Blogging to Drive Business: Create and Maintain Valuable Customer Connections, Rough Cuts

Description

• Copyright 2010
• Dimensions: 6 X 9
• Pages: 192
• Edition: 1st

• Rough Cuts
• ISBN-10: 0-7686-9500-7
• ISBN-13: 978-0-7686-9500-7

This is the Rough Cut version of the printed book.

Use Blogging to Supercharge Sales, Customer Loyalty, Innovation, and Profits

“To connect with today’s buyer, you need to stop pushing your message out and start pulling your customers in. And there is no better tool for this than the blog! Blogging to Drive Business is an essential guide for any business wishing to use a blog to attract a steady stream of inbound opportunities.”

—Paul Dunay, Global Managing Director of Services and Social Marketing, Avaya Inc.

Blogging can help you deepen customer loyalty, reach new customers, gain indispensable feedback, and drive more sales. This no-nonsense guide shows how to craft a business blog that does all that, and more—building your business and increasing your profits. Top e-marketers and business bloggers Eric Butow and Rebecca Bollwitt help you define clear goals, generate the right content with the right tools, attract visitors, build communities, and avoid costly mistakes. They draw on their own extensive experience, as well as the work of innovators from companies such as Intel, Wal-Mart, Google, HP, and BusinessWeek. Whatever your role in the business, you’ll learn how to:

• Launch a blog that truly represents the best of your business

• Create a comprehensive, long-term blogging strategy

• Staff your blogging initiative

• Integrate blogs with other offline and online marketing programs

• Use your blog to drive customers and prospects to the business

• Push up-to-the-minute information to customers via RSS

• Build a thriving online community—and learn from what it tells you

• Manage comments (and decide whether to have them)

• Utilize podcasts, vlogs, microblogging, and other new techniques

• Gain business value from hot new Web 3.0 technologies, including widgets, mashups, personal agents, and the Semantic Web

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Sample Content

Table of Contents

Introduction    1

How This Book Is Organized    2

Conventions Used in This Book    3

Web Pages    3

Special Elements    3

There’s More Online    4

1  Why Are Blogs So Important?    5

Media Growth Is in One Area: Online    6

Get the Message Out    6

Blog Popularity    8

Hello,World!    8

Promote Products and Services    10

Reach People    12

Keep Pushing Content    13

Drive People to the Blog    13

Crowdsourcing    13

Case Studies: Intel and Adidas    15

Intel Inside Scoop Blog    15

Adidas Soccer MySpace Blog    17

Summary    21

2  Leveraging Your Blog with Marketing Tools    23

Online Marketing    24

Web Site    24

E-Mail Marketing    24

More Work… and Potential Solutions    25

Offline Marketing    29

Pushing Information via RSS    31

Getting Customers to Subscribe    33

Taking Care of Your Readers    33

Case Studies    34

City of Arvada    34

The Sacramento Bee    36

Summary    38

3  Creating a Blogging Strategy    39

Blogging Platforms    40

WordPress.com    40

TypePad    42

Vox    44

Blogger    44

LiveJournal    45

Blog Software    46

Finding the Blog Best for Your Business    49

Vlogs    49

Photoblogs    50

Podcast Blogs    51

Tumblelogs    52

Microblogs    53

Moblogs    55

Combining Blogs with Other Networking Sites    56

MySpace    56

Facebook    57

LinkedIn    58

Twitter    59

Case Studies    60

BusinessWeek    60

KCBS Radio, San Francisco    62

Summary    64

4  Blogging Responsibly    65

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