I know that a lot has been written on this subject, but I’m putting up what I consider the top 5 Best Practices in Business Blogging for your review–if you feel I’ve missed something or I’m off the mark, please let me know!

The 5 Best Practices in Business Blogging

1. Write with a specific audience in mind — Who is your audience? As you’re writing, pretend like they’re sitting down right next to you. What is going to get their attention? What can you write about that’s going to help them solve the problem that’s been keeping them awake at night?
2. Focus on the content and help your readers solve a real problem–Chances are, you know how to help your customers solve a real problem, or else you wouldn’t be in business. Your article (or blog post) should fulfill a real need, or else it is not relevant.
3. Be educational not promotional–Blogging is not broadcasting, so educate your readers, don’t pander to them. This is your chance to show them you know what you’re talking about… by helping them solve a real problem you are establishing yourself as an expert, and you increase the likelihood that when they have a need they’ll call you first.
4. Write for readability–”Pretend like I’m in 8th grade“–that’s what one of my old bosses used to say. You impress people the most when you get your message across. In most cases, your writing should be made to be simple so that your readers follow you, and understand what you’re writing about. Write in plain english and avoid foreign languages and jargon. (This post was written at an 8th grade level--which means that most 13 and 14 year olds can understand it–you can check your own readability at http://www.read-able.com)
5. Create ways for your readers to engage with you–Comment forms, polls, social media buttons, live chat buttons encourage your readers to interact with you. Your objective shouldn’t be to get a purchase right now at this moment–but rather interaction, engagement, and feedback. Engagement deepens relationships.

When you boil it down to its very essence, Blogging is just another way to communicate–a very powerful way, because like all “real” communication– it’s a two-way street, an opportunity to engage and build relationships with others–by commenting on blog posts you can show off your active listening skills, and offer value to the conversation.

Make your content so good that people want to share it

If Social Media is about (1) connecting with others (2) collecting  information that’s important to you, then blogging is about making your content relevant so good that your readers will want to collect it and share it with their connections, friends, and followers. If you follow these 5 Best Practices for Business Blogging, your content will be so good they’ll want to share it with their friends.

So those are my 5 Best Practices in Business Blogging, and I’m sticking to them! I’m sure there are other best practices out there, so if you have any you’d like to share please “make my day!”

So why do so many companies keep doing the same old thing, and expect anything different? It’s insanity.

If you’d like to break out of the same old routine, and produce some real results you need to try something new.

Here are 12 great marketing ideas you can try in the coming months to achieve better results.

12 Marketing Ideas you can implement to produce better results

1. Update your strategic positioning so you really stand out from the competition
2. Create a new offer, like a payment plan, to make your services more affordable
3. Simplify your website to make it easier for customer and prospects to do business with you
4. Do an SEO Makeover to achieve a #1 ranking so prospective customers and buyers can find you on the web
5. Get other websites to link back to you using Off-page optimization to boost your search engine rankings and your website traffic
6. Start a Business Blog to establish thought leadership and niche dominance
7. Implement a Social Media Marketing Program to share your ideas with your followers
8. Create a Pay-per Click Program to augment the leads you’re getting from other sources
9. Test Landing Pages (Landing page optimization) to maximize the results from your Pay-per-click budget (you can do a lot with $200/month)
10. Create an Affiliate Marketing program to get others to identify opportunities and generate leads for you
11. Implement a Marketing Automation System with powerful marketing automation sequences to educate the prospects who aren’t ready to buy yet and convert them into ready buyers who want to do business with you
12. Accept Credit Cards online with Automated Recurring Billing to reduce time spent on invoicing and collecting payments from customers

How many of these ideas have you already implemented? Are there any other ideas you’d add to this list? What are you doing to ramp up your marketing activities?

The most successful companies are continually trying new ideas to achieve better and better results. That’s the only way that you can hope to improve.

So why aren’t companies more adventurous when it comes to trying new things?

It’s the “I hate brocolli” syndrome of marketing and business.

If you ask the average CEO, “What’s the rationale for the way you’re currently marketing your services?”  Many say: “It’s what we’ve always done.”

The sad truth is that many companies are engaging in the same old tried marketing tactics rooted in strategies that were developed eons ago (a.k.a. 2007).  They’re wasting money on tactics that are not rooted in any real, current strategy – or based on the realities of today’s marketplace.

How to get higher response rates and higher conversions

 Any Direct Marketing old timer will tell you that the secret to getting and maintaining high response rates and higher conversions is: “Test. Test. Test.”

In fact, there are some who say that  30% of your budget should be set aside for testing.

If you’re testing new ideas agains the old ones it’s the only way to know for sure that you’re marketing is continually improving. 

Apply the principles of continual improvement to your marketing. In Direct Mail it’s called “A/B Splits and Multivariate Testing.” In Google Web Optimizer it’s called “Marketing Experiments.”

Test everything. Test in order of importantance. Your offer, your keywords on your pay-per-click ads, your landing pages.

Or if you don’t really want new and better results, you can just keep doing what you’re doing — what you’ve always done.

That’s a great way to go through your entire budget fast with zero results.

The trick to getting higher higher response on pay-per-click ads is to create a separate landing page for each of your top keywords in three easy (but time-consuming) steps.

3 Easy Steps to Better Pay-Per-Click Results

1. First, discover which keywords are driving the most traffic. If you have 100 keywords in your campaign, chances are that 20% of them are driving 80% of the traffic (or more like 10% of the keywords are driving 90% of the traffic). Turn off the non-performing keywords.
2. Second, create a separate landing page for each logical grouping of the remaining 10 or 20 keywords. Make sure that the headline and the offer of the landing page matches the ad to reduce your bounce rates and increase your conversions.
3. Third, and this is something many people forget to do, but is to filter out the negative keywords to fight the “My Simon effect (people looking for something for nothing: “free, cheap, affordable, and low cost”).

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A successful pay-per-click campaign requires a process similar to that used traditional marketing.

The process involves strategic planning, creative development, results analysis, and mindful execution.

Your success (or failure) is dependent on the critical analysis and thinking that your efforts, as well as the reassessment of the results following each set of efforts.

How do you get your prospects to engage with you? Top search engine rankings are nice, but it really doesn’t matter if you’re not converting traffic into inquiries, and inquries into sales.

Here’s the secret: “It’s not about you.”

Most websites are guilty of the biggest strategic copywriting blunder

People like to talk about themselves. And they love people who empathize with them, and who show they’re good listeners. On the flip side, people do not like braggarts, and people, ironically, who focus only on themselves.

If you focus on your prospects: their problems, their worries, their desires. And if you show show them in your content that you can help them solve their problems, alleviate their worries…, and help them achieve their desires, then your customers will love you.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a profile company profile listing your qualifications, but telling your prospects on a constant basis why they should pick you can be boring.

Focus on your customers and prospects

So in your website copy you should:

1. Focus on your prospect’s problems
2. Present a solution to the problem
3. Illustrate how you can solve the problem

What’s the problem? > There is a solution to the problem > You are the solution

Be a good listener

If your customers and prospects feel like you really care about them, then they are going to like you. And if they like you, they are more likely to contact you, to purchase from you, and to continue doing business with you.

So show you care by listening and focusing on your customers and prospects rather than yourself. You are the one who will benefit the most.

• 40% the list,
• 40% the offer, and
• 20% for everything else , i.e., copy, creative, timing, etc.

If you’re not getting the response you think you should be getting, look at the offer first.

The strategic process in old-fashioned Direct Marketing is matching up the right list with the right offer… segmenting the list into micro-segments (or “splits”), and tailoring specialized offers to make the offer more relevant. 

The 3R’s: It’s not Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, but…

Jim Prendergast who is one of the great Direct Marketers of all time, a long time friend and mentor, and Professor of Marketing for years at Baruch College, always reminds his students of the 3 R’s of Direct Marketing:

1. Make your offer RELEVANT; to achieve response you can’t have one message for your entire customer base. Using Segmentation and analysis, you’ve see you have different kinds of customers, and they’re going to react differently to different offers and messages. What the segments, and what are the offers and messages?
2. Establish a RELATIONSHIP with your customer (they’re not a customer until they’ve bought from you three times). You are in business to win customers. Then to get them to buy more from you until they become multi-buyers, and ultimately to become raving fans of your business, so they refer all their friends to you. Again, it’s all about the customer.
3. Be RESPONSIVE to your customer’s needs. Ask them what they want, and create periodic customer satisfaction surveys. Ask them if there’s anything else you can do for them. Funnel this information into developing new products to keep you ahead of the competion (if you have any). ”Give ‘em what they want.”

Here are a few more well-known sayings about “the offer”:

• “It’s the offer, stupid! If you do not get the results you need or response is flagging, check the offer first.” ~ Bob Hacker
• “If you want to dramatically increase your response, dramatically improve your offer.” ~ Axel Andersson
• “Success in direct mail is 40% lists, 40% offer and 20% everything else.” ~ Ed Mayer

An avatar is an icon or a little picture you see next to comments in a website, and is used to or distinguish yourself from others. In other words, a Gravatar is an Avatar you can take with you. Created by Tom Werner, and available at www.gravatar.com, gravatars make it possible for a person to have one avatar across the entire web.

Why is this important?

One of the factors in achieving higher search engine rankings for your website is what’s referred to as “off-page optimization,” which is determined to a large part by how many influential websites with a high page rank link back to your website.

By posting comments in forums or influential websites, which have a form with your name, email, web address, and comments, enable you to create a link back to yourself, which is a factor that can help increase your search engine visibility.

That’s why it’s in your best interest, when you read an article or a blog post that interests you, to add your two cents. YOu acknowledge the person who wrote the article, and also if you distinguish yourself with your comment, others might see it and follow up with you for more information.

How to get your own gravatar

To get your own Gravatar, go to en.gravatar.com/site/signup, and:

1. Enter your email address
2. Activate the account (by clicking on the activation link in the email they send you)
3. Upload a picture ( your picture or a logo or some other image you like)

That’s it! Now whenever you post a comment, or chat in a forum that uses Gravatars, people will be able to associate a face (or a logo) with your name.

Everyone loves Constant Contact.

It’s a simple easy-to-use tool that I have used to help many clients communicate periodically with their customers.

One of the drawbacks of using Constant Contact though is that the subscriber forms they are  just plain ugly.

Fortunately, Constant Contact has made it possible to create  a  normal-looking webform, and put it on your website through the use of their API.

The Constant Contact API

Details available at http://developer.constantcontact.com/ – you just need to sign up to get your API credentials.

With a little manipulation of the PHP, a little HTML, and a little .CSS, I was able to make the subscription form for my client match their branding and seamlessly integrate with the rest of their website.

Seamless integration

What is she thinking?

We’d all like to know what others, particularly our prospective customers, are thinking.

And that’s what the discipline of Market Research is intended to do. But how do you conduct research on the web that’s cost-effective, and that produces results?

We’ve all seen them. Those Netflix popups that are generated when you’re leaving a website. They’re annoying and inneffective. The best way to conduct market research on the web is to be honest with people. Let them know up front what they’re getting into, and give them the option to say “Yes”, or “No” upfront.

Best practices require that you ask permission first

I’ve created a methodology, based on best practices, that I’ve implemented on my own website. Depending on the survey you design, you can use this for pure research, or for lead generation.

"Click here to take the sample survey"

To pull this off, I’m using WordPress as my blogging platform, SurveyGizmo as my research software, and several different plugins and some custom code to: (1) show my popup invitation with a 45 second delay after the initial page load (2) use a lightbox effect (everything on my website behind the box greys out) (3) show it to a visitor only once per day (4) give them an option to say “yes” or “no” — if “yes” another box pops up; if “no” the original box closes using javascript (5) an onobtrusive box that waits until the user has stopped browsing and reminds them to “start questionnaire”.

It’s completely permission-based, unobtrusive, and produces great results.

The purpose of the survey I’m using in this example is purely for research, because hypothetically, I’d like to know what you think of my website.