I wrote a fair amount of content for the recently published Packager's Playbook Series from the Summit Media Group. The playbooks are being offered free by the publisher via packworld.com.
The playbooks are packed with strategies for success, best practices, and useful tips from industry experts. It was an honor to write content for these very handy and informative packaging industry guide books.
Compelling Reasons for a B2B Company Blog:
Source: Bloghub (Introduction to Business Blogging eBook)
I write for several B2B company blogs. One of the biggest challenges my clients currently face is how to use the popular virtual pinboard, Pinterest, as a marketing channel when the majority of their posts lack visual content.
The Infographic Solution
Infographics are the rage right now. And they are doing very well on Pinterest. Lately, I've been recommending that my clients turn industry data into easily visualized infographics and place them in relevant blog posts. And to do so before competitors beat them to it.
Excel with Data Charts
I'm also recommending that my clients build simple data charts in Excel for use in blog posts.
Pinners (the person who does the sharing on Pinterest) can pin these charts to their pinboards on Pinterest. The key to success with charts is making sure they contain a clear headline in the image to help facilitate the pinning process.
Printerest Interest
As B2B companies make the move to business blogging, it is critical that they understand how to leverage emerging, visual-based social networking platforms such as Pinterest if they are going to get the most from their blogging efforts.
Google's pre-announed policy to level the playing field between sites that overplay SEO and those that simply provide excellent content is a boon to the B2B companies that hire me as a ghost blogger. Here's why: Google plans to reward my client's high-quality content by adjusting their GoogleBot functionality (what I've dubbed the "Level Playing Field" policy).
Google's Matt Cutts explains:
Normally we don't pre-announce changes, but there is something we’ve been working in the last few months and hopefully in the coming weeks we hope to release it. The idea is basically to try to level the playing ground a little bit. So all those people who have been doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly doing their SEO – compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we are trying to level the playing field a bit. We try to make the GoogleBot smarter, try to make our relevance more adaptive, so that if people don’t so SEO we handle that. And we are also looking at the people who abuse it, who put too many keywords on a page, exchange way too many links, or whatever else they are doing to go beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.
This is great news for my corporate clients who are interested in educating their customers and prospects (rather than trying to monitize traffic). Instead of focusing obsessively on the number of page views, they can now shift their attention to "bounce rate." As in golf, the lower the bounce rate, the better the score. Bounce rate is one of the key indicators of the value (stickyness) of a site's content.
I've been preaching quality content to my clients for nearly a decade. Those sites that have been overplaying SEO trickery to boost traffic in an effort to monitize are finally going to get their comeuppance. I applaud Google's Level Playing Field policy.
I write the content for the Siemens Totally Integrated Automation (TIA) newsletter. The March issue appears online today.
The Siemens TIA newsletter is an excellent example of the evolution of the corporate house organ. I've written dozens of corporate newsletters-stretching back to the days before the Web when all newsletters were printed and mailed. Siemens has taken the corporate newsletter into the 21st century by leveraging quality content with an online interface that allows readers to delve deeply into the information presented. The information is fresh, easily accessible, and, most importantly, delivers value to the reader.
I currently write three corporate newsletters that are available online (through the auspices of Summit Publishing), and Siemens TIA newsletter is one of the finest examples. If you take a moment to explore the issue by clicking the link provided above, you'll understand why I make this assertion.
I'm proud to be associated with the Siemens TIA newsletter and the good people at Summit who publish it.