We’ve just concluded a very enjoyable 2 hour session on “Getting Started With Blogging” and making the most of the Wordpress platform here at Open Space. The lively audience which consistently grew as the session continued participated and interacted with their questions on the basics of blogging, getting started and tips on how to become an active part of the blogosphere. It was a pleasure interacting with people from various walks of life and discussing how they could use blogging to their advantage whether it was to create awareness for their nonprofit organizations, their college projects, businesses or personal passions and made for a lively session. We hope the workshop will help inspire them to kick-start their own blogs really soon!

The session was arranged by Open Space which is a brilliant initiative by the Centre For Communication and Development Studies which follows a mantra of Talk -> Think -> Act for change. The Open Space centre in Pune leverages literature, cinema, theater, music, debates and several forms of communication to create discussion on issues that impact society, build knowledge, skills and initiate change. For more on Open Space and the work they do check out their website www.openspaceindia.org and their publication www.infochangeindia.org

We look forward to being back!

Well let’s see…

1. The office is quiet
2. You don’t need to spend on phone and traveling expenses
3. You don’t have to worry about what to do if you have too many customers pouring in

Heck…there are no advantages! Having a salesperson who doesn’t communicate is absolutely pointless! Having marketers that are not making a noise about your business or actively doing something to promote your products are equally of no use. Then why have a website that’s doing nothing to make a noise about your business and actively market itself on the social web to sell for you?

Conversation is the very basis of the social web we are all a part of today. If you have a great website but you are not actively reaching out to people on the web and not joining in the conversation it’s virtually like setting up a shop in the neighborhood with no salesperson and making no attempts to reach out to the community letting them know you are here.  Perhaps setting up your website establishes that you have a presence on the online world but to make that presence felt you need to connect with the social web and …make some noise so to speak. How do you make some noise? Keep publishing.

Blog, tweet, comment, update statuses, make connections online, start communities, publish articles, send out press releases, create videos, create podcasts… keep speaking online … and you will be noticed. Stop speaking (publishing) and you will be ignored. The web is a crowded market place and just as you would find street vendors shouting on top of their voices to grab some attention in a bustling bazaar, that’s what needs to be done on the web to draw the right people using content and publishing to create conversation.  Having a blog doesn’t get you noticed, blogging actively get’s you noticed. Achieving something like winning an award for your business doesn’t bring traffic to your website, telling others through your blog or press releases and shouting about it on social networking sites will.

There are no advantages to having a salesman or marketer who doesn’t communicate and actively promote. There are no advantages to having a website that no one is talking about on the social web and no one knows about.

Make some noise. Keep publishing. Jump start your content marketing and start a conversation. It’s easy to ignore the silent website, it’s hard to miss the one that everyone is talking about and doesn’t stop talking itself.

being silent leads to being forgotten

If you picture a kid in a bus who is constantly talking about something and barely silent for a moment, you may not really be interested in what he is going on about but the chances are you are going to notice him and tune into what he is talking about. Chances are, others in the bus have also taken notice. It’s a lot like this with online channels starting with your blog. If you keep a constant conversation going online through your blog, Twitter, social networking and bookmarking sites, it will draw some listeners and create some interest. A part of that interest may drive readers to contact you and explore further. It generates a active interest in what you are talking about and creates opportunities. However, when the conversation stops, the blog posts dry out, the Twitter accounts turn silent and there is no dialog online, the activity around your site also tends to diminish (with the exception of search traffic coming through content that has been well indexed and show up in search results which has long lasting effects). If that online silence is prolonged, you’re likely to be forgotten.

constant activity is key

Most of those we work with are looking for our blogging and social media marketing support not because they don’t know how to do it themselves. It’s because they do know how it works and they know how important it is to be able to post and stay active very regularly and that is something their time schedules don’t permit.  They know there is a direct relation between the ability to consistently publish fresh content having active social channels and the ability to generate interest, conversations around their business and new customers.

keep a continuous online conversation going starting with your blog

For now, it’s time for me to break that silence on this blog with this post and other ones to follow. Then get back to being active on Twitter and other social sites to let everyone know I’m back and stiring a buzz. Perhaps I’m not very talkative in person but when it comes online marketing I know for sure, too much silence is not good for business.

Perhaps best said by Joe Pulizzi of the Junta42 blog in a post he published in July this year:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, social media doesn’t work without relevant, valuable and consistent content. Success in social media relies on a web content strategy that works for the brand and especially for the brand’s advocates.

Running a community, sharing links on Twitter, blogging, search marketing, inbound marketing, online marketing promotions or landing pages all rely on having great content to generate that conversation or value that draws the right people. That “content creation” is a core component of all subsequent social marketing and online marketing activity and needs to be accounted for by businesses.

What needs to be considered about content?:

• It’s a core component of social media and a lot of other activity is built around it and relies on it
• Creating content involves considerable investment in terms of time, effort or money. Even a one man business running a daily blog to create awareness needs the owner to spend considerable time daily to keep posts fresh.
• It’s a constant requirement not a one time purchase. As long as you need to improve search traffic results, deliver something engaging to your audiences or keep a social marketing program running, you need a supply of content.
• It needs to be accounted for in marketing budgets and feature separately for any online marketing plans to really measure true costs of online marketing and accurately track progress.

Good social marketing campaigns are fueled by a great supply of quality content. Just take a look around:

Successful software product company 37Signals much loved blog Signal Vs Noise and ebooks like Getting Real have fueled a huge online fan following for the business who will generate massive marketing for anything they do.

Inbound marketing company Hubspot’s exceptional content in the form of blog posts, videos, comics, podcasts, Slideshare presentations and online TV show is behind the huge buzz they have generated online around their business and drew a large customer base in a relatively short time.

The evidence is consistent with every sucessful social marketing effort. They are all backed by great content and to build a supply of great content, a dedicated effort is needed. One that clearly addresses content creation and content marketing as a core part of the overall social marketing strategy. Do you have your consistent supply of online content figured out?

In this short span we’ve discovered we’ve outgrown our previous website and that’s driven us to move to the new BuzzFactory.net website and blog which will be our new home on the web. The new Wordpress driven site will give us a better platform to continue our conversation on blogging, content development, social marketing and how these tools can be used effectively in generating more online visibility for your businesses and websites. The blog will continue to have regular articles, updates, views and posts around content marketing as well as updates from the team every now and then so stay tuned.

Please bear with us as we transition to our new home on the web and iron out any kinks that may come up in the process. We are extremely grateful for the support of all our early customers and hope to be able to work with more of you along the way. Here’s to the journey ahead…

Cheers!

From the BuzzFactory Team

Business vertical based blogs are a great alternative to high ad spend and are one of the most valuable mediums of inbound marketing. It’s important to note the main objective of such a blog or online publication is not outright push selling to a customer simply using the blog as a tool to do that. The objective is to create the most engaging and useful publication with great content for targeted audience in your business vertical. If you can publish a blog or online magazine which can do that, you will build a community of followers who will be pulled to your business website eventually simply because they enjoy your publication. It’s non-intrusive pull marketing. For example, if you’re reading this article on online content marketing and value the articles we publish, the chances are, sooner or later you will be curious enough to explore what we do and what we offer at Buzzfactory.net. The objective is: this article you find useful will lead you to our website and perhaps even contact us to see if we may be able to work together.

Thinking out-of-the-box and not restricting your content to revolve only around your business can play an important part in how others perceive your publication. For example, if you are hotel or resort located in Miami, a blog which talks about the hotel property itself may be interesting but can you really build a long term reader base around it? Instead, if you could build a blog with great articles on “Travel in Miami” which has tips, guides, advice and articles on what those visiting the city could do, that could scale into a widely read travel blog. In effect, the branding space on such a blog would be more valuable and the reader base perfect for those who may be interested in checking out the resort website and perhaps making an online booking. An adventure sports blog for an adventure sports apparel company, an automotive blog for a a car dealership or a boat & yachting online publication for a boat manufacturer are all along the right lines to attract attention online and build a good platform. In the B2B space the objective is the same. Create a publication that the audience finds useful and ask yourself, as someone interested in this vertical, what would you like to read?

Finally the success of an online publication for any business  comes down to it’s planning and execution. While many set of to create a vertical or industry blog or publication, few actually manage to keep up the momentum and publish fresh content as frequently as it should be. The way we approach completely managed publications for our customers is much the way a magazine would. Setting monthly objectives for both content and traffic goals is important as is a weekly plan of the articles that need to be done for the week. Once articles are published they need to be promoted on social networks shared through social bookmarking and the process needs a dedicated effort. It’s a gradual learning process which needs experimenting and constant review to understand what is working, what the audience respond to and how to stay creative and continue to make it valuable. It calls for a dedicated effort where you can consistently publish fresh content and continue to keep readers happy.

If you’ve looked at the best blogs and online magazines in your industry and have made up your mind to take them on with your own, our advice is “Go for it!”

Every business is working towards a strong online marketing plan to help drive customers towards their websites rather than going after customers. Different strategies work for different businesses and whether it’s paid online advertising, search engine optimization, inbound lead generation programs or social media marketing, the main goal is the same: To get in front of customers with a message. Experimenting with all these various online marketing techniques over some time will help determine the winning mix of just how much of each one needs to get their customers coming in however among all these variables is one fact that can’t easily be disputed: Content plays an important role in the online marketing process.

The rules for the race to get the top spot in search engine results for the best target keywords has changed. The game has become more competitive. A lot more competitive. How many businesses would rest once their website shows up in the number one spot or the among the first page results of a Google search? Few. The race is no longer to get to the first page or claim that top spot. The aim is to dominate the results on the first page or even the first few pages of search results. After all, how long can your website hold that podium position before someone else comes along and pushes you down? This is why SEO or one aspect alone can’t drive online success. Once you’re at the top, you need to fight to stay there and you need to fight daily.

This is where content comes in. Fresh content is generally given priority over older content so need to produce fresh content as often as possible is key to staying among the results for a targeted set of keywords. Little wonder how blogging has turned into such a powerful marketing tool in any social media marketing plan. Depending on how often the blog is updated, the process helps update the content consistently and search engines pick up on this, marking it as a valuable source of information. Turning out daily content around a strategic topic area while including certain keywords (without going out of context just for the sake of keywords) will gradually work towards a website ranking higher for those keywords. More importantly, the more useful content you can get out there and promote through sharing and social media, the wider a net you can cast so more visitors are likely to be directed towards your site.

1. Develop content around your business whether its blog posts, videos, presentations, pdf documents, white papers, articles etc
2. Do it daily if possible or as often as you can. The more frequent you can publish new content, the better.
3. Promote each piece of content as much as possible. Share it, bookmark it, list it on directories and sites, tweet it and get it out there
4. Dominate the search results for that topic

Consistency is the key. If you can generate content consistently, you can become more visible.