5 Steps to Reduce the Pain of Starting a Business Blog

Blogging can be intimidating for someone who hasn’t done it in the past or grown up in the age where everyone has a personal blog. It is, however, critical that business owners and marketers ‘ blog for business .’ Putting pen to paper or more appropriately, putting fingers to your keyboard is the biggest challenge for most people. So let’s talk about how to get started.

1. If you’re hesitant to put your voice out there for fear of being critiqued, start small. Go to blogs in your industry and start reading. Reading is the easiest way to get started. See what others are talking about, review the comments. Place a few relevant comments on other blogs to get a feel for what it’s like to be out in the blogosphere.

2. Blogging doesn’t have to be technical. Setting up a blog for your business is as easy as setting up a sub-domain or a sub-directory of your main website. If you have an IT team, this will take them a matter of minutes. If not, it’s still a relatively easy exercise. Depending upon where you host the site (i.e. Network Solutions, GoDaddy), their support department should have detailed instructions on how to set-up a sub-domain . There are also inbound marketing software packages that have blog software included.

3. Determine who your audience is going to be and why you are blogging. Think about what you are trying to accomplish with a blog. Is your objective to entertain, educate or just drive visibility to your company/industry? Write these personas down. You may think you’ve thought of everything, but you haven’t. If you had to give a 30 second pitch on all of the people you were writing for, could you? Craft your articles based on the personas you have outlined. This will help you target your audience and solid blog content.

4. Figuring out what to write about when getting started is a snap. Review old email to find common questions that leads or customers have asked about. Chances are you already have quite a bit of content in your email. Drop it into your blog and do a little editing based on how you’ve defined your audience and BOOM… you have your first article. Do this until you feel comfortable drafting new content. If you don’t have information like this available, go to other blogs and take your own spin on controversial or interesting posts.

5. Post! Seth Godin is one of those rare big thinkers and he has produced several best selling books . One of the most interesting points he makes is that you cannot wait for every piece of something to be perfect. You must produce work. Produce it. Get feedback. Tinker with it and then produce more work. If you wait for the perfect topic, the perfect title, the perfect content, you will never get anything out the door. If you never get anything out the door, you’ll never get any better at blogging. Don’t put something on your blog with spelling and grammar mistakes, but just start writing and posting. It’s the fastest way to get better, become a thought-leader in your space, drive traffic and ultimately inbound links.

Checklist: How to Start a Business Blog

Excellent content leaves the reader with something new that they didn’t have before. People like to get something from blogs they read. You don’t have to be Shakespeare to have a good blog.

The fact is that web sites with a blog received 55% more visitors , 97% more inbound linksand 434% more indexed pages than those that didn’t have a blog. Businesses in particular can capitalize on this because businesses that blog experience 126% higher lead growth than non-blogging businesses. Can you really afford to miss this opportunity?

1. CONTENT

Remarkable Content – A mix of content is good. What’s remarkable? Anything relevant and useful, interesting, thought-provoking, controversial, and entertaining. Try things like current news, opinion, and media rich content. Note: this is not your place to talk all about your services or products.
Keep content topical, informative, and non promotional
Check your grammar and spelling
Organize your content

TITLE
Sub-heading

Content with bold words or language indicating importance

Give your readers something to chew on – A blog post should be 400-600 words on average

Search Engine Optimization Basics - As you create remarkable content you will want to optimize that content for search engines as well as users. Make it as clear as possible. This should include updating the following - Page title, Meta description, and internal page links.

Attention Grabbing Headlines – Not to pile on the pressure but your Headline/Title/Subject line is important. In most cases it is also your post URL so make it count. If you can include your keywords. Generally things like top 5 lists, trends, and news focused articles do really well, but add variety and measure what readers like best.

Target Audience – Who are you writing for? Focus on the "who" of your blog. You need to think about the type of person, on average, who you want to attract to your blog.

Bloggers – Who is writing? Will you be the one writing articles? Or are you just a champion/facilitator/coordinator and others will be doing the writing.

Schedule – How often will you publish? – Plan or schedule how frequently your content will be published. Every day or every week or anything in between. Do what is realistic for you. The most important thing is consistency.

2. READER ENGAGEMENT

Call-to-Actions – Your blog should be a lead generating machine. Offers for call-to-actions can include: newsletter sign-up, eBook download or webinar registration. Great blog call-to-actions are action oriented, positive, clear, and direct.

Published Author Name – Give people credit for the content they write and also show your readers who is involved. It is more friendly to know whose work you are reading that have it be a mystery.

Comments – Be sure to moderate your comments for spam. No one wants to read “great post…I will bookmark this” over and over again. At the same time, don’t eliminate good conversations even if they are potentially controversial.

Lists – People like to read posts with a nice, simple presentation of information. The most popular kind are list of: recommendations, popular posts or articles by tags.

Search – Give people the opportunity to find content easily and quickly. People are used to having answers at their finger tips. Chances are that if you don’t provide that information people will wander elsewhere.

3. INTERACTIVE MEDIA


Images – You want to think of images as supporting assets. They are the supporting characters in a feature film. Now, you shouldn’t litter your post with pictures but at least one is good to start. Graphs, diagrams and even screenshots can come in handy as useful blog images.

Video – This is pretty much the same as with images. A good interactive video can help your blog go viral. You don’t have to do your own mini-series but maybe you came across a video that is relevant and supports the point of your content, go ahead and insert it and share it with your readers.

Polls and Surveys – Done right, polls and surveys can give you some good data. They may even be somewhat entertaining. But don’t show a poll about “where you should go on vacation” when your blog is not even remotely related to the subject.

4. SUBSCRIPTION OPTIONS


Email – People like options. So give them the option to subscribe to your blog via email. You’ll be surprised that many people will still prefer this over RSS.

RSS – This is a standard feature for blogs. You can take it one step further and make it even easier by just taken the RSS image icon and hyperlinking it to your RSS URL. Within a click you will have subscribers to your blog.

Social Media – This seems like it should be common sense by now, but many bloggers still seem to miss out on this one. Give people the option to share your content. Again, simplicity is the key here. Have the icons display alongside your blog posts. Think about your industry - Is it more technical? If so then include Reddit and Digg. Are you in HR? Then be sure to use LinkedIn etc.

Follow Me Option – Having people share your content is only half of the equation. You also want to build a following on your networks, whether it be your own Ning network or Twitter. Let people know where they can connect with you.
5. MEASUREMENT

Javascript - You should be using some kind of tool for the purpose of tracking traffic, which means you will have to copy and paste some kind of javascript code into your website for that tool to track that information. Don't forget it.

Analytics – Look at page views, links, comments and where content was shared. The same way you want to know how your website is succeeding, you'll also want to know what's working on your blog. And if you've followed the steps above you should also be generating leads from your buiness blog.

BONUS TIP - Things you don’t need

Advertising – Unless you are generating tons of traffic this is a waste.

Splash screens – Pop up screens are incredibly annoying and distracting. Try to keep them at minimum or only shown once, not repeatedly.

Free Checklist
For people who like to have a paper checklist, check out the document below. View this document on Slideshare and click download at the top of the document to get a copy of this checklist for your business.