While the numbers trusting corporate blogs rise a bit among those who regularly read blogs (24 percent) and those who blog themselves (39 percent), Bernoff notes these aren’t exactly killer numbers. It’s not a news flash that folks are broadly suspicious of companies’ motives. This explains the higher scores for mediums perceived as coming from neutral sources, such as consumer product ratings/reviews (60 percent), portals/search engines (50 percent), and social networking site profiles from people you know (43 percent).
Leveraging consumer reviews and opinions can be tricky, but offers some nice payoffs for companies that do it well https://arsprojecta.com/. An example that won me (and more importantly, its customers) over: Dell and its IdeaStorm community.
Before you immediately cancel plans for a corporate blog, listen to Bernoff’s good advice: Your corporate blog should be more about your customers and theirneeds than about your company. Illustrate to them how your company can meet those needs – but do it in thoughtful way, instead of just pointing out how buying your stuff will change their lives for the better.
Interestingly, Forrester spotlighted similar issues with business-to-business (rather than business-to-consumer) blogs earlier this year. The overarching point appears to be the same: Most companies just rehashed press releases or other well-known news instead of giving readers information of actual value to them.
Start your posted messages off right by using a title which matches both the content of your post and the overall topic of your blog. Suppose for a moment you have a blog about your pet cat named Felix. Your cat did something funny this weekend so you want to write about it on your blog to share with your readers. Your main goal on your monetized blog is to have your AdSense ads show up to be about cats so they blend in with your blogs topic. Rather than use an ambiguous title like “My Weekend Adventure” use something more specific like “My Weekend Adventure with Felix My Pet Cat.”
By using just “My Weekend Adventure” as your title, AdSense is liable to return you ads for things like weekend vacations and other topics which are not of interest to your cat blog readers. By including the word “cat” in your title, and even using the word “pet” too, you are much more likely to get ads about cat products which are much more relevant to your blog. You are also much more likely to come up in search results when people are searching for “cat” or “pet” related websites in search engines.
You also want to have a link to each of your blog messages. This is the field directly below your title in Blogger. A good rule of thumb online is that any type of link is always a good thing. The more links a website has the higher the search engine ranking of the site. Good search engine ranking equals more of those natural visitors to your site and thus more clicks on your AdSense ads. (We will talk about links in detail in Chapter 9 of this eBook.)
To start off the text sections of your post always take the time to re-type your title in bold type. Below this second title, which of course has good key words for AdSense and search engine optimization, follow up with the actual text of your post Article.
Within your Article text itself you will also want to try and use as many of your keywords as possible. Mention “cat” and “pet” multiple times where it makes sense to do so if your blog is about pet cats. However, do not add things into your posts simply for search engine optimization and AdSense because it will irritate your readers. You want to use your keywords but use them when it makes sense to do so.
Another simple tip to help you write exciting looking posts, and ones in which the search engines like, is to use a variety of formatting. If you say something which has importance – use bold. Use larger text for things like titles, subtitles and keywords. However, don’t irritate your readers just to improve your rankings. Make your posts read well and not look like you created them just for the rankings.
If your posts are distracting to read because of weird formatting or stuffing of keywords in them then it will make your readers feel like you blog is just about the income and search engine rankings rather than about their own learning and entertainment. This will cause your readers to move on to other blogs which are more about their learning and entertainment and less about income for the blogger. Always remember that your blog is not the only one on its chosen topic, but you can always strive to be the best blog on that topic!
Think for a moment about your local television news broadcast. You turn on the television to watch after a hard day at work and then you found it to be 95% commercials. You would likely be very disappointed and you would likely change the channel. You would feel like there isn’t anything there for you and that the broadcast was all about advertising revenue for the news station. Same thing for your readers, they do not come to your blog to be targets for advertising. They come to your blog because they feel a connection to you and an interest in what you have to say. Provide them with the necessary ads but give them the good content so they can tolerate the ads as well.