Internal Blogging for Companies
A blog is an essential tool for companies who want to effectively communicate with their
staff. A blog will:
Capture information for short and long‐term reference ‐Foster cross discipline communication of information
Localize information and increase “findability”
Decrease deficiencies found in traditional knowledge transfer Usually placed on or linked from the company intranet, the internal blog should be one of the most easily accessible points to gain internal company information.
Ideally, everyone should be able to post entries; however, to maintain a sense of decorum, it is sometimes best to allow all management to have access to post entries while
everyone else in the company should have access to post comments.
Typically easier to pitch to the execs than an external blog, internal blogs are also
substantially easier to implement with buy‐in from senior management, as the content isn’t
viewable from external sources. In addition, an internal blog is more likely to be read by
employees than a typical company intranet, newsletters, or general announcements.
So, what should be included in an internal company blog? Obviously, any company
announcements, including new products, new company directions, staff additions and
changes, awards won, events, and especially “fun” things like riddles, links to interesting
sites related to the industry – even birthdays and other announcements can be included.
Usually just a couple of posts per day are sufficient to communicate all information without
overloading your readers. Any more than that, and information can easily be missed. Space out your announcement and do a “round‐up” once a week to reiterate all important
communications and links.
It typically takes five to ten repetitions for a piece of information to reach and be
comprehended by the majority of staff, so the more vehicles there are for internal
communications initiatives, the better – and if the staff is young or technology oriented, what better way than a blog?
Making Money through Blogging
You’ve written a bunch of great blog content or perhaps you’ve written an e‐book and
you’ve been giving it away for free. You have solid traffic to your site, but you don’t want to
advertise. How do you create cash from your site?
If your blog is a success and you’ve been giving your content away, you’ve got a solid basis of authority and an existing customer base. The only thing that’s left to do is package what you already have and sell it.
Check out the self‐publishing services offered by companies like Lulu (http://www.lulu.com/). If you already have an e‐book that you’re
offering for free, you can add the option of a hard copy book for a price – or like many new
authors, organize your existing blog content into a book.
Alternately, if you prefer to stay faithful to the paperless e‐book option, you could take a cue from countless successful subject matter experts, add additional content, and charge for
an “unabridged” version, which you can sell not only through your own blog, but through multiple other niche websites as well as monsters eBay (http://www.ebay.com) and Clickbank (http://www.clickbank.com). Better yet, automate the process and create an ongoing cash stream. Once your blog has solidified you as an expert in your subject matter, with your expertise and existing traffic; it won’t be difficult to turn your work into something profitable.
SEO Content
There are numerous simple methods to make money through blogging, including Google
Adsense, affiliates, sponsorships, paid reviews, and brokering services, but before
implementing any targeted monetization systems, the first thing you need to do is make sure your blog is well‐ranked in the
search engines, enabling people to actually find your site to then click on any advertisements (or
what‐have‐you) you may have implemented.
Most people use search engines to find what they’re looking for, and from those people, many
won’t look past the second page of results. There is a higher probability of someone clicking
on a link to your site if you are ranked highly within the search engines ‐ and the more hits you have, the more potential money you can make.
Although in the past, search engine optimization has most often referred to making changes in the development of your site, people are now realizing that content is absolute king. Valuable content, coupled with readability and site structure, provides the basis for
any SEO ‐friendly content. There is a fine balance between giving your audience with
compelling content and providing search engines with popular content.
Developing content with top search terms in mind (i.e.: writing for what your audience is
searching for) is the most sure‐fire way of increasing your ranking; use these additional
tips to help increase your traffic:
1. Focus on niche markets ‐ if you broaden your subject matter too much, you’ll find
yourself lost among too many results to count. Focus on particulars and frequent other
blogs in the same niche; comment on other posts leaving a link back to your blog. Instant
traffic!
2. Research popular search terms using resources like Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/),
Digg (http://digg.com/), Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends), and Technorati
(http://technorati.com/) ‐ remember; you’re not looking for keywords that you WANT
people to search; you need to find out what they’re ALREADY searching for and use those
popular terms to create new content and thus boost your ranking.
3. Make use of your Meta tags to ensure that your title, description, and keyword tags are
unique to your page’s content, and pair down unnecessary language to boost your keyword density.
4. Test your site using a Meta tag analyzer and a keyword density analyzer; there are many
free tools available to analyze your content and tags. Some search engines claim to ignore
Meta tags entirely, but frequently use the description tag to provide a page’s description in
search results. Well‐written tags are strongly recommended.
5. Use Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics) or a similar service to keep
track of where your hits are coming from, and write new posts based on popular posts
you’ve already written ‐ why reinvent the wheel when you can learn from your existing
content? Analytics will track all traffic to your site and will tell you everything you want to
know about how your visitors found your site and how they interact with it ‐ you’ll be able
to focus your content based on what’s already been proven popular and improve to convert more visitors.
6. Make use of your blog roll ‐ link to external sites as well as other posts within your own
blog; this will increase referral traffic and most search engines give more weight to pages
that are frequently linked. A very general rule is that the higher the off‐site pages rank, the
quicker the site will be crawled, and so the greater number of important sites that are
linking to YOUR site, the more often search engines like Google will crawl your site in the
future. Many well‐linked sites are crawled several times a day.
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