Balancing Strategy, Transparency, and Measurement in Blogging

Doug Karr has a great post over at his Compendium blog called When to Fire Your Blogging Expert. The post breaks down the concept of weighing the intangible and tangible benefits of blogging. Doug talks about what a blog consultant should be discussing when they are helping with an overall communications strategy:

1. Your Business
2. How You Drive Customers
3. Measuring Results

I wanted to map out a couple of things you should remember when planning your communication strategy. If you are the smart business owner, a social media strategy will be combined with your current offerings. I am gleening off of Doug’s comment:

Authority, engagement and transparency are all valid tactics when writing blogs for business, but the ultimate goal is to grow qualified leads through search acquisition for new prospects and upsell opportunities by building relationships with current clients.

Based on Doug’s post and a couple of ideas of my own there are three things you should remember when planning a social media marketing : Strategy, Transparency, and Measurement.

Strategy

There is not much mystery surrounding the concept of strategy. There is strategic thinking involved in every aspect of business from finances to communication. Sit down and create a detailed list of things you want to accomplish while using the blog… Examples:

1. We want the blog to increase page views and conversions by 35%.
2. We want to be number one in pagerank for (keyword) and (keyword).
3. We want to increase the  exposure of our brand in a specific geographic area.

Those are fairly simple and completely stupid but you get the point! What are your goals and how are you going to get there? Writing once a day? Three times a week? Specific keywords you need to write about.

All of the above. Check out Chris Brogan’s post: If I Started Today… to get more tips and suggestions.

Next up… Transparency… TO BE CONTINUED.

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