Ebook: Blogging to Drive Business: Create and Maintain Valuable Customer Connections

Use Blogging to Supercharge Sales, Customer Loyalty, Innovation, and Profits   “To connect with today’s buyer, you need to stop pushing your message out and start pulling your customers in. And there is no better tool for this than the blog! Blogging to Drive Business is an essential guide for any business wishing to use a blog to attract a steady stream of inbound opportunities.” —Paul Dunay, Global Managing Director of Services and Social Marketing, Avaya Inc.   Blogging can help you deepen customer loyalty, reach new customers, gain indispensable feedback, and drive more sales. This no-nonsense guide shows how to craft a business blog that does all that, and more—building your business and increasing your profits. Top e-marketers and business bloggers Eric Butow and Rebecca Bollwitt help you define clear goals, generate the right content with the right tools, attract visitors, build communities, and avoid costly mistakes. They draw on their own extensive experience, as well as the work of innovators from companies such as Intel, Wal-Mart, Google, HP, and BusinessWeek. Whatever your role in the business, you’ll learn how to:   • Launch a blog that truly represents the best of your business • Create a comprehensive, long-term blogging strategy • Staff your blogging initiative • Integrate blogs with other offline and online marketing programs • Use your blog to drive customers and prospects to the business • Push up-to-the-minute information to customers via RSS • Build a thriving online community—and learn from what it tells you • Manage comments (and decide whether to have them) • Utilize podcasts, vlogs, microblogging, and other new techniques • Gain business value from hot new Web 3.0 technologies, including widgets, mashups, personal agents, and the Semantic Web