What is the best marketing option for the money?
- realtor
The answer to this could vary based on your industry and audience, but in general we feel that you get the most value for your marketing dollar with a blog. A blog is a website (or part of your existing website) where you regularly post new articles, images, and even videos. It can be very inexpensive to create a blog, and the software is designed so that you can make the updates yourself instead of hiring a web developer for each change.
A blog does require a commitment on your part. While you won’t be spending a lot of money to keep the blog chugging along, you need to be adding new content regularly. That could be daily, and should definitely be at least weekly.
So that’s what you need to put into a blog, but what are you going to be getting out of it?
Home base for your social media – on Facebook, Twitter, and your other social networks you can direct people to your recent blog posts
SEO - search engines will rank your site higher (resulting in more web traffic) if you are frequently posting fresh, relevant content
Position yourself as the expert - regular blog posts will teach your followers to turn to you for the latest news in your industry
Dialogue with your visitors – the commenting dynamic of blogs allow you to get valuable feedback and make connections with your visitors
Ongoing contact - regular updates to your blog keep you in front of your audience
Ease of sharing media – photos, audio files, and videos are easy to share through your blog
Not quite convinced, yet? Check out what Seth Godin and Tom Peters have to say on blogging.
If you have a blog, what are you getting out of it? Is it worth the time you’re putting in?
What do I do when someone leaves a negative comment on my blog?
- almost every person who’s attended one of our blogging seminars
The first step is not to panic. Have you ever gone to a restaurant where they screwed up your order? The meal can go two ways after that. The server might assume there’s nothing that can be done to salvage your experience and give you shoddy treatment the rest of the night. The other approach your server might take is to apologize, take responsibility for the mistake, and make it right. That might mean saying sorry, a free dessert, or getting the manager to comp your meal depending on how bad they screwed up.
If they handle it right, you’ll leave the restaurant even more impressed and pleased than you would have if the order had been right the first time. Sometimes seeing how someone responds to a problem is what makes you love them. The downside with the restaurant example: only one table got to see how the server responded in a crisis.
So back to the blogging scenario. Someone leaves a comment about a bad experience they had with you. Here’s your chance to respond to that person and make it right. Not only does the commenter see it, but everyone who reads that blog post will see it, too.
Update: everyone sees it because you are responding in the same forum: the blog comments. This is hugely important. See the comments of this post for an example. (Thanks, Robby.)
So what do you do? Here are the elements that should show up somewhere in your response.
Apologize. Do it sincerely.
Take responsibility. If there’s any part of the problem that was your fault, own up to it.
Make it right. Offer an exchange at your expense. If you provide a service that wasn’t right, offer to go out and do it again for free.
Thank them.
That last one may leave you scratching your head. What are you thanking them for? If there’s a problem with what your delivering to your clients, you need to know about it so you can fix it. Most clients who experience a problem don’t tell you. They simply move on to your competitors, and you never learn why. You’d pay a lot of money for a consultant to survey your clients to find out why they leave. When you find a client that goes out of their way to give you that information unsolicited, they deserve your appreciation.
How do I make blogging important to sales people who can’t write and don’t care?
- sales training
It’s a common problem to have people in your organization who aren’t particularly interested in writing blog posts, even when their knowledge and role in the company makes them seem like a natural fit for blogging. I can think of two big objections that may be going through their mind:
1.) I don’t have time.
Of course this might be 100% true. It seems like most of us already have more than enough tasks to fill up our week and then some. There’s no getting around the fact that writing blog posts takes time. Here are some suggestions for dealing with this:
Allow them to write a one-time post. Instead of trying to get the CEO to commit to writing a post three times a week, just try to get a single post on some topic that’s important to him/her.
Repurpose existing content. Use something that’s already written. Maybe the introduction to the company’s printed newsletter or annual report would be a good post. How about the transcript from a speech someone in the organization gave?
Use multimedia instead of text. Although search engines really prefer the text on your site, the real people that visit your blog may love to see a video. So record a presentation that your reluctant blogger gives.
2.) I don’t write good.
This objection might also be completely justified – especially if they use good in place of well. You can offer to edit the article for them before it is published, but that may not be much comfort. You might find you’re talking to someone who is just as embarrassed to have you see their underdeveloped writing skills as they would be to have the general public see them. So what can you do?
Write the post for them. Take a conversation or email that you’ve had with this person and write it up from their perspective. Now you’ve given them the power to take a look at it and make edits/changes where necessary.
Go multimedia. The video route is also a great way of getting the wisdom of someone who isn’t a natural born wordsmith onto your blog.
Those are the first two that came to mind. Have you come across other obstacles? Are you constantly hounded by someone on your team to write a blog post? What are the roadblocks for you? Sound off in the comments.
You've landed at Get Back on the Road - a great community for business owners to throw out their marketing questions and get answers from seasoned professionals. Go ahead and get your ask on!
What do I do when someone leaves a negative comment on my blog?
December 1st, 2009The first step is not to panic. Have you ever gone to a restaurant where they screwed up your order? The meal can go two ways after that. The server might assume there’s nothing that can be done to salvage your experience and give you shoddy treatment the rest of the night. The other approach your server might take is to apologize, take responsibility for the mistake, and make it right. That might mean saying sorry, a free dessert, or getting the manager to comp your meal depending on how bad they screwed up.
If they handle it right, you’ll leave the restaurant even more impressed and pleased than you would have if the order had been right the first time. Sometimes seeing how someone responds to a problem is what makes you love them. The downside with the restaurant example: only one table got to see how the server responded in a crisis.
So back to the blogging scenario. Someone leaves a comment about a bad experience they had with you. Here’s your chance to respond to that person and make it right. Not only does the commenter see it, but everyone who reads that blog post will see it, too.
Update: everyone sees it because you are responding in the same forum: the blog comments. This is hugely important. See the comments of this post for an example. (Thanks, Robby.)
So what do you do? Here are the elements that should show up somewhere in your response.
That last one may leave you scratching your head. What are you thanking them for? If there’s a problem with what your delivering to your clients, you need to know about it so you can fix it. Most clients who experience a problem don’t tell you. They simply move on to your competitors, and you never learn why. You’d pay a lot of money for a consultant to survey your clients to find out why they leave. When you find a client that goes out of their way to give you that information unsolicited, they deserve your appreciation.
Tags: blogs, comments
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