RUBEL’S TEN COMMANDMENTS OF BLOGGING

In June 2005, Steve Rubel, a prominent public relations blogger, wrote these “10 Commandments” for PR professionals (see www.micropersuasion.com/2005/06/10_commandments .html), but they are also great starting points for achieving true success in the world of blogging:

1. Thou shall listen. Utilize every avenue available to you to listen actively to what your public has to say and feed it back to the right parties.

2. Remember that all creatures great and small are holy. It doesn’t matter if it’s The New York Times calling on you or an individual blogger, both have power. Take them all seriously.

3. Honor thy customer. Create programs that celebrate customers and they will celebrate you.

4. Thou shall not be fake. Keep it real; don’t hide behind characters and phony IDs.

5. Covet thy customers. Don’t sue your fans. You will alienate them.

6. Thou shall be open and engaging. Involve your customers in the PR process. Invite them to help you develop winning ideas and become your spokespeople.

7. Thou shall embrace blogging. It’s not a fad, it’s here to stay. Be part of it.

8. Thou shall banish corporate speak. People want to hear from you in a human voice. Don’t hide behind corporate speak. It will soon sound like ye olde English.

9. Thou shall tell the truth. If you don’t tell the truth, it will come out anyway.

10. Thou shall thinketh in 360 degrees. Ask not what you can do for your customer, but also what your customer can do for you.

BUILDING TRAFFIC

Because a blog is a website, and because websites have tangible metrics such as the number of visitors per day, number of pages those visitors visited, and where those visitors came from, one of the standard measures for growth and success in any blog is traffic that is, the number of visitors who come to your blog, generally measured daily and monthly. However, traffic doesn’t matter all that much, because if you’re building a valuable conversation, it doesn’t really matter if it’s with 2 people or 200. Also, the number of visitors doesn’t matter as much as the quality of those visits, how influential visitors are, and how much they contribute to the conversation and to your company. All that said, more traffic typically does mean more conversation, more influential visitors, and more contributors. So while traffic may not be the best overall metric, it isn’t a bad one to track. Plus, it’s always nice to see those traffic graphs going up month by month. Traffic on blogs generally comes from one of three places:

• Links from other websites, specifically blogs

• Search engines

• Traditional marketing efforts

CONVERSATION BREEDS TRAFFIC

Blogs are linking machines, and bloggers love to link. Depending on the readership of a blog, a single link to your site from another blog may mean five more people or 5000 more people will visit your site. Those who follow links on other blogs will typically be one of three types: another blogger, a new reader, or a “drive-by” visitor. It is good to have other bloggers come to your site, because that gives you higher odds of securing yet another link. Blog-driven traffic tends to be exponential in nature. If one blogger sends five visitors your way and one of those is a blogger who links to you and sends ten other bloggers your way, and three of those are bloggers who link to you and send six more visitors your way…. Well, suffice to say that even a link from a minor blog can result in hundreds, if not thousands, of new visitors to your blog.

The second type of visitor to your blog is a new reader. These are also valuable readers, largely because once you’ve secured a reader, you have an opportunity to turn him or her into a customer, an evangelist, and a contributor to your company. New readers are a little bit like shareholders in a company: they want to hear what you have to say and they want you to do well.

The final class of visitor is the drive-by. These visitors hold little inherent value (about as much as someone who sees your ad in a newspaper or hears it on the radio), but a series of impressions may eventually lead them to recognize your company and brand and become either a customer or a reader. Don’t dismiss the value of drive-by visitors. Ultimately, a link o

n a blog any blog is very, very good. The biggest reason for this is that typically visitors who come from other blogs are coming because they’re interested in what you’ve said in the past, which opens a huge door for them to be interested in what you’re saying now. One of the keys to designing a blog properly is to provide visitors who see only one page (the one they arrive at from a search engine or from another blog) to find the newest content, the most valuable content, and related content. This will help you turn drive-by visitors into readers.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

For most bloggers, traffic they receive is split somewhere around 30 percent from other blogs, 30 percent from search engines, and 40 percent from their regular readers. As a result, appealing to search engines is incredibly important, because it can mean you gain (or lose) massive amounts of potential readers, customers, and contributors. The practice of making your site as search engine friendly as possible is known as search engine optimization (SEO for short). This is a bit of a dark art, but if all you do is the following three things in your blog, you’ll hit most of the high points of SEO:

• Have “good” blog post addresses. Search engines love blogs for which each post has its own page. Most blog packages like WordPress, Movable Type, TypePad, and Expression Engine do this for you. They like it even more when those addresses are meaningful. So www.myblog.com/about-our-business .html is more meaningful than www.myblog.com/5313 .html, because the first URL contains recognizable words (separated by dashes). Search engines find your page more easily when the page address describes what’s on the page, and most blog packages allow you to do this with some minor configuration.

• Link back to your blog home page and main home page. Most search engines today use a Google-style of page ranking: more links to a page means more importance for that page. So linking to your blog home page and your main home page as part of the template for your blog could mean hundreds or thousands of distinct links (the more you post, the more links there will be). Some blog systems will create these links for you “automagically,” while others will require you or the person who maintains your website to make the links part of the blog setup. Providing users with a way to get around your site and your blog is critical.

• Use good page titles. Most search engines display the title of the page as part of the search results. If the title for your page is just your company name, people who find your page via search engines may not know it contains the answer to their question (even though it’s in the list of results). Great titles include two things: your blog or company name as well as the title for the post. If you’ve constructed meaningful post titles, new visitors will know not only what they’re going to see when they arrive, but also who they’ll find when they get there.

MAKE THE MOST OF A VISIT

Once visitors find your site, it’s your job to make it easy for them to find information, ask questions, and ultimately build relationships with you. (Hint: having an actual e-mail address on every page is much, much better for new visitors than having to go to Contact Us, clicking on E-mail, and then filling in a form.) You can make it easier on your new search engine visitors (and all firsttime visitors) to make the choice to begin a relationship in three ways:

• Include an “About the Author” page. If this is your official company blog, include information about your company (short and sweet is good, you can always link to your main “About Us” page on your website). Make sure that each blog author is a person, has a name, and includes basic information about him or herself. Large companies with dozens of employees blogging on their main blog tend to link the profile back to the individual contributor’s blog or link back to the first post the contributor made. Either way, the goal is to provide new visitors an idea of who the author is and who the company is in such a way that they want to find out more.

• Provide relevant links. While most blogs’ templates are the same for the main blog page or an individual post page, I’m a big fan of having some different bits of information on the pages for individual posts. If nothing else, include a small welcome message that tells visitors where they have arrived and how they can find similar information. You may also want to show your most recent posts, categories list, links to other blogs, and other information. Provide relevant links and context so that new visitors can explore your blog if they like the content.

• Turn visitors into readers. Providing first-time visitors with a way to subscribe to your blog (either via e-mail or feeds) is key, as it allows them to establish a quick relationship on their terms. You may want to include a page that explains how to subscribe, or you can include a “syndicate this site” link, with the orange XML icon that many blogs use to show that a site is subscribable. You can also provide alternative ways for users of specific feed readers to subscribe to your blog. NewsGator, Bloglines, FeedDemon, and most other feed readers include these buttons, which make it easy for users to subscribe to your feeds using those services. Empower your readers to make a choice to subscribe to your blog. Lower the barriers as much as possible so that visitors can become readers.

IT’S THE MARKETING, STUPID

Another way that new visitors will arrive at your blog is via traditional marketing methods. If you have a personal blog at your company, include it on your business card. If your official blog is valuable, include it on your business card. Your business card should be a way for people to connect with you, and including “blog: www.mycompany.com/blog” on all of your employees’ business cards is a great way to get people to check out your blog. You can also advertise your blog using traditional marketing techniques. If your blog is the best way for people to establish a relationship with you (other than meeting you in person), be proud of your blog and tell the world about it.

Anywhere that you post your website address should also include your blog address. Similarly, you should advertise your blog prominently on your website. If nothing else, it should be part of the main navigation, and it should be one of the most important elements of that navigation (don’t put it way down by “Contact us”). Advertising your blog in this way will bring in drive-by visitors. But if they’re potential clients, a well-written blog will not only provide them with yet another positive experience (hopefully their first contact with them was positive, right?), but it will show them that you are authoritative, passionate, and you know your industry. If partners, suppliers, or customers see your blog in your traditional advertising, they have another way to build a relationship with you and your company and will likely open the door for further conversations, which could range from “So, how’s that blog working for you?” to “Isn’t that blogging thing a fad?”

TIPS FOR BUILDING TRAFFIC

Provide a reason for people to come back to your blog, for bloggers to link to you, and for people to tell others about a great new post on your blog. You can build traffic in many different ways. Although traffic isn’t the only measure of success you should have on your blog, more people reading your blog means more people interacting, commenting, contributing, and generally being aware of your company which is the goal of most business blogs in the first place. Following are tips for building traffic to your blog.

Provide Comment Notification

Many people who read your blog will comment. Thanks to feeds, they can stay up to date on your newest post. If I’m interested in your post asking for opinions on how to fix one of your products

and I leave you a few ideas, I’d be very interested to know your response. However, there is currently no blog-based way (such as feeds) for me to stay up to date easily on whether you (or anyone) have responded to my post. You may want to allow readers to receive an e-mail notifying them when someone replies to a post to which they’ve responded. This notification of a new comment (hence, comment notification) should be optional (in case a user doesn’t want to receive these types of e-mails), but for those who choose to use it, it’s a great way to keep the conversation going.

When people know a conversation is happening about something of interest, they’ll often contribute even more. Thanks to comment notifications, posts that normally would have had only two or three responses may suddenly get 20 or 30 responses as your readers engage in a discussion on your blog. In fact, the day I added comment notifications to my blog, traffic jumped by 20 percent.

Conduct Interviews

Interviewing important people in your company is a great way to let your readers know who works at the company, that smart people work there, and that ultimately the company employs real people with real passions. For example, Microsoft’s Channel 9 (http://channel9.msdn.com) was created expressly to give readers a view into the lives of people working inside the company. Your interviews may not be video based, and they needn’t appear frequently, but adding interviews (especially with real people who work on real products) is a great way to help your readers relate to your company. As an added bonus, bloggers love linking to interesting interviews.

Ask Questions

The absolute best way to get someone to participate in a realworld conversation is to ask a question and blogs are no different.

Asking your readers “What do you think?” and “How would you have handled this?” doesn’t show (as some may fear) that you don’t know what you’re talking about. On the contrary, it shows that you know that even the smartest people in the world sometimes need to bounce ideas off others and your blog readers are the best people for this, since they want you to succeed. Bloggers love to say “Company x is looking for some ideas on their newest product, so go tell them what you think.” And people love to offer opinions.

State Your Opinion

The second best way to get someone to participate in a real-world conversation is to state an opinion. Stating an opinion gives people three options: they can agree, disagree, or propose a different opinion. The more conversation you can get happening on your blog, the more people will return and the more people will link to it.

Take and Answer Reader Questions

Regularly respond to reader comments, questions, or e-mails as a post. You may do this by saying “Ask a question” (as Microsoft recruiter Gretchen Ledgard does with her suggestion kitty, as illustrated here), by asking a reader who e-mails you a question if you can use that question on your blog or by taking a question a reader posed in a comment. This answers readers’ questions and does it publicly. Open-ended “What would you like to know?” questions are also great ways to solicit this type of feedback and they are also the types of posts to which bloggers enjoy linking.