Right now, one of the best ways to reach out to your customer base and increase brand recognition is through the use of a corporate blog. However, many companies aren’t sure where they should start and how they can take advantage of this trend. Here are some tips that make corporate blogging easy for any size company.

1. Plan your blog’s path out in advance.

It’s not enough just to create a blog, throw up a few posts and hope it will work. You will need to come up with a clear plan on what you plan to talk about with your blog, how often you will post and a general list of topics that you want to cover. By taking care of this in advance, you’ll be able to avoid a lot of the common pitfalls that make corporate blogs fail.

2. Design your blog to match your corporate site.

This sounds like a given, but it is actually a very common error. If you’re working on branding, you need to create that factor of instant recognition. By integrating your blog’s design into your site design you will be able to easily create that recognition. Many companies try to get crazy with wild themes or simply fail to have any sort of visual link between their blogs and their sites. This is a mistake that can be easily avoided.

3. Use an RSS management system.

Most blogs will have an RSS feed that will allow readers to receive instant updates whenever you publish new content. There are numerous services out there, such as Feedburner, that take this to a whole new level, providing you with tracking, format management and many other features. You can use these statistics to help shape your blog by finding out which posts are the most popular, which ones don’t receive much traffic as well as your overall readership. Pageviews aren’t enough when you’re trying to see if your blog is successful. You need to have that extra information at your fingertips.

4. Use a platform that is conducive to easy and frequent blogging.

If you are using blogging software that is complicated chances are you won’t want to post on a frequent basis. Likewise, you don’t want to have to spend a lot of time training your blogger to use the system. Go with an application that allows a simple type and post action to make it easier.

5. You’ve got to promote your blog.

If you don’t spend the time promoting your new blog, you may as well not have one. Take the time to use social networking sites and other avenues to build your blog readership.

A blog management company can help you accomplish all of these tasks and many more. Busy company owners find that having this kind of help makes corporate blogging incredibly easy and more successful. You will be able to leverage their experience and expertise to create a stellar blog that gets read.

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Originally posted 2008-06-25 05:36:54. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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If you are publishing a corporate blog that has an RSS feed, and you should be, it is important to use a service that will allow you to enhance that feed and learn from it. One of the best services out there for this is Feedburner, and it can make a big difference in the way that you publish your content, and what you learn from it. Let’s take a look at just a few of the benefits that using this service can bring your corporate blog.

1. True estimate of readership.

Although your blog may have the ability to track page views, this really is not an accurate estimate of your readership. With Feedburner, you will be able to see how many people are clicking on feed links, which stories they are reading and how many subscribers you have. Tracking data is supplied on a daily basis and there are options to enhance the kind of information that is provided. When you first start your corporate blog, this is a very nice feature to have since it allows you to see if the time you are spending is worth it in terms of how quickly you gain readership.

2. One permanent feed address.

Perhaps the best benefit of using a service like Feedburner is that you get an RSS URL that will never change. Once you pick your Feedburner URL, you can redirect any of your own URL’s to it, so that your readers only have to subscribe to your feed once. If you change blogging platforms, or if you change the RSS feed, this will never actually affect your readers. This is very vital for companies since it is possible to lose hundreds of readers with one feed address change.

3. Gauging what posts work and which ones don’t.

With Feedburner, you will be able to see which particular posts are garnering the most interest. This is data that you can really use. By paying attention to these statistics, you can start publishing information that your readers want to read – and that is how blogs become successful. Sure, you may adore writing about a certain topic, but if your readers aren’t feeling it, you’re wasting your time. Use these stats to help you figure out which direction your blog needs to go in terms of the type of content you are publishing.

4. The software your readers are using.

Most blog readers use an aggregator to deliver their news, and there are many choices out there. Feedburner lets you see which ones your readers are using, and this can be beneficial when it comes to formatting and making sure that your blog is displaying properly. It can also let you know how many readers are actually just going to your website to get the blog and how many are actively using a feed to get there. This is useful information that you can use to shape the way that you publish your blog and the way your blog is designed.

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Originally posted 2008-08-25 05:32:08. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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