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30 content ideas for an email newsletter

Mark Tosczak — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:48:45 +0000

One day your boss comes into your office and announces that he wants to publish an email newsletter about your department, company or organization. And then he gives you the job of actually producing it. He gives you a deadline and says “I look forward to seeing a draft of the first edition next week.” What do you do?

I’ve created and managed a few email newsletters over the years. Just as with a blog, an email newsletter is built around content. Here are 30 content ideas for your email newsletter.

1. Links to and excerpts from your recent blog posts.

2. Links to and excerpts from other web sites or blogs that your readers might find useful or interesting.

3. A short essay or letter that’s not published anywhere else.

4. An exclusive tip of the week/month.

5. Links to your company’s social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook fan pages, etc.).

6. News and announcements about what’s going on in your business or organization.

7. Special offers, discounts and coupons.

8. If your employer is a for-profit business, links to the favorite charity encouraging people to donate and explaining why you support the group. (Like I did with this post.) If you work or a nonprofit, links to businesses that support you in a substantial way.

9. Employee profiles (to put a human face on your business or organization).

10. Customer profiles.

11. Customer testimonials.

12. Links to independent reviews of your products or services (such as on Yelp or Amazon).

13. Invitations for readers to review your products or services on your web site or an independent site.

14. Contact information (seems basic, I know, but it’s important).

15. Polls or trivia questions.

16. The results of the last poll or answers to your last trivia question.

17. Photos of your products.

18. Reader-submitted photos of your products being used.

19. A contest.

20. Listings of upcoming events (sales, meet-ups, open houses or whatever’s appropriate for your organization).

21. A tutorial or lesson. You could do a series of these.

22. A guest column by an outside writer, perhaps a well-known blogger in your industry or even a celebrity.

23. Q&A style interview with a key employee in your organization.

24. Emails from readers, answered by you “Dear Abby” style.

25. Inspiring, compelling stories of about customers of yours who are doing great things (climbing mountains, raising money for charity or maybe training for the Olympics).

26. A funny video produced by your employees.

27. Holiday greetings (during the holidays).

28. An invitation to an event or webinar exclusively for your newsletter readers.

29. New job listings. Hire your customers? Why not. If they buy from you, they could be great advocates for your brand.

30. Sneak peeks or previews of new products or services.

What else have you put in email newsletters? What would you put in a newsletter if you were doing one? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

How to use personas in blogging

Mark Tosczak — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 14:33:29 +0000

Putting a face on your readers with personas can improve your blog and content marketing efforts. (Source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/499007)

Many marketers use personas to help them better understand their customers and design products and marketing campaigns that will be attractive to those customers. You can use them to improve your blog or other content marketing efforts — podcasts, videos, white papers and so forth.

What is a persona?

A persona is a fictional character used to better understand the desires, goals and motivations of some set of potential customers.

If you’re running a blog about weight loss, you might use personas to understand the differences between a 19-year-old woman and a 47-year-old man when it comes to losing weight. Chances are they have different motivations, different values and different circumstances in their day-to-day lives. Rather than treating those two sets of customers the same, personas allow you to clearly fix in your mind how each group is distinctive and will likely seek different information as they explore weight loss solutions.

Properly constructed personas are built off extensive research, which could include interviews, spending time with people in their day-to-day lives and collecting statistics about a target group of customers. If you have the resources for that sort of research, then you have a huge advantage compared to your competitors. But even if you don’t, you can still use personas to rough out some basic ideas about different audiences.

You can still consider all the people you know in real life who are representative of potential readers. That can help you define personas based on interactions and communication you’ve had with real people.

Also note that you can have multiple personas for a single brand, product or service. Different groups of people may purchase the same product for different reasons. Effective marketing communications will still take into account the needs, aspirations and values of these different personas in creating an overall marketing plan.

Four steps to building blog reader personas

1. Figure out who your readers (or potential readers) are. Or, if you don’t have any readers, figure out who you’d like them to be. Are they male or female, young or old, from your country or from abroad? Just the basics here.

2. Figure out what your readers are looking for. Do they want actionable information (how-to posts), industry news, strategic perspective or insights into the big picture? And take this beyond merely what kind of information they want. Ask yourself why they want that information: What is their root motivation?

3. Decide how knowledgeable your readers are. Are they rank beginners? Jaded experts with decades of experience? Somewhere in between?

4. Craft persona portraits. Once you’ve figured out your readers are, what information they’re looking for and how knowledgeable they are about your subject matter, write short bios for each persona. Here’s an example of a persona profile I wrote last year for this blog:

Media Michelle – A young professional in media, marketing or PR who is just getting into social media and wants to learn more about them. She needs basic information about how to do things better and more efficiently, plus examples of others doing things well, ideas and some basic theory.

I’ve seen personas much more detailed than Media Michelle, so don’t hesitate to pile on the detail if it’s relevant and helps you form a richer picture of who you’re trying to reach.

How to use reader personas

Once you’ve got your reader personas developed, you can start to use them to guide your content development. For each persona you can come up with content ideas (blog posts or whatever) that meet the persona’s needs. You can edit and review content you’re creating with an eye toward how well it works for the target persona. And you can check your persona or personas periodically to make sure that your blog or content marketing efforts aren’t leaving any important audiences out.

Have you ever used personas for a blog or other content marketing efforts? If so, please share your thoughts and ideas in comments.

How to strengthen your relationships

Mark Tosczak — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 17:30:36 +0000

Have you reached out and touched people in your network lately? (Photo source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/616726)

In social media it’s easy to get caught up in mechanical ideas of what building and maintaining relationships is about. Are you pinging your network regularly? Are you sharing content, creating value? Are you thanking people? In marketing, we start quantifying these things: How many tweets, how many retweets, how many followers or subscribers or fans?

And that’s fine. Except that it’s all just a way of dancing around the real issue: relationships.

I got an email last week from an old acquaintance (which I haven’t returned yet — sorry Jamie, I will). We’re connected via LinkedIn and she wrote to tell me what was going on with her life and to ask what was going on with mine. She said that she was trying to do a better job this year of connecting with her network. Good for her.

All of us should steal that idea and do the same. It’s not numbers of friends, followers or subscribers that are ultimately important, it’s relationships. That’s why it’s called social media, and that’s where its power lies.

This isn’t just a soft and fuzzy “well isn’t that nice” issue either. The strength of your relationships and the strength of trust can have a huge impact on your bottom line. Many sales people understand this instinctively — they’ve always operated on the basis of relationships, trust and communication. Marketers are trying to take old mass media ideas of brand and integrate them with social media concepts around trust, reputation and relationships. It’s still a work in progress.

Dave Navarro published an interesting case study last week looking at short sales letters vs. long sales letters. It’s worth reading. The bottom line there with Laura Roeder‘s webinar is that she has spent a long time building trust and relationships with her community. That includes pushing out content for them (she publishes an email newsletter and a blog), but it also includes lots of interaction (look at her Twitter stream). Interaction is the bedrock of relationships.

So, let’s bring this down to some actionable stuff. Ask yourself these questions. Based on your answers, you should know what to do next to strengthen your relationships with your community.

Do you routinely say happy birthday to people? Facebook makes this easy.
Do you congratulate people in your community when they get promoted, get a job, win an award or achieve something noteworthy?
Look at your list of Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections. Who haven’t you talked to in the last few months? What’s stopping you?
Who do you need to meet for coffee or lunch or a drink?
You just read something interesting. Who in your community could benefit? Instead of sharing it as a status update (maybe in addition to), have you just sent it to that one person via email? Do this for one or two people a day and watch your relationships tighten up.
Are you being human? Are you sharing with your friends and colleagues what’s important in your life? Are you asking about and listening to what’s important in their lives? This might have nothing to do with what you or your friends actually get paid to do every day.

What else? How else can we all do a better job of connecting and reconnecting with people in our communities and networks? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

How to figure out your blog’s USP

Mark Tosczak — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:45:50 +0000

It takes more than beauty to stand out. (Photo source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/942854)

There are a lot of blogs out there. You’ve got to wonder — what makes your’s different? Why should anybody read it? If you don’t know the answer to that question, then your readers may have trouble figuring it out as well.

You need a USP — a unique selling proposition. Marketers develop USPs all the time for products and services. The USP helps define precise why a potential customer would choose that product or service over all the others. If you can define the USP for your blog, you’ll do a better job of persuading more people to read it and getting more people to subscribe or give you their email addresses.

Developing a USP is tough, but here are some questions to consider to get you thinking about it.

Your market

The first thing to do is to consider the market that you’re in.

What’s your market niche, topic or industry? What subject area are you focusing on? If you’re not focusing on a particular topic or theme (or at least restricting yourself to handful) it’s going to be a lot harder to define what value your blog delivers to some particular group of people.

What are others in your niche doing? Reading lots of other blogs in your niche and figuring out what they’re doing can be a bit depressing. The first time you do this, you might come to the conclusion that other bloggers are already doing everything that could be done. There may be folks writing about breaking news in your niche, some providing tutorials for beginners, others providing strategic guidance for advance practitioners. But keep looking and thinking. What’s not being done?

You

Once you’ve got a good grip on your market, it’s time to think about you (or, in the case of a company or organizational blog, your organization). You need to figure out what makes you unique, as that will probably figure into your USP.

What experiences — jobs, education, hobbies, attitude, values, experiences, nationality, skills, etc. — are you bringing to your blog? Imagine a group of new bloggers writing about fitness and weight loss. One’s a doctor, and knows how to find and cite the latest scientific evidence. Another is a fire fighter, and can talk about the challenges of eating right and exercising while working a stressful job. And another is a devout Christian, and can write about how fitness, nutrition and weight loss fit in with spiritual values and practices. Different backgrounds, and, I’m sure, different blogs.

What are you really good at? What are the things that you do that people in your life tell you you’re good at? Do any of those apply or relate in any way to your niche? (And if they don’t, do you need to reconsider your niche?) How can you bring that skill to bear on your blog? How can that skill be reflected in the content you create?

What fascinates you? A big part of a successful blog is passion and energy. Bring that to the table, and your writing will shine a little brighter, your posting schedule will be more frequent and the quality of your content will be higher. How can you incorporate what really fascinates you into your blog?

Your USP

Answer all those questions above (and maybe a few more that might occur to you along the way) and you might start to get a clearer idea of what your USP is. Here are a few more thoughts to help you crystallize your USP.

Can you combine two (or more) different elements (perhaps two parts of your background) to create a unique new persona? How about a Buddhist MBA productivity blogger, for example? Though someone probably has that one already tied up.

Is there a certain type of content not being provided (or not provided well) in your niche? Interviews, tutorials, data analysis? What’s not being done that you could do?

Can you bring a particular style or attitude to your blog? If all the other blogs in your niche are sincere and heartfelt, bring some humor to the niche.

Is it unique and will it sell? Finally, once you start to get an idea of what your USP could be, ask yourself: Is it unique and will it sell? You want to be honest with yourself here, though not so hard on yourself that you give up. But if your USP is not unique or it won’t sell, then you don’t have a USP. Back to the drawing board.

Have you successfully created a USP for your blog? If so, how did you go through the process? What tips do you have? Please share them in the comments below.

Dear email marketers – why don’t you love me anymore?

Mark Tosczak — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 12:15:54 +0000

Your unthinking emails could wash away my affection for you. (Photo source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1089948)

Dear Email Marketers,

I have to admit, in the beginning I was really infatuated with you. You had a cool web site with lots of great content. You had obviously spent a lot of time developing it, and it seemed like you were going to be pumping out more great content in the future. All you wanted was my email address. I wasn’t sure, but then there was that special offer: the enticing free ebook, discounts, special offers just for me. So I took the plunge and signed up for your email list. What the heck, I figured, you seem legitimate, and legitimate email marketers would honor a future unsubscribe request. And if that didn’t work, I could always mark you as spam.

At first it was good. You sent me updates, new content, emails that were genuinely useful and interesting. But over time, your ardor seemed to fade. The emails got shorter, the copy less engaging and less interesting. It seemed like, more and more, all you wanted me to do was click on that link and go read a sales page, watch an over-the-top promotional video or buy something else with my 15% off coupon (which isn’t so special when you’re sending me one every week). The interesting, engaging content that had attracted me at first? It was no longer there.

And then it got worse. I started getting these really short emails – “Hey, Mark, you’ve got to check out this link.” No explanation, no detail, nothing. Too often the link led to just another sales page.

Then there was the “Whoops, I made a mistake in yesterday’s email and sent the wrong link. Here’s the right one.” Yeah, right – that’s just another come on.

Or worst of all, the “keep this a secret.” Even though I know you’re sending the same email to many other people. C’mon, we both know there’s no secret. Do you really think that old copy writing trick fools anyone?

And about those subject lines carefully crafted to look as though they come from a friend. Sometimes they start with a “RE:” at the beginning to make it seem as though you’re replying to something I sent, or they have proper nouns spelled with lowercase letters to make it seem more casual. Do people really fall for that? Listen, as soon as I saw your email address, I knew you were a marketer, not a close personal friend.

That’s not all. Sometimes you sent me these emails that had nothing but images in them. Don’t you realize my email programs automatically block those images? I couldn’t even guess what you might be sending me without hitting that download images button. I admit, I’m in a hurry and I’ve got a lot of other email to get through, so sometimes I don’t bother. The email was never read.

And those emails from the upscale office supply company whose products I love? Lately, those have seen really cluttered. Too many pictures of too many products. What are you trying to sell me? The pens, the purses, the new line of notebooks? Don’t you know that most of what I’ve bought from you, and most of what I’m interested in, are the notebooks and paper? Why are you distracting me with all those things I’m not interested in?

What’s wrong, email marketer. Don’t you care about me anymore? Why aren’t you making an effort.

What, you don’t know how? OK, then, I’ll tell you what I really want:

1. Interesting, useful content — right in your email. Sure, I’m not always going to click through to your web site, though I know that’s what you really want, but at least I’ll continue to pay attention to your emails, and maybe click through another time.

2. Offers that are actually related to my interests. You already know them, don’t you? After all, I’ve bought things from you before, and you got my email address during those transactions. Please don’t make me go hunting through your promotional emails for what I really want.

3. Honesty. Drop the “I made a mistake” and “Let’s keep it between us.” I know you’re trying to sell me something (which I’m OK with, if it’s a quality product that I’m interested in). But I hate the deceptive writing intended to somehow manipulate me into doing what you want.

4. Regular emails, but not too frequent. I’m busy, I get a lot of email, and sending me something everyday is just too much unless you’re providing great content.

5. Uniqueness. When you send me the same thing every time, the same discount or coupon, it just looks like you’re not trying. And quite frankly, it’s boring. Why don’t you mix it up a bit and come up with some new ideas? That would get my attention.

I unsubscribed from some emails today — I wasn’t getting anything from them. But maybe that won’t happen to you. I want what I once got — engaging, relevant content. Maybe you’ll make some changes before it’s too late.

Sincerely,

Mark the Customer

p.s. Dear reader — What do email marketers need to do better to woo you? Leave your ideas in the comments.

Ten corporate blogging mistakes

Mark Tosczak — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 12:03:17 +0000

Business blog not working the way you had hoped? You can fix it. (Photo source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/899403)

If you’ve started a blog for your business, but it’s not taking off the way you wished, you might be making one or more of these mistakes.

1. You use anonymous authors instead of real people as your writers. You can use multiple writers, you can appoint a single chief blogging officer or you can just assign it to the right person in the public relations or marketing department. But posts without a real human face and name behind them probably won’t appeal as much to readers.

2. You post mostly press releases and product announcements. I think it’s fine to write a post about what’s happening in your company, or what new products you’re launching. But you’ll have more success if more of your content solves problems, entertains and otherwise engages the interests of your target audience.

3. You post infrequently. A blog post once a month is not often enough. If I can post several times a week here, in my spare time, than most corporate blogs ought to be able to manage regular updates. This can be challenging for small businesses. The key is to develop an editorial calendar, make writing assignments and decide blogging is a priority.

4. You post only one kind of content. I’m a writer, and I love text. But videos, slide shows, photos and podcasts are also good. Mix up the kind of content you post (yes, I need to do that here, too).

5. Your blog doesn’t have any personality. Every company I’ve ever been in has a personality, and has personalities working for it. Show them. Blogs are an intimate, engaging medium, not a place for news release-style writing by committee. If you “personality” is too frivolous for you, then think of this as demonstrating your character or brand.

6.You don’t encourage visitors to subscribe and you don’t capture email addresses. You should make your RSS feed highly visible, and also make it easy for people to subscribe via email. You’ve got a much better chance of getting repeat visitors if you encourage people to sign up to receive notifications of new posts. Self promotional alert: Please subscribe to this blog — the email form is over on the right.

7. You don’t provide clear links to other parts of the corporate web site. That is why you’re doing this, right? Don’t make it hard for me to learn more about your company, your people and your products and services. Make those links clear and prominent.

8. You don’t encourage employees, vendors and other stakeholders to read the blog. Those people are probably not your primary audience, but they can help spread the word to your real audience.

9. You’re not using social media to spread your content. People are not hanging around waiting for your next blog post – they’re too busy. So use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and whatever else makes sense to push your blog content out to the web. Some people who see it at those sites will visit your blog.

10. You don’t have a clear purpose and metrics. I believe in the value of social media and online marketing tools, but I also believe they need to be used strategically. That means you need to have clear goals for your blog, tied to your company goals, and you need to measure those over time.

What other mistakes do you see corporate blogs making? Please share them in the comments below.

How to counter 11 common arguments against corporate blogs

Mark Tosczak — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 11:50:13 +0000

Have you been told to stop the corporate blogging project? (Image by ColinBroug via stock.xchng - http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1219058)

At many companies, if you propose a blog you will get a lot of resistance. It may come from older, senior executives who don’t read — or think they don’t — blogs. It may come from traditional marketers who don’t believe you can demonstrate ROI from a blog. It may come from lawyers who are worried about compliance issues and new risks. It may even come from some completely unexpected source. Here are some common arguments against corporate blogs, and some suggestions for countering those arguments.

“Our target audiences don’t read blogs”

That’s probably only true if you’re target audience isn’t online at all. The estimates vary, but in the U.S. tens of millions of people read blogs, with the estimates ranging from roughly 50 to 75 percent of all Internet users. Blogs are now commonly published on larger web sites for media outlets, universities, companies and other organizations that it’s unlikely that a typical Internet user doesn’t read at least from time to time.

And the numbers may even be higher than the statistics indicate. It is possible, that people read blogs and don’t realize it. Lots of news now gets published first on blogs, but I have heard even web-savvy people identify those blog posts as articles. Your target audience doesn’t read blogs? Only if they’re not online at all.

“We would be subject to comments we can’t control”

Many people in corporate environments associate blogs with unfettered criticism and comments — conversation they don’t want to publicize further. But the truth is the Internet is a bastion of free and unfettered conversation, and offline and online your organization is already subject to comments you can’t control. If you think you’re not, it probably means you’re just not aware of it. If those comments are on your blog, you can monitor what people say about you more closely. You can respond more quickly and more aggressively to correct untrue assertions and make a case for your viewpoint.

On your own blog, you also control if, when and how comments are left on your blog. While it’s not considered good form for most, some high profile bloggers have even shut off comments entirely on their sites. In many cases that’s probably not the best solution for a corporate blog, but if you get libelous, untrue or other problematic content showing up in comments, it’s easy to prevent that from showing up on your site.

“We wouldn’t have control of where the blog content ended up on the Internet”

As with comments, you already don’t have control of where your web content shows up on the Internet. Blogs are no different. The nature of information online is that it spreads. If you are publishing content that you think is worthwhile, important and relevant — why would you want to limit its spread? If you don’t want people to be familiar with your brand, to know what kind of expertise you have and to be exposed to your ideas, then you probably shouldn’t have a blog. But if you don’t want those things, you probably shouldn’t have a business, either.

“We can’t measure the ROI on a blog”

There’s an old joke in advertising: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. Trouble is, I don’t know which half.” Actually, things are a lot better now than when John Wanamaker, an early department store entrepreneur, tossed off that comment. Many big companies measure how effective and efficient their advertising, public relations and other marketing-communications efforts are (small companies should, but are often reluctant to spend a little more on measurement). Blogs are no different than any other marketing-communications tool, and you can measure the ROI on a blog just like anything else.

If you want to measure how many people you reach, track unique visitors to the blog. If you want to measure your influence in the industry, track how many people comment on your posts and share your content on other web sites. If you want to measure how a blog affects your sales, track how many people click through to your e-commerce site or how many customers cite “blog” when asked where they heard of you. If you want to do this formally (a good idea in a big organization), you might start with Katie Delahaye Paine’s excellent social media measurement checklist.

“A blog is not really the most important priority right now for the company”

The blog itself may not be a priority, but like many communications tools, a blog may be able to support whatever the company’s current priorities are. No one should start a blog just for the sake of having a blog, but tying in your blogging (and other communications activities) to overall organizational goals ought to be the first thing you do.

“Blogs are good for B2C marketing, but we’re a B2B company”

Blogs are designed for communicating to other people — period. B2B communications are aimed at real people, and there is little evidence that people buying for businesses make decisions differently than people buying for themselves. In fact, given the existence of services like business class airfare, I’d say there’s an argument that people buying for businesses are sometimes less rational than people buying for themselves. (Note — I’m in favor of business class airfare, but not because it saves anyone money. It makes business travel, which can be unpleasant, a little less arduous, and happy employees are worth a lot.)

“We don’t have the resources to create content for a blog and then spend all that time monitoring comments”

If a blog fits your communication goals, it might actually be less costly than other channels. While it takes time to run a blog, just as it takes time to run an advertising campaign, the primary cost of a blog is time. Other communications channels frequently have additional costs beyond time — advertising spend, printing, postage, etc.

If the concern is only about employee time (which is now, more than ever, in short supply), there are plenty of freelancers, consultants and agencies (like my employer) who would be happy to help.

“No one takes blogs seriously”

Really? Do people still say this? Yes, I suppose some do. Dell didn’t take a blog too seriously, until complaints about its product quality and warranty service became endemic and threatened the company’s reputation. Microsoft hired blogger Robert Scoble a few years ago, and he helped give the not-so-loved software giant a human face and an improved reputation. A few years ago Apple sued bloggers about confidential information they published. Turns out that these very large, very successful companies took bloggers very seriously. You should, too.

“We really need to be putting our efforts into Facebook, Twitter and social media”

Yes, you probably should be putting some effort into the newer social media platforms, which are becoming centers for conversation by your customers about your products and services (if not now, then eventually). But blogs were among the first of the “social media” channels, and still play a central role in many social media strategies. They allow you to publish more content, and have more control over it, than shorter-form sites such as Facebook and Twitter do. If your company is on Twitter or Facebook or other sites (or wants to be), than your company should be considering a blog as part of that strategy.

“IT can’t/won’t support a blog”

No problem. Host the blog on an outside server, with a separate domain if necessary, and hire a consultant who specializes in blogs to support it. Plus, many web hosting companies, including my hosting provider Dreamhost (affiliate link), make it easy even for people with few or no technical skills to set up a blog.

Don’t like the DIY solution? Well, why won’t IT support a blog? Chances are your IT staff support email, spreadsheets, smart phones and other applications and services. Chances are the IT staff has the skills to support a blog (whether they want to admit it or not). If IT won’t support your blog, that probably means you haven’t gotten true buy-in from all the executives you need to.

“Blogs are amateurish and embarrassing, and don’t match our brand”

Some blogs are amateurish and embarrassing, but your blog can be whatever you want to make of it. Many blogs are well designed, well written and popular; yours can be, too. All you have to do is make the effort, commit the resources and sit back and reap the rewards.

What arguments have you heard against blogs? How have you responded? Please share in the comments.

Eight steps to launching a corporate blog

Mark Tosczak — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 11:00:07 +0000

Developing the right team is an important step in launching a corporate blog (Photo by alemjusic at stock.xchng - http://www.sxc.hu/photo/693414)

A lot of what I write about here applies to individuals — individual blogs, personal branding and personal use of social media. But businesses, large and small, can also use blogs and social media to strengthen their brand, reach new customers and grow sales. And some kind of corporate or organizational blog is often an important part of the social media strategy.

So, let me suggest a few tips on ways to ensure your corporate blog is effective.

1. Get buy-in.

Make sure your executive leadership, including the corporate counsel and the CFO’s office. At large companies this process could require months. Nonetheless, getting buy-in on the benefits of having a corporate blog (and the risks, and a plan to manage the risks) is a lot easier to get ahead of the time then to ask for later.

Chances are blogging is actually not the riskiest thing your company does — far from it. But to many senior executives it may sound risky, so educating them is important.

2. Develop a strategy.

Identify your audience (investors, employees, current customers, potential customers or maybe all of these?) and get clear about what the goal of the blog is. What are you trying to achieve by having a corporate blog? Are you trying to drive leads to sales? Increase awareness? Foster conversation with key influencers (such as analysts and journalists)? Figure that out.

While you’re at it, develop some metrics to go along with your goals. Is it merely traffic, the level of interaction, or the profit from new customers?

3. Decide on the team.

Having a blog team makes it much more likely that your organizational blog will keep going, even during times when other stuff crops up and threatens to take your focus away from your blog (I speak from experience on this). Choose team members with the right skills, an interest in blogging and social media, and the ability to get the job done. Your team might include an editor/team leader, one or two contributing writers, someone from IT to help with the technical side of things and a designer to ensure the blog looks good.

4. Establish an approval process.

The quickest way to slow down posting on a blog is to have an unclear approval process. Or worse yet, no approval process at all. The first time some dumb error slips through the blog will also be the time when the CEO just happens to be reading it. You want an approval process — a system — in place, or else you run the risk of having one imposed on you.

Who on the team writes the draft of a blog post? Who edits it? Does anybody outside the blog team need to review it? If so, who sends it to that person? Do outside reviewers understand your blog deadlines?

5. Brainstorm blog post ideas.

Get your team, get your plan and go hole up in a conference room. Then come up with lots and lots of ideas for blog posts. If you want to prime the pump for this exercise, consider my post yesterday on 10 ways to generate ideas for blog posts.

You may only have to do this once, because often the act of writing a blog post results in more ideas for future posts. However, if you find your bank of blog post ideas getting a little thin, you may want to schedule a new brainstorming session periodically. Also consider the value of bringing others into these sessions — other employees, business partners and vendors, and perhaps even members of your target audience (for example, potential customers).

Once you’ve done your brainstorming session you’ll probably need to go back and winnow the list down, picking out the best, strongest ideas for blog posts. But brainstorm first; it’s easier to pull out strong ideas from a really long list produced by a good brainstorming session.

6. Create an editorial calendar.

Once you have a bunch of blog post topics, schedule them and assign them to members of your team (including yourself). Make sure everyone understands who’s writing what, who’s editing what, and when blog posts are scheduled to be published. Having a clear schedule with blog posts already plugged in ensures that you won’t be scrambling around for a post when you realize the entire blog team is going on vacation at the same time.

It’s OK to add things to the editorial calendar at the last minute, based on new announcements or developments in your company’s business. But in case you don’t have news to fuel the blog, an editorial calendar will help you keep it on track.

7. Train people on the software.

Whatever blogging software you use (I recommend WordPress, but Movable Type is also an option, and there are a host of other robust content management systems available), train your team on it. If there’s only one person on the team who knows how to actually post content, then you’re blog is going to grind to a halt whenever that person is away.

At their heart, blogs and social media are all about empowering people. So empower your team, even the blog virgins who have never used blogging software below and need some training.

8. Decide on a comments policy.

Decide on how you’ll handle comments. And in particular, decide on how you’ll handle negative comments. If your blog is at all successful, you will get negative comments. So will you publish those? If you publish them, will you respond to them? This is the hardest part for most traditional companies to figure out. Businesses are usually just not comfortable with the idea of responding to negative comments in a forum that’s visible to everyone.

But, not allowing negative comments may make your blog appear less transparent and less credible. And not responding to negative comments may allow false perceptions to take hold in your audience. Nonetheless, this is tricky for businesses. As I said in step No. 1, getting buy-in from senior executives is the most important part of this process.

There’s a lot more corporate bloggers can and should do, of course. But if you’re just launching a blog, going through these steps will give you a strong foundation for a successful blog. What are your tips for launching a corporate blog? Please share them in the comments below.

Four keys to improving any web site

Mark Tosczak — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 11:00:38 +0000

What have you done lately to improve your blog or web site? (Photo by ilco at stock.xchng - http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1198416)

When I look at this blog or almost any other web site, I always see things that could be done better. And I know that there are things that could be improved that I’m not seeing, because I’m simply not aware of all the shortcomings of a particular web site.

Since you can’t do everything at once, you might try tweaking and improving your web site one area at a time. Here are some ideas to help you do that:

1. Analytics.

Web analytics can help you understand who’s coming to your site, how often and how they’re using your site. Fortunately, this need not be expensive. Google Analytics is a powerful, robust tool that’s completely free. And it’s getting better all the time.

Analytics bonus tip: It’s not just what people are doing on your site, but what links they’re clicking on that take them off your site. Google Analytics can help you do that.

2. Conversion.

In case you’re not a marketer, conversion is basically what you want somebody to do on your site. In the context of your blog or another web site, conversion could mean buying something, but it could also be the number of people who sign up for your email newsletter, who subscribe to your RSS feed, who click to other pages on your site or who download a white paper. Figure out what conversion means to you, and then start tracking it. (And yes, once again Google Analytics can help and some of Big G’s other tools, such as Website Optimizer.

Conversion bonus tip: If you’re wondering why people aren’t clicking on your buttons or signingup for your newsletter, take a look at this cool tool from Google. Browser Size allows you to see how much content on your site readers see in their browser window. It may be that you’ve got a lot of readers who simple don’t see all your shiny buttons and enticing graphics at first glance.

3. Stickiness.

One of the things your analytics package (Google’s or something else) should be able to tell you is the bounce rate. That’s the percentage of visitors to your site who leave after viewing just one page. Generally the lower this number the better. Chances are that in order to engage people, and certainly in order to convert them, you need people to visit other pages on your site.

The more pages people typically visit on your site, than the “stickier” your web site is. How do you increase stickiness? One way is to make sure that links to your best content (your most popular blog posts, articles, photos or whatever) are clearly visible on every page of your site. That’s why I hae the “Popular Posts” navigation menu on the right hand side of this page. The WordPress plugin Yet Another Related Post Plugin, which I run here, gives you a list of other posts that should have be related in topic to this one.

To increase stickiness, make sure readers see your best stuff, no matter what page they’re on.

4. Speed.

The slower your web site, the more likely it is that people will get tired of waiting for it to finish loading and then leave (and your chances of achieving any conversion goals you might have will go to zero). So what do you do about it? Figure out how fast (or slow) your site is, diagnose the speed bottlenecks and then fix them. Here’s a couple tools that can help.

This free web site optimization tool allows you to plug in any site address and see how long the site will load at various speeds. It will also give you all sorts of tips on how on how to speed up your site.

Google also has a free browser plugin, Page Speed, that can help you diagnose and fix your web site speed problems.

Caution: Some of this information is technical, so if you’re not sure what a CSS file, you might be better off leaving this kind of optimization to a professional web developer.

Work on these four things and I can practically guarantee you will get more of the results you want out of your web site.

Do you have some tips on how to improve a web site? Please share them in the comments below.

How bloggers are handling the new FTC affiliate disclosure rules

Mark Tosczak — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:00:48 +0000

It’s been almost two months since the U.S. Federal Trade Commission implemented new rules about how affiliate links can be used (or not) in blogs and social media. The rules went into effect Dec. 1, and since then I’ve been seeing bloggers and online marketers use a variety of strategies for complying. At the same time, the FTC itself is still trying to figure out how it’s going to enforce these rules, especially for bloggers.

For those who may not be familiar with this issue, here’s the basics.

Affiliate links. Affiliate links are hyperlinks, often inserted into blog posts or other social media channels, that pay the writer a commission if someone clicks through that link and makes a purchase. These were originally pioneered by Amazon and other major online retailers, and have become a valuable marketing tool for all sorts of online merchants and publishers, and a major source of income for lots of bloggers.

The FTC rules. The FTC’s new rules [pdf] essentially say that if you are get a free sample, or if have some kind of link to a seller (for example, you’re an employee) or you have an affiliation that could bring you income, you have to disclose it you review, endorse or otherwise give a testimonial. The new rules also put new restrictions on the use of testimonials and endorsements in all kinds of advertisers, but I won’t go into that here — I’m focusing on how bloggers are handling the affiliate disclosure rule.

The reason this has become such a big issue is, to put it bluntly, that a lot of people were inserting affiliate links into reviews and not disclosing that they were getting paid when people purchased through those links. I think a lot of people using affiliate links to make money were concerned that once they began to disclose the relationship, people would stop clicking and they would make less money. It’s a reasonable fear. After all, if someone is being paid when you buy a product through them, aren’t you likely to take their endorsement more skeptically, and also less likely to make that purchase?

I’m not going to go into whether or not the FTC should be regulating this, and I’m not going to go into whether or not bloggers should disclose the relationships in the absence of regulations that force them to. However, suffice it to say that a lot of bloggers are now disclosing these relationships in a variety of ways.

Now, on to some examples.

Jonathan Fields – Awake @ the Wheel

Blogger Jonathan Fields, the original career renegade, is using a very short disclosure next to the affiliate link.

Jonathan Fields discloses an Amazon affiliate link

I like this approach because the minimal (aff link) doesn’t get in the way of the writing. I don’t know, however, if this is enough disclosure to satisfy the FTC’s requirements. Fields is a lawyer by training, so I assume his reading of the FTC guidelines is a bit more rigorous than mine. But, what one lawyer does isn’t legal advice per se.

World’s Strongest Librarian – Josh Hanagarne

Over at World’s Strongest Librarian (a wonderfully written blog, by the way) Josh Hanagarne inserted affiliate links into his review post, and then disclosed them near the end.

Affiliate disclosure near the end of the post

I like this disclosure because it fits in so well with Josh’s writing style and his flow. Does it meet the FTC’s legal requirements? I have no idea. He is clearly trying, though, so that should count for something.

Michael Hyatt

Christian publishing house executive Michael Hyatt has come up with a standard set of disclosures to insert at the end of blog posts (in small gray text), depending on what he needs to disclose (an affiliate link or having received a free review copy, for example).

Disclosure text - even when it's not needed

I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure there is no requirement that you disclose that you don’t have any kind of material disclosure. Hyatt does have others (click on the link above to read his post), so I’m not sure if I think the disclosure of no relationship is overkill, or if it’s clever. If readers get used to seeing that small block of gray disclaimer text at the bottom of every post – even when it’s not necessary — after a while they’re likely to start ignoring it. In effect, it becomes invisible — at least to regular readers.

I’m NOT, by the way, saying that’s Hyatt’s intention. His reading of the FTC guidelines (or his lawyer’s) may lead him to believe that’s required, or he may feel that it’s the best thing to do in the spirit of full disclosure for his readers. I don’t know. But I suspect that the effect over time is to cause a sort of “disclosure blindness.”

Other options

There are certainly lots of other disclosure options out there. If you haven’t seen them yet, start looking. I guarantee you’ll start to notice them all over the place. I included an affiliate disclosure in my review of Beyond Blogging last week. I think my disclosure meets the FTC’s guidelines, but I’ll say it again — I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t play one on this blog.

One web site that’s trying to create a standard set of disclosures anyone can use is Cmp.ly. The idea of short links to a compliance statement is tempting. But the badges the site offers to provide disclosure with the blog posts seem, well, ugly. I suppose that’s the point — to make an prominent disclosure, but it’s not very elegant or satisfying.

All of this raises a bunch of questions that, as far as I know, there aren’t really any good answers for. Including:

Are any or all of these affiliate disclosure methods adequate for the FTC? I guess we won’t know until the agency goes after someone for a perceived violation. In fairness, FTC officials have said it’s not their intention to be heavy handed with enforcement and go after a lot of individual bloggers.
Is just saying “affiliate link” enough? I know we (me and all of my charming, intelligent and well-informed readers) know what an affiliate link is. But does everybody? That’s basically the disclosure the myself and a lot of others are using right now, but I don’t know if those two words by themselves will meet this still-undefined FTC standard.
If there are old affiliate links on your blog that were published before the FTC’s rules took effect, do you have to go back and add disclosure to all of those? I am guessing that most lawyers would say yes — erring on the side of caution. But again, I really don’t know.

The bottom line is you should probably disclose something in some fashion. How much and how you disclose seems very much up in the air. There’s an attorney in Texas, Mike Young, who apparently provides legal services for Internet marketing businesses. He’s got some blog posts and some ebooks on his site that might be worth checking out. In full disclosure – I don’t know much about him so I can’t say if his advice is good or not.

Bonus tip: Businesses considering how to comply with these rules should take a look at these suggestions from my RLF Communications colleague Aleasha Vuncannon. These aren’t legal advice, but they are based on solid, ethical public relations principles.

Are you using affiliate links on your blog? How are you disclosing them? As a reader of blogs, what kinds of disclosures would you like to see? And would those make you more or less likely to trust what a blogger is saying, and click on the link? Please share your thoughts below.