Monday, November 30, 2009

Corporate Blogs - the real audience

In the last 3-4 years, I have seen most software vendors starting their own corporate blog. I have seen first-hand how these corporate blogs help in lead-generation and sales. Most of us think that this requires a lot of thought-provoking, high quality content, but that is not necessarily true. This is because the true audience of the corporate blog is NOT the CIO or IT manager or admin who is looking to learn about new technologies. The real audience is actually the search engines and corporate blogs provide a great way to improve where one shows up in the search results.

One of my close friends, a great marketing person, gave these tips to get maximum mileage out of corporate blogging efforts -
  • Create a shortlist - start by creating a list of keywords that you'd like to improve your search rankings on. At Solidcore, these keywords would normally include Change Control, File Integrity, Whitelisting, etc.
  • Post Regularly and consistently - every blog post must target 2-3 of these keywords in a consistent manner. For best results, try to incorporate these keywords in your titles or tags. And be regular - it takes at least 3 posts a week for 6 months before your search rankings improve
  • Link back - linking to other articles about the topic you are posting about also improves the search rankings. In fact, you should aim to link to at least 1 (preferably 2-3) other posts in every blog post
As you can see, this is fairly simple. If you don't find any good topics to blog about, just repeat the words in random order, a la "change control is solidcore and my file integrity oops what a neat way to cheat the search engines". I haven't seen too many instances of such obvious posts, but don't for a moment get beguiled into thinking that the corporate blog is aimed at you, the reader. It is not.