This past year was a tough one for corporate blogging, especially considering the bashing business bloggers took from two separate Forrester reports. The primary problem with blogging in 2008 originated from a focus on the wrong objectives. The result was pretty much a big disappointment from both the readers of corporate blogs and the companies that supported them, which began asking the question, “Why?”However, all is not lost. Many companies did in fact find the successful formula for both high ROI and reader satisfaction. As we move deeper into 2009, these trends will accelerate and the maturity of corporate blogging will become both scalable and sustainable, while actually contributing to the bottom line.
The following are my predictions for the top trends in corporate blogging this year:
Trend 1: A focus on what’s important
The healthy thing about a bad economy is it forces us to get focused on the activity and investments that actually drive our businesses. The days of tweets or Facebook occupying our brains are long gone. In online marketing, we have to focus on high-return activities. Vince Lombardi said that football was about two things: blocking and tackling. Likewise, online marketing is about two things: email and search. Since more than 90 percent of the internet population engages in a search every day, businesses should focus on this instead of how to measure ROI on blogging.
Trend 2: Blogging for search
Organic search is driven primarily by the formula (D + C) x V = OST. That means data plus content multiplied by volume equals organic search traffic. In the case of online marketing, the data are your targeted keywords. Content is based on target to those keywords. The magic enumerator is volume. The more web content you create specifically around your targeted keywords, the more organic search traffic you will drive.
This is where businesses really start to appreciate the power of corporate blogging. We must forget about RSS feeds or comments as the measure of success and realize that blogging is a target marketing strategy based on delivering a message to a keyword, just like email delivers a relevant message to an email address.
When you consider the three main traffic sources to corporate blogs (direct navigation, referrals, and search), search is the only measure you should focus on because it’s the only one you can control and, more importantly, scale. You can’t increase the number of referrals or direct navigation; it either happens or it doesn’t. But on the other hand, when discussing search, if you want more organic traffic, you simply have to add more blogs targeted specifically to your keywords and write more content.
To view the other 8 ideas (courtesy of ImediaConnection) CLICK HERE.
