As I was catching up on some reading/research this weekend I came across an interesting story of how McDonalds is starting to employ business blogs inside the mega-corporation. There’s no plans to start marketing with business blogs anytime soon — but when a corporate giant like this starts to incorporate the technology, you can bet there’s some serious research that is backing their moves.

Kevin Newcomb in a recent article sheds some light on the moves McDonalds is making in response to today’s online marketplace. The company is apparently slipping slowly into the waters of the blogosphere by starting with internal blogs (behind their firewall.) Their first moves are intended to help improve internal communications and stem the tide of management “surprises” and misunderstandings.

But it looks like McDonalds will quickly move to external blogs for marketing, PR and customer relations. Here’s a quote by Steve Wilson (senior director of global Web communications for McDonalds) that caught my attention:

“We showed them that there were already members of our crews blogging, operators blogging, and customers blogging,” Wilson said. He then showed the executives results of a blog search that found 675,000 entries by McDonalds employees, franchisees, or customers talking about McDonalds in one 90-day period. “That got their attention very quickly,” he added.

Clearly the ease of blogging, the viral nature of the blogosphere, and the increased weighting of blog posts by search engines has had a direct impact on the McDonalds name — good or bad — without any attention from the company. McDonalds cannot afford to ignore the World Live Web. It’s only a matter of time before the company starts to develop a marketing strategy using business blogs.

More momentum behind business blogging

This is just another news story in a long line up, about big money being put behind efforts to “catch up” with the blogosphere. When huge publicly traded corporations get involved in business blogging (internally and externally) it’s clear that they have significant market research to justify these moves to shareholders. As we’ve talked about before on our Marketing With Business Blogs coaching calls, this is just another indication that blogging has moved beyond (more…)

PART 2 –Five simple (and nearly free) ways you can start monitoring your RSS feeds to maximize your marketing with business blogs

In PART 1 of “How To Measure The Impact of Your Marketing With Business Blogs and RSS” we looked at why it’s so important for you to make business blogging and RSS feeds a major part of your online marketing (if you want to be in a key position when consumers want to buy that is.)

And — although it will take some effort on your part to make marketing with business blogs, podcasts, and RSS work for you and your company — I think you can see from just the few statistics we looked at in PART 1 that it is well worth it. But really … to be brutally honest (and being anything but that wouldn’t be fair to you) — you don’t have any choice.

So here are five quick ways you can start monitoring the impact of your marketing with business blogs and RSS feeds so you can test your approaches, track consumer actions, and improve your results.

Here are five simple your business blog and RSS marketing results can be analyzed:

1. Track new feed subscribers

You must continually increase your subscriber base if you want to increase traffic. It’s a simple relationship.

If you have a self-hosted business blog like WordPress, then a service like FeedBurner can help track the number of subscribers to your business blog. Some of the better third-party hosted blog services like Blog Harbor offer internal tracking of RSS feed traffic. There are some other options out there as well if you don’t want to give up your URL in your feed as you do with FeedBurner, or host your blog with a provider like Blog Harbor.

No matter what option you choose, implementing some type of RSS subscriber tracking will be helpful. That way the baseline data you gather can be added into the mix when monitoring your business blog and RSS marketing.

2. Develop free “premium” content for readers to download or subscribe to, and track those click-throughs or subscriptions.

This is one of the most effective methods for maximizing your marketing with business blogs. Just like you’d do on a regular web site, you need to create highly targeted reports, ebooks, or newsletters/ezines that directly compliment the niche focus of your blog.

Yes – I did say newsletter. Although a recent study by Pew Research showed that 25% of all web surfers are bypassing web sites all together, they’re still looking for targeted information/education about and around their interests. If you’ve already established credibility with your blog content and have proven you can add to their growth with an email based publication – then it’s a pretty good bet they’ll register for it.

Another consideration is that you’ve still got 75% of the market catching up with the technology. These are people who are still accustomed to the standard email delivery of content. This strategy makes sure you capture them as well.

A free report or ebook would work just as well. But don’t mislead or offer junk just to get a read on the quality of your traffic. That’ll certainly tick people of and have them dropping both your feed and your email delivered content.

Business Coaching Corner: This is not the place to try out some new download or ezine format. You need a solid benchmark and a proven track record to compare your on-blog downloads against. Use a free publication, download, or report that’s proven itself online or offline in another marketing channel.

The quality of your initial “free premium” content will firmly position you in the minds of your target audience. Whatever free content you offer is leaving a first impression with subscribers that will not be easily changed.

3. Monitor click-throughs from posts and feeds

Although you can’t track specific people, you can tell which content or product offerings drive usage. And the way you do that is with tracking links that lead people out of your feeds and posts. If you’re using a halfway decent web analytics software program (something like ProAnalyzer or DynaTracker,) this will be a snap for you.

Given that RSS is an additional way to reach customers, you should consider testing the cost efficiency of different ways to get customers to subscribe to your feeds or free premium content offers.

4. Measure the time spent on the target site with visitors originating from your posts or RSS feeds.

Any top line traffic analysis software will allow you to track visitor footprints and movements around the destination site readers link to out of your business blog. This information will help you assess when people view, how long, and where they go on your site. It’ll help you determine what type of content to publish, and how many pieces to publish at a time And this data can even help you determine what time of day to publish.

If you have an e-commerce site, track purchases and related metrics. And look at how you can engage these customers and extend your relationship beyond the steps you’ve taken (like step #2 above) once they reach your site.

5. K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple) — Minimize your costs and start out slow

When you’re going to get started monitoring and measuring your business blogging and RSS marketing efforts, don’t make this a big ordeal. It doesn’t need to be. Most of the time all that’s needed is the re-titling of pages or encoding URLs, not creating special HTML or landing pages. This keeps the costs of monitoring the marketing impact of your business blogging and RSS feeds painless on the pocketbook.

Remember — the key to getting consumers to keep revisiting your business blog and reading your RSS feeds is that you must continually supply new content that readers find relative and valuable. Though RSS currently reaches a relatively small user base, it’s growing fast. And RSS feeds (and your business blog posts) have a direct impact the search engine positioning of your main site when it’s set up properly, so RSS reaches it’s marketing impact far outside the blogosphere.

Starting to use and measure business blog and RSS marketing today can be an important addition to your marketing mix. It reaches consumers who might not otherwise engage with your content, and when set up properly — draws them in as prospects and then clients.

In today’s internet dependent marketplace, every company with a properly structured business blog and a robust Web site is a content provider. Start thinking about and testing how to make business blog and RSS marketing work for you.

Learn how to unleash the maximum marketing power of business blogs, podcasts, and RSS (in any industry, profession, or niche) with Marketing With Business Blogs™.

John-Paul Micek is a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honolulu Star Bulletin. He’s known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club™.


The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc.® and licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Previous in series

PART 1 –Why does marketing with business blogs and RSS deserve your attention?

If you’re a business owner who’s marketing with business blogs, you’ve probably realized that automated options for measuring the marketing effectiveness of RSS feeds are slim to none. Compared to static web sites tracking, traffic analysis, and metrics related to RSS is still in it’s infancy. There’s not much help out there in the form of software or ASP solutions (unless you’ve got deep pockets and an internal marketing research team.)

The good news

If you’re a business owner who’s serious about optimizing your online marketing with business blogs (and it’s underlying RSS feeds,) there are some simple steps you can take . Although it may take a little more effort gathering measurements on your “live content” (RSS-based) than tracking and metrics on your regular static web site — you can get the measurements you need to tweak your business blog and maximize your RSS marketing results.

In PART 2 of this article, we’ll share five methods that have proven effective with tracking our own business blogs as well as helping dozens of our coaching clients who’ve completed the Marketing With Business Blogs course and are aggressive about getting results.

But before we get to those steps, I’d be remiss if I didn’t coach you on a few important points regarding the importance of RSS, business blogs, and other live content. Like any other area of business, having the right mindset and motivation will have a lot to do with your level of success. So let’s take a moment and look at the reasons why you must give RSS the attention it deserves — IF you’re going to market effectively in today’s online marketplace.

Why RSS deserves your attention

It’s a common excuse I hear from the business owners we coach when it comes to making the effort to gather metrics on their business blogs.

“I don’t know who is subscribing to my feed, and I can’t tell how many people are actually reading a new post. So why put in the extra effort to gather metrics right now.”

Although you can’t tell who has actually read your RSS feeds (as you can with e-mail,) they’re still a crucial part of marketing in today’s online environment. Today you can’t predict how consumers are going to gather information. They can find you, your products, or your services in dozens of different ways online. Organic search engine results are one of the top ways.

And one thing you can be sure of — the “World Live Web” and all it’s content is getting substantial boosts in weighting for inclusion in top search engine results. If you doubt that fact, just take Yahoo’s recent addition of top-rated “news bloggers” to their search results in their news engine as evidence. Or Google’s investment (a publicly traded company answering to shareholders) in a blog specific search engine.

Search engine placement is essential for small business owners and professionals who want to market effectively online, and it’s growing more critical day by day.

Again, let’s just look at the facts:

- A recent study by Forrester shows that 80% of all Internet users use search engines to find web sites.

- Enquiro discovered in their research that 64% of business users go first to a search engine to research a B2B purchase decision.

- Studies by Outsell reveal that 79% of ALL business research begins with a search engine.

I could keep going on for pages, but you get the point. Looking at these statistics alone it’s pretty clear — you’re either there when your prospects are looking for you, or you’re dead in the water. All recent reliable data points to a major shift in the marketing impact live content is having on search engine positioning.

And even when we look at RSS feeds stand-alone, you can see it’s important to be part of the World Live Web. It’s your chance to be heard as more and more consumers come to rely on the convenience of content delivered via RSS. Some RSS readers, like FeedDemon and NewsGator, allow users to set up custom searches to continually monitor important key words. Those can be things like your company name, the profession or industry you’re in, the type of service you provide, or the products you offer.

Whether it’s in the organic search results of the major search engines, or the personal RSS readers of consumers — wouldn’t you like to be there when the time is right?

Well in PART 2 of this article, we’ll share with you five simple (and nearly free) ways you can start monitoring your RSS feeds to help maximize your marketing with business blogs.

Learn how to unleash the maximum marketing power of business blogs, podcasts, and RSS (in any industry, profession, or niche) with Marketing With Business Blogs™.

John-Paul Micek is a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honolulu Star Bulletin. He’s known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club™.


The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc.® and licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Next in series

Business Blogging Question: Hey J.P. what do you make of this? I got this email notification of a comment posted on my blog. I wish I knew more. I guess this is the way I will learn.

K

—–Original Message—–
From: Keyword Queen [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2005 12:34 PM
To: “”
Subject: [Relationship Rescue] 9/20/2005 03:32:12 PM

I skim a lot of blogs, and so far yours is in the Top 3 of my list of favorites. I’m going to dive in and try my hand at it, so wish me luck.

It’ll be in a totally different area than yours (mine is about seo toolbar tools) I know, it sounds strange, but it’s like anything, once you learn more about it, it’s pretty cool.

If you don’t mind, I’d really appreciate being able to come back and get a few tips and suggestions from you, if that’s alright, alright?

Thanks,
Tiffany Burrell
Keyword Queen!
ps. I confess, that’s not my real picture!

–
Posted by Keyword Queen to Relationship Rescue at 9/20/2005 03:32:12 PM

Advanced Business Blogging Answer: K, this is what we call “comment SPAM.” Meaning Spammers post comments like this to get inbound links to their URL (for SEO,) or to lead people to their site.

Here are three ways you can identify comment spam: (more…)