How to Create a Business Blogging Plan

By Linda Dessau
Published May 12, 2014

Do you have a business blog?

Are you ready to start publishing blog posts, but don’t know where to start?

Before you start a blog to support your business, you need a comprehensive plan.

In this article I’ll show you how to create a business blogging plan in six easy steps.

People who “wing it” when they blog are only setting themselves up for failure. If you are going to put the time and effort into writing a business blog, you may as well make it the best it can be.

Follow a blogging plan to ensure success. Image source: iStockPhoto.com.

That means do your research, build a solid foundation and blog on a regular basis. A blog can take some time to build momentum, so stick to it and enjoy your blogging success!

Let’s get started.

This first step is especially important for those starting a blog for the first time. Before you start blogging, find a blog role model. See what a blog you like does well, and conversely, what a blog you don’t like does poorly. This will help you figure out the best way to present yourself.

If you’re going to model your blog on someone else’s approach, be sure they’re blogging consistently and that they’ve been publishing for at least six months. (A year is even better.)

To find a good blog to use as a role model, check out the websites of other companies and search for their blogs. You can seek out the blog of a company in your industry or a complimentary field. Or just go with a company or blog you respect.

Blogs aren’t always filed under that name on a company’s site. For example Coca-Cola’s blog is titled, “Unbottled.”

Note: Sometimes this area will be called something other than “Blog.” You may find it under “News,” “Articles,” “Tips” or in the case of Coca-Cola, “Unbottled.”

As you explore blogs, find 3-5 blogs to analyze.

Ask yourself why you like them and jot down notes. Be precise in your observations, and highlight things they’re doing that you could improve upon or customize for your own business blog.

Joe Pulizzi of Content Marketing Institute has a simple, three-part process to define the mission statement for your content marketing, which obviously includes your blog. “The why must come before the what,” he says.

To help you focus, answer these three questions for your blog and business:

Who is the core target audience?What will be delivered to that audience; for example, tips, recipes, success stories, new ideas for common problems?What will be the outcome for the audience; for instance, how will their lives or businesses be improved as a result of reading this information?

People can tell when a company’s motive is to help rather than just to sell. Find ways to help your audience through your blog and they’ll keep coming back.

On their blog, Moz shares resources that help customers and draw in new leads.

For example, Moz sells products that help people “do better inbound marketing.” If you visit their blogs, you’ll see they focus on helping their customers and prospects do things on their own.

Approach your blog as a way to support your mission statement. You’ll want to keep it focused on benefits you deliver to your readers, whether they are current or potential customers.

When you strive to help your audience first, you’ll find yourself living your company’s mission.

What are your marketing goals? What are your blogging goals? Did you know that blogging can strengthen or even replace some of your marketing activities?

Overwhelmed business owners and marketing professionals can’t imagine adding one more thing—in this case blogging—to what they’re already doing to market and grow their business. But you can have your blog content do double duty.

For example, use blog content to populate your social media pages. You can also send blog articles to prospective customers as a way to follow up after meetings.

For your marketing plan, it’s essential to find a balance between paid visibility (like advertisements) and earned visibility (such as blog posts that people choose to read and share).

Blogging can help you achieve these common marketing goals:

Demonstrate your expertise and/or thought leadership in a specific industry or specialty.Educate/motivate/inform your audience.Gain wider exposure for your business.Build trusting, long-term relationships with customers, prospective customers and your business community.

Determine which marketing goals are most important to your company, and see how you can use blogging to achieve them. Add the above goals (and any others) to your hybrid marketing/blogging plan.

At this point, you should be clear about why your blog exists, whom it will help, what it will do for your readers and what it will do for your business.

Now, choose 7-10 categories that address relevant topics of discussion in your business. Keep your mission statement in mind when you do this. Remember, you want your content to solve the most pressing problems of your customers and prospective customers.

Your blog is like a trade publication for your industry. If you are stumped on categories, think of topics people would read about in a magazine for your business. Use that as a starting point. Also, be sure that each category is something you and your team have the knowledge and experience to blog about for a long time.

Disney is strategic—and sparing—when it comes to their blog categories.

The Disney Parks Blog has carefully curated its categories to help readers find exactly what they want without offering too many options.

Try to stick with this list for at least the short-term (6-9 months).

Down the line, when you’re tempted to assign a new category to a post, carefully consider whether both the post and category fit with your mission statement and marketing goals. Also figure out if you’ll have enough fresh ideas to keep that category populated in the long-term before committing to an additional category.

When you determine how often you should publish, refer back to your model blogs. See how often they post new content. Does their schedule seem manageable to you?

There’s no one frequency that’s right for every company. Set a reasonable schedule that you can follow at least to start with. You can always increase the number of times you publish when you’re up and running.

Once you have a posting frequency in mind (every week on Tuesday, or the second and fourth Wednesday of the month), put together an editorial calendar. This document should incorporate all of your categories, seasonal/holiday content and any important events that relate to your business.

Assign a topic and title to each post that benefit your reader and are designed to support one or more of your business goals.

How to Write a Blog Post

Brainstorm ideas based on the topic and/or title in the editorial calendar or a new idea that’s come up for one of your existing themes (categories). Sketch out a rough outline of the post, including possible subheadings and main points.

Fill in your outline. Make sure you get all of your ideas down on paper so you don’t forget anything.

Research your topic online to add relevant links, facts, stats and photos to your post.

Polish and finish the draft of your post, including the photo(s), as well as all of the promotional text it needs (i.e., the post excerpt/summary) and teaser messages you’ll use on each social media platform.

Proofread your post for typos, grammatical errors and readability.

Load your article text, links and photos to your blog platform. Include keywords from the article in the image “alt” text, optimize the post for search engines and schedule the post to publish on the right day at the right time.

Promote your post on social media and notify anyone you mentioned in the post. Generate engagement as you monitor and reply to responses, comments and shares.

Ideally you want to set up your blogging schedule 3-6 months in advance. Note: It’s okay to just have a 4- to 6-week schedule, especially when you are just starting out.

At the beginning of each month, you can review that month’s content and then add the next month into your schedule. Before you know it, you’ll be adding blog content to your schedule like it’s second nature.

The only way to know if your blogging is working is to monitor whether you’re meeting your business goals.

Here’s something to think about in determining which measurements are most meaningful:

If your goal is to demonstrate your expertise and/or thought leadership, you should be receiving requests for media and speaking opportunities.If your goal is to build trusting, long-term relationships, you should see a rise in subscriptions.If your goal is to generate new leads, you should be booking new clients or selling products.If your goal is to gain wider exposure, you should see an increase in blog comments, as well as shares, likes and comments on social media. Track the metrics that relate to your goals.

You may not be able to directly attribute these increases to one specific post or even blogging in general, but there are ways to quantify the benefits of blogging. Track important blog metrics like visitors, page views and social shares.

As part of your blogging plan, schedule time to collect and analyze these measurements, and figure out how you might tweak your blogging strategy accordingly.

Over to You

Starting a blog for your business can feel like an overwhelming prospect. But the benefits clearly outweigh the challenges.

Follow these six steps, and you’ll find that it’s easy to move from planning to publishing. You’ll be blogging before you know it!

Do you have a plan for your blog? What kinds of things did you plan before you started your blog? Did you over-plan? Under-plan? Alter your plan? Please share any tips you have for setting up a business blogging plan in the comments.

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How to Create Buyer Personas With Google Analytics

By Ben Jacobson
Published May 8, 2014

Do you want to learn more about your social media followers?

Have you created social media buyer personas?

You have to know your audience before you can serve them on social media.

In this article I’ll show you how to create buyer personas for your social media audience using Google Analytics.

A buyer persona goes beyond the definition of your target audience. You use them to create fictional identities that represent people within your target audience who share similarities.

Use Analytics data to find information you need to create your buyer personas.

With solid buyer personas informing your social media messaging, you can formulate content to better target your audience’s interests and concerns. This will in turn make for a more engaged audience.

You can find a lot of information about your brand’s online audience in the search data from your website’s analytics.

Here’s how to build buyer personas with Google Analytics.

Begin by opening up Google Analytics, then go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Google/Organic and set the Secondary Dimension to Keyword.

Go into Google Analytics to find your keyword traffic.

This shows you the keyword searches that bring visitors to your site over a relatively long time period.

While the vast majority of the referring keywords will be “not provided,” the remaining data will be enough to get you started.

Here is an example of top organic keywords displayed in Google Analytics.

Copy the list into a spreadsheet so you can edit it.

Sort through the keywords in your spreadsheet and group them into themes or categories.

For example, if you market sporting goods, you might divide the keywords into categories such as clothing, footwear, balls and other equipment. You might also have categories for location-specific searches or sports-related questions.

After you determine which keywords send customers to your website, imagine what types of people are searching for them. Image: iStockPhoto.

Once you’ve created the categories, use them to determine what types of people are searching for these terms. Use the information you have to find the right questions to ask yourself to come up with accurate representations of your customers.

Make a list of personas such as “serious runners interested in buying sneakers locally for under $100,” or “beginners thinking about getting into mountain climbing.”

These are your rough buyer personas.

Now that your personas have been roughly defined, use the referral traffic data from Analytics to create prototypical audience members for each of your social media channels.

Back in Google Analytics, go to Acquisition > All Referrals. Choose Second Dimension and click on Landing Page.

Find out what content your readers like by social media channel.

Download this data into a spreadsheet and group the landing pages by social channel so you can determine which kind of content resonates best with the followers from each social media channel.

Who is listening to you? Where are they? Image: iStockPhoto.

The patterns and preferences you find will help you create a sharpened buyer persona for each social network your brand manages a presence on.

For example, a restaurant might find that Facebook refers more people looking for reservations and that Twitter refers more people looking for daily specials.

With that information, the restaurant can install a custom reservations tab on their Facebook page to better serve their existing customers and begin promoting their lunch specials on Twitter to bring in new customers.

You can take things a step further and beef up your personas by looking at how your fans and followers on social media describe themselves to see if you can spot any patterns.

Twitter’s native Analytics provides relevant insights, especially from the Your Followers Also Follow and Interests sections.

Using the often-overlooked Twitter Analytics module, you can learn what topics (other than those directly related to your brand) are popular with your followers.

Followerwonk will pull common keywords from your followers’ Twitter bios.

On Facebook, you can use Graph Search to learn more about the interests of your fans by running queries such as “pages liked by fans of [your business page]“.

Examine the smaller social media sites your audience frequents—for example, Behance, Empire Avenue, TripAdvisor, OpenForum or Quora—to help you further narrow down their interests.

For example, people who spend time on Q&A sites are likely to enjoy information written by experts, while those who like photo sharing social networks will look for content rich in images.

Use social media buyer personas to zero in on your customers’ interests. Image: iStockPhoto.

The more information you compile for your buyer personas, the more personal you can make your messaging, content and outreach.

Over to You

Follow the steps above and you’ll learn more about your social media audiences and maximize the business impact of your social marketing.

Once you know what your social media audience searches for, you can adjust the content you create and your messaging so they match the interests of each social media channel’s buyer persona.

Better understanding through data analysis is what lets you do this, and the potential rewards are huge. When the members of your community feel that you understand them and have a knack for addressing their needs, they’ll pay more attention to what you have to say. They’ll also interact more with your posts. This means more organic reach to like-minded people, which will drive more business.

Use the information available to you on Google Analytics to learn more about your audience and serve your customers better on social media.

What do you think? What tools and techniques are you using to learn more about your social media audience? Share your suggestions and comments in the box below.

Tweet!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,'script','twitter-wjs'); About the Author, Ben Jacobson

Ben oversees new media marketing and at Action Packed Media, a boutique managed service agency based in Israel. Action Packed Media also offer subscription-based email marketing solutions via ManagedForMimi.com. Other posts by Ben Jacobson »

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15 Resources to Create Images for Social Media

By Debra Eckerling
Published May 21, 2014

Do you post images on social media?

Would you like to create attractive images to share?

When creating images for social media, quality makes a difference.

In this article we’ll share tools and resources to create professional and engaging social media images that you can use on multiple platforms.

In this visual-centric world, it’s more important than ever to create high-quality sharable images.

Getting Visual With Your Content: 10 Effective Ways to Use Images: In this infographic from Fresh Take on Content, Lane Jones visually suggests different ways you can use images in your social media. Share product pics, recipes, team photos, location, checklists and more. “It’s amazing how by just taking ordinary words… and putting them on a background makes the difference between a post that barely gets noticed and one that gets liked, shared, retweeted or reposted,” she says.

Find ways to use graphics on FreshTakeonContent.com.

Visual Impact: How Photos Ramp Up Your Social Media Strategy: Vanessa Doctor goes over the advantages of using visuals in social media marketing in this Hashtags.org article. Graphics are great for space-saving, convenience, higher engagement and more. Readers are attracted to visuals. Along with posts or hashtags, visual media also help with storytelling.

Top Tip: Using Photos in Your Social Media Strategy: “A picture will change the way you communicate on social media,” says guest author Kate Huffman on the ME Marketing Services blog. Since it can sometimes be a challenge to choose the best picture for your posts, Huffman shares things to consider, such as permissions, impact and relevance.

There are many free and paid options to find images online to use with your social media posts.

18 Top Stock Photo Libraries: This list from Creative Bloq includes image sharing sites, ones with free photos, pay-per-pic and subscription services. Each paragraph includes a screenshot, so you can get a feel for the site, as well as a description highlighting the service’s most distinctive features.

Explore several image libraries on CreativeBloq.com.

Stock Photography Service Review: TopTenReviews compares and rates top stock photography websites. It includes a section on why to use a stock photography website, as well as one on things to look for when choosing a service. Criteria to consider are features, sort/search capabilities, quality and selection.

If you don’t want to think about costs or permissions, or you’d just rather take your own photos, there are a variety of things you can do to take better photographs for social media.

Check out these tips for taking better smartphone photos from Mobile Tech Video.

Photography for Social Media: 5 Detailed Tips: Since “part-time photographer” is in the unofficial job description of anyone who works in social media, it helps to step up your skill set in that area. Daniel Lemin shares 5 ninja photography tips on the subjects of framing and composition, lighting, background and style, camera angles and resolution in this Convince & Convert article.

The Guide to Great Social Media Photos: Libby Turner’s post on Room 214 blog is jam-packed with tools and tidbits on how to take photos that encourage engagement. Two must-read parts: Opportunities (“the moments you might consider taking a photo to share on social networks”) and the Bonus Resources section, where Turner talks about focus, cropping, guiding your subjects and more.

Discover photo taking tips on Room214.com.

Tips for Taking Quality Photos With Your Smartphone: MarketAmerica has tips for making better use of your smartphone’s camera. It starts with logic-based recommendations: get acquainted with your camera and keep your lens clean. Other tips include using your flash only when you have to, using the highest resolution possible and getting in close to avoid using zoom.

Foodies rejoice. Here’s advice from Stephen Hamilton on how to take better smartphone pictures with a focus on food.

Once you’ve chosen or taken your photos, there are many free and paid web and mobile tools you can use to improve the quality of your photos, as well as create graphics or infographics. You can also use traditional software like Photoshop, Illustrator or a general paint program to prep your graphics to post on your social sites.

Visual Web: 5 Tools to Create Eye Catching Images for Social Media: Ian Cleary of Razor Social shares his favorite sites for making graphics more visually appealing. Pixlr, Quozio, PicMonkey, Canva and Fotor made his list of tools that can help you improve your social media pics.

Learn about top image tools on RazorSocial.com.

14 Great Tools to Create Engaging Infographics and Images for Your Social Media Posts: This list from Buffer by Belle Beth Cooper has tools for creating quote graphics (more on quote pics below), collages and more. It also includes a section on different tools for creating infographics.

Find more image creating tools on BufferApp.com.

10 Image Editing Tools to Make Photos Fit for Social Sharing: On The Next Web, Luke Chitwood from Simply Measured compiled 10 free and paid tools that will help you create, edit, manage and share images. Each one has a description, pros, cons and cost, and then gets a rating (0 to 5), based on function, ease of use and shareability.

Discover image editing tools on TheNextWeb.com.

Photos with quotes are very popular in terms of visual appeal, response and engagement.

You can use your own quotes or take quotes from podcasts or blogs (just be sure to attribute and link). And you can find famous (and not-so-famous) quotes on sites like BrainyQuote, Quoteland, The Quote Garden or Wikiquote. There’s a searchable list of quotes from TED and a Forbes article on Top 100 Inspirational Quotes to get you started.

10+ Web Tools for Making Quote Photos: As a word person in an “image-crazy world,” Courtney Seiter compiled a list of best quote pic resources on the Raven Tools blog. Each tool has a graphic example (the site’s name in the type of quote-style graphic they offer), as well as detailed info such as price (most are free), quote styles, post options, pros, cons and extras.

Find easer ways to make quote images on RavenTools.com.

How to Quickly Create Your Own Quote Graphics to Share on Social Media: Jonathan Milligan on Blogging Your Passion shares his system for collecting, creating and tracking quote graphics to use on social media. “The point is people love to read quotes,” he says. “They are highly shareable and it can be a great strategy to grow your social media following.”

Final Thoughts

The images for your visual strategy don’t have to be over-the-top professional. However, there are things you can do to take things up a notch or two. An extra boost of professional zing could make all of your graphics stand out.

What do you think? Do you use graphics for social media? What are your favorite tools? What tips do you have to share? We’d love to hear what works for you. Please share your experience in the comments.

Tweet!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,'script','twitter-wjs'); About the Author, Debra Eckerling

Debra Eckerling is an editor at Social Media Examiner. The creator of Write On Online, a website and community for writers, Debra helps individuals define, plan and achieve their goals. Other posts by Debra Eckerling »

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How to Create a Google+ Community to Grow Your Business

Are you looking for a way to get the most out of Google+?

Does your business have a Google+ community?

When you bring conversations to a central place and encourage collaboration, you provide value for your audience.

In this article I’ll show you how to create a Google+ community and how to connect with people and keep them coming back.

Google+ communities are one of the most flexible tools available in social media, and they’re free for Google+ users and brands.

Communities are easy to set up and a great way to develop a loyal following. That sounds pretty good, right?

Communities are a place to chat about the business of the day.

Then let’s kick off with how you can create a Google+ community for your company. (You can also create one for your personal account, but this article focuses on brand options.)

To create a Google+ community, log into your Google+ account, go to your brand page dashboard and follow these steps:

1. Move your cursor over the Home button at the top left of the page and choose Communities from the menu.

You’ll see the screen below.

Creating a Google+ community is easy.

2. Click the blue Create Community button on the right side of the screen.

3. Choose either a public or private community.

Public and private communities each have their benefits, but there’s a catch. Once you’ve established a community as public or private, you can’t change it. Private groups stay private and public groups stay public. Definitely consider which option will serve you better.

Decide whether you want your community to be public or private.

If you already have a larger following, I suggest creating a public community. In a public community, people can share content outside of the group (e.g., to their own stream).

In a private community, you can’t do that. In my experience, the energy in a community implodes when members can’t share valuable content from the group.

Having said that, private communities are great for conversation, so they definitely have a place. You just have to decide what’s best for you and your audience.

But let’s roll with a public community for this article because they have the greatest reach and are the most popular. You’ll most likely use the public setting for your community.

4. Name your community, set your preferences and click Create Community.

You’ll end up on this page:

Tell your members a little about yourself.

5. Finish setting up your community by adding a tagline, image, About section and discussion categories.

Click Done and you’ll see a pop-up window that lets you invite new group members.

6. If you want to invite members to your group, type in a friendly message at the top, then add the people you want to invite in the To field and click Send.

If you created your community for a brand or company, you’ll have a Follow button in the Created By section. (This option isn’t available to general users right now.)

In the image below you can see that I’ve assigned our brand as the community creator instead of myself.

Use your company’s logo and name for the Created By box.

It may seem like a small thing, but it encourages more people to follow your company’s Google+ page instead of your personal page, and it reinforces that the community is owned by your brand.

You’re done with creating your community. Now let’s get people to find you and join.

A group is always better with more members, but they have to know about you to join, right? There are a few ways to get the word out.

It’s a given that you’ll share your community via your Google+ page and your own profile, but go ahead and send personal invites to people on Google+ in case they miss the announcement.

Once you’ve clicked on Invite, you have the option to choose an existing circle.

The important thing to remember with personal invitations is don’t be spammy. Instead of inviting everyone in your circles or even people you haven’t met yet, I suggest you contact only those people who have indicated some interest.

Google+ is a great start, but don’t forget to share across your other social profiles as well. Many of your followers have cross-platform accounts just like you do and may miss your announcement on Google+. Give them the opportunity to join no matter where they are.

If you run a live or recorded event (e.g., podcasts, hangouts or webinars) include a call to action in your promotion and during the event asking people to join your community.

Two things that have worked very well for our company are adding a link to email signatures and adding a community badge to our website. These small efforts have resulted in a steady flow of people joining our community.

Sometimes the perception of exclusivity can be a big motivator.

If you created an open public community (i.e., anyone can join without asking permission), consider changing your settings so it’s closed. When you close the group, people have to ask to join.

We did this with our Plus Your Business community and membership and engagement have skyrocketed. In the past six weeks alone, we’ve met 1000 new members and introduced them to each other.

Here’s how to change your group from open to closed in three easy steps:

1. On your community page, click the settings icon and choose Edit Community from the menu.

It’s easy to edit your public Google Plus Community settings.

2. On the next page, scroll to the bottom of the left column and you’ll see Who Can Join. Click the Change link.

Find the Who Can Join option at the bottom of the left column.

3. In the pop-up window, choose Yes, Anyone Can Ask to Join and click Confirm Change.

When you make a public community closed it’s still public. That means non-members can still see the community’s content and +1 or share that content, but they can’t comment.

Engagement is a key component of any successful community.

You’ve probably created communities and groups before, so you know that moderation goes far beyond you or your members sharing a post in the stream and clicking the +1 button. It’s important to meet and greet each person.

Encourage Discussion

To build a loyal community, you really need to be present. If you want people to interact, take the lead and start the conversation—be available, accessible and friendly.

Exclusivity can help you grow your membership.

When someone asks questions privately, suggest that they drop them in the main community stream. This not only allows others to offer advice, but it’s a way for you to share resources with everyone (rather than just the individual).

Ask people’s advice and involve them in the future direction of the community. Listening to your members’ suggestions and discussing in the main stream builds trust and loyalty.

Keep Categories Up To Date

Every once in a while, review your community categories. If you find people aren’t posting in the categories you’ve created or people are posting in the wrong category, try changing up the topics.

You can have up to 20 categories in a community. If they’re used well, people will post the right content in the right place.

An important note about categories: If you delete a category, it will also delete the posts in that category.

Reward Super-Engagers

In any group, there are always a few people who are the most vocal and helpful. Reward them by including them in a special circle and sharing it with the group members. The circle gives everyone an easy way to keep up with these super-engaged members.

Make it about them and give back by bringing people together into circles.

If you want to further reward your top contributors, you can create a Google hangout for the top 100 members of the community (you can have up to 100 people in the text portion).

Not only do you want to retain your existing members, you want to entice new members. One way to keep everyone interested is to offer regular community events.

Look to have events, including hangouts on air, as ways of bringing people together.

If there’s a topic that keeps popping up, a hangout is a great way for everyone to connect and discuss it. It’s likely that the conversation will continue in the group after the hangout is over.

Conclusion

If done well, Google+ communities can change your social experience forever.

Even if your community is large, discussions can be very intimate—members get to know each other. They share questions and answers, industry developments and more. Your community page becomes the gathering place.

What do you think? Are you already using Google+ communities? Do you have any tips for others who want get started? Please leave your comments below.

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