Well, here we are in June of 2011 and location-based social networks and QR Codes are all the rage. Everyone’s talking about Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and now, Facebook Places. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn are all considered mainstream and imperative in terms of marketing.

However, it is obvious that many, if not most, businesses have yet to venture into the simplest and arguably the most effective type of social marketing…blogging.

Blogging is nothing new. Blogs date back to 1997, took off in 1999 and were considered mainstream by 2004.

It’s 2011 and your company hasn’t started blogging. Why is that? Are you afraid of what someone might post on your blog? Here’s the deal…people are going to talk about your company, whether it’s on your blog or in the grocery store. Perhaps you don’t see the importance and you’re not completely sold on blogging for business.

A recent study by eMarketer shows a strong increase in companies entering the blogosphere. Their study predicts that 43% of companies will be blogging by 2012.

Here’s a short list of 5 reasons why your company should be actively blogging:

1 - Blogging gives you the opportunity to establish yourself as the expert in your industry or field. Are you a local fitness center or gym? Your blog should contain posts and information on why someone should join your fitness center, as opposed to your competition. You never want to downgrade your competition on your blog. Rather, focus on what your fitness center has to offer and emphasize all the positive attributes of your facility and staff.

2 – Blogging gives your current and potential customers a platform to ask questions and communicate with your business. This adds credibility and can increase customer loyalty. Monitoring your blog closely, answering questions and replying to comments will promote trust and transparency.

3 – Search engines love fresh content. If you don’t add new content to your website on a regular basis the search engines have nothing new to crawl and distribute. Integrating a blog into your site makes it easy to post fresh information on a regular basis for the search engines to find.

4 – A blog is another chance to issue a press release, announce an event, launch a new product or make an important announcement. Blogging is marketing. What are you marketing? Your business!

5 – Your blog serves as what I call your “content distribution source.” With every blog post you publish, you can take that article, create profiles on dozens of other social platforms and post. Not only will this generate more traffic to your blog and website, but you’re also creating links, which will aid in search engine optimization.

Maximizing your blogging efforts will take time, but it’s worth it. Post often, include important keywords for your business/industry and engage with your audience. In my opinion, this should be the first step in creating a powerful social media presence and personality for your company or business.

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Here are five key ingredients your site must have in order to be successful:

1 – Page Titles: The blue bar at the top of every page of your site should contain the name of your site and the title of the corresponding page. This will aid in SEO.

2 – Clear, Concise Navigation: Your nav should be simple and short, but specific. It needs to be laid out in a logical manner with layers kept to a minimum.

3 – Quality Links: Your site should link out to specific websites and pages/articles of interest to your readers and users. Additionally, your site should have as many inbound links as possible for better SEO. These are links coming to your site from other quality websites.

4 – Contact Info: Are you making it easy for your users to contact you from anywhere on your website? Google may find a particular page of your site to distribute to a user. Will that user be able to locate your phone number, email address and simple contact form easily from that page? Put this info on every page, if possible.

5 – Content: Keep it to 250 words per page. Make it simple, specific and easy to read. Remember, your users are looking for pertinent information, not a novel. One of the secrets to SEO has always been GOOD CONTENT. Make sure you use a keyword research tool and incorporate those keywords into your content.

This is a short list, but if you implement these five key parameters your website will be more successful. There are certainly more things you need to include for optimal performance. We’ll touch on these soon.

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Over the past couple of days there have been some issues with the 800-Pound Gorilla…Facebook. This led me to think about what would happen if Facebook suddenly disappeared. What would online marketers do if one of the most powerful tools they had was gone? One of the things we would do is put more focus on blogging. The truth is, we should never lose focus on blogging. Don’t neglect home base. Keep it fresh regularly and blog smart.

Here are 10 quick tips for effective blogging:

1 – Decide on a stand alone domain name myblog.com, or directory of existing site: mysite.com/blog. Utilizing a sub-domain is also an option: blog.mysite.com. If at all possible, avoid hosted services that do not allow you to use your own domain name.

2 – Research keywords and develop a glossary using a keyword research tool, such as www.semrush.com, www.wordstream.com or www.link-assistant.com.

3 – Enable your automatic trackback and ping functionality.

4 – Submit your RSS feed and Blog URL to prominent RSS and Blog directories and search engines.

5 – Optimize and distribute a press release announcing your blog.

6 – Research and comment on relevant industry-related blogs and blogs that are popular and get lots of traffic. Always link back, but don’t be spammy when you comment.

7 – Monitor your inbound links, traffic using analytics (Google Analytics, if possible). Also, monitor comments and mentions of your blog using Google Alerts, Technorati, Blogpulse or Trackur.

8 – Put prominent links to your profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr and other social platforms in every post.

9 – Include bookmarking/sharing widgets that allow users to share content on the platform of their choice: www.addthis.com.

10- Post regularly. I’m often asked how often. Once a month is not enough. Once a week is not enough. I’ll cover this more in my next post.

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