Blogs and forums Finding ways to engage and interact with your target market both on your own site and within other relative industry forums

Blogs  Blogs are a way to have fresh content on a regular basis, adding more value to your target consumers as well as raise your SEO profile  Relevant information to your industry is a must if your blog is to be effective  Personalize it once in awhile by writing about the accomplishments of people and groups within your organization

Blog postings and timing  Manage your consumers expectations by having regularly scheduled postings  Decide on how you will schedule these and how they will be maintained  A ‘single voice’ is the best way to manage the style, tone and language of the content

Interaction  Allow for responses and/or comments: This can be managed either internally, or, by ‘self policing’ where others following the blog will call out any poor comment contributors, allowing for richer conversations and difference of opinions  Comments can be live or submitted for review before posted: Be sure to have a plan in place and be transparent about your right to review posts for content before displaying publicly

Content: What to write?  Variety and value  What’s trending in your industry?  What external factors like law changes, economic factors, competitors are affecting your industry?  What technological or Research and development or training are you doing to improve your product or service for your customers?  What is your company doing to better the community in which it services?

Create a calendar  If you blog posts are regularly scheduled as a weekly post, create a calendar that will list the next 8 weeks (2 months) of posts.  What do you plan to post each week? A simple 1-2 sentence description is enough to get you started  Who will write the post? Keeping in mind the ‘one voice’ for style and tone, if manageable, a single person is best to accomplish this. Guest contributors or even reposting another respected blogger in your industry can help fill your list of posts  Always stay on top of the list and allow yourself some flexibility to replace post when necessary

Manage expectations  Thank you for your comment/submission…  If you are reviewing the submission, you must let your contributor know when you will be getting back to them or posting submission/comment  Be transparent with your policies for submitting comments (this will vary)

Tips for content  Write posts that contain ‘rich’ content  Use keywords in your headlines and apply tags to help raise your SEO profile on searches  Be relevant by researching what’s trending both in your industry and with your target consumers  Allow for ‘crowdsourcing’ where you allow your visitors to make suggestions for posts or even contribute one  Create a contest or survey

Contributing to forums  Find forums that allow you to contribute relevant information for your industry  Locate high-ranking forums by checking Google Page Rank and Alexa Rank  Find forums that allow you to provide link back to your site Pg 119

Register  Register your profile with these forums  Make sure they allow a signature (logo and linked information back to your site)  Remember to add keywords in your signature profile

What to contribute  Stay on topic and add value to the forum and it’s readers  Dialogue: forums are a place where people interact, contribute questions and solutions. You must be prepared to manage comments and questions  Add value by providing rich links back to your site for readers to find out more about the topic of which your are speaking of Pg 120

3 reasons to contribute to forums”  1 – Builds credibility and a positive reputation  2 – Drives relevant customers to your site  3 – Improves your search engine ranking

Tips for content  Remember, ‘Top 10…’ lists and ‘How to…’ posts rank higher than any other post. However, you could not make a habit of this - spread these out within your calendar  Stay relevant and on topic  Add other rich links to your forum contribution to drive traffic to other pages on your site.