Forge Web

Corporate blogs have been around for a while, but most of the marketers behind them all struggle with the same problem: they don’t get any traffic. All the different reasons for why they’re stuck and can’t seem to get more than a few unique visits a day vary, however the big hurdle is rooted in the underlying motivation for why these blog are created in the first place.

While inherently any blog tied to a corporate entity is biased, even ours, distinction is in whether the goal is to actually help or to sell and make money, with the majority opting for the latter. It’s actually really easy to immediately spot who’s trying to do what; just ask yourself whether you’re wanting those 5 minutes of your life back after reading a post and you’ve got a good idea of what’s going on.

If you’re guilty of owning a sales hungry blog, it’s not too late to change your ways so that you may begin to genuinely build a loyal readership in hopes of establishing credibility and interest. It’s not an easy road to travel and requires hard work and endless commitment. Most difficult of all, it requires a significant investment of time before you start to see and feel the results.

We’re all familiar with the timeless cliché that time is money and as such begs the question to where the value might be in such a proposition. The value is in the work itself, for you are publishing quality and the readership is proof that you’re an authority within your domain. Your time, your insight as a result of your research and experience is a prize to yourself, your readers, and your product or service.

You should never underestimate the value of the traffic because even if you’re not directly selling, each one has a value which can produce sales or leads later on. Last fall, a new client welcomed our proposed strategy and has since experienced a generous growth in sales as a result. Based on the analytics we’ve mined, each visitor that viewed the homepage after reading the blog was valued at over $9 per visitor.

The value is calculated by taking the total revenue generated for that source and dividing by the number of visitors. The ecommerce conversion rate was almost 10% and we’re looking at data that has spanned approximately 6 months. With that said, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about achieving this; there’s a balance you have to maintain when attempting to maximize the value of each visitor.

We didn’t use any Flash animated ads, pop ups, interstitials, or anything that remotely resembled Google AdSense. The header has a link to the shop and in the sidebar, we placed a widget that would automatically display the newest products added to the ecommerce store, pulling from an RSS feed. It’s an absolute requirement that you do nothing intrusive, which will turn off your readership immediately.

Next time I’ll cover how you can make shopping an interesting part of your blogging experience, how to go about featuring products and initiating comparisons, listening to feedback or complaints and realizing how you can take advantage of a negative and turning it into a positive. Blogging and corporate can work together, we’ll keep showing you how.