B2Bridge

So you're running a B2Blog and your visitor numbers increase. But what's your measure for success? Having started up dozens of specialised sites, and looking at other sites publishing counters, geomaps or full statistics, I'd propose following benchmarks:

• Startup: tens of daily visitors
• After 3-6 months: 100+ daily visitors
• After 6-12 months: 1000+ daily visitors

And don't benchmark against 'major' sites such as general media, Wikipedia, etc. These get millions of hits, but what really counts for you is their hits on your specialised topic.

These past few days, there are a few posts on company's half-hearted attempts to step into the blogosphere without a real understanding, for example through this post from 10kmarshmallows.

Through a patent application from Google, ProBlogger gives some insight how Google Blogsearch ranks posts, with far-reaching implications.

A good checklists from beetoobee.com was voted to the front page: 8 ideas to revitalise your blog after a false start (article from www.marketingprofs.com).

ProBlogger is one of the blogs run by Darren Rowse, a professional making a living from blogging. ProBlogger is dedicated to help other bloggers. Typical posting frequency is once to twice per day. The emphasis of ProBlogger is a bit different than for business blogging, but still a lot of the basics are the same. Some recent posts are noteworthy, for example:

• The proposed code of conduct for bloggers
• A reflection on setting goals for your blog, but how too much focus on metrics & goals can be self-defeating
• Is it better to be discovered, or is steady growth more sustainable?

ProBlogger is also famous for its series of articles. One of the most reputed one is the 31 days to building a better blog, a good tutorial to follow after the typical getting started guide.

Last week, we discussed social bookmarking as a mixed blessing for b2b practitioners. But we failed to mention one important aspect: the use of social bookmarking (SB) as part of your knowledge management. It pays to regularly visit specialised SB sites, or general sites to observe new submissions against the tags of interest to you.

Now, B2B marketing practitioners have their own social bookmarking site. It's called beetoobee.com. The site is still in its infancy, and needs our support, if we want it for our profession. For example this week, only 5 new stories have been published, but I found 2 of them useful.

Blogs are streams of articles, and a blog software produces a machine readible feed of the its recent articles in an XML format. This makes it easy to integrate a blog into other sites as a 'what's new' stream, a process called syndication:

Web syndication is a form of syndication in which a section of a website is made available for other sites to use. This could be simply by licensing the content so that other people can use it; however, in general, web syndication refers to making Web feeds available from a site in order to provide other people with a summary of the website's recently added content (for example, the latest news or forum posts).

There is a wealth of resources on b2blogging on the internet. Hereby a few pointers:

• beetoobee:  a peer-to-peer network on b2b knowledge
• b2blog: running since April 2002, this is probably one of the first b2b marketing blogs by an industrial marketing professional
• 75 blogs: Jon Millers big list of 75 b2b marketing blogs

Blogs produce a unique link for each article, which allows bloggers to treat each article as a separate campaign. And the best part: if you create an alias for this page link, using a clever combination of your domain name with keywords from the article means that you've almost optimised your site for search engines.

If you're going to read a book on marketing with blogs, I would recommend Susannah Gardner's 'Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies'. If you can read beyond the title, it will give you a good introduction to the essentials of b2blogging:

• Blog setup - a discussion of hosted blog solutions and independent blog software, but also organisational aspects
• Joining the blogosphere - the culture and its do's and don'ts
• Positioning your blog - promoting your blog while staying on the right side of the law

My favourite part is the chapter of tens listing '10 dry-spell-breaking ideas, 10 traits of a good blogger (take the test) and 10 blogs you should know.

While blogging is a quite casual and forgiving medium, still there are a few pitfalls to avoid:

1. Underplanning: a new blog is created every nanosecond, but many do not make it beyond their first post, first week, first month.
2. Overplanning: the best way to kill a blog project is setting up a corporate blog committee reviewing each individual post.
3. Overblogging: blogs can go on Christmas breaks, you know.
4. Underblogging: but probably you cannot afford a winter break.
5. Too casual blogging: pay attention to spelling and style.
   

The word 'blog' is quite a loaded term among professionals in general, and marketeers in particular. The reactions can vary from being intrigued by blogging, to almost instant rejection as a suitable medium for the b2b environment. But some who reject blogs do not realise they're actually using them on a daily basis.

So when you enter the blogosphere, consider whether you will label your project as a blog or not. There are many alternatives, e.g. community of practice, forum, newsgroup, message board, portal, ... It is worth testing with your intended target audience what label works best.