The Ten (not quite) Commandments of Marketing With Business Blogs and New Media - Part 3 » Advanced Business Blogging… A New Media Marketing Expose’

In part two of this business blogging and New Media Marketing series we looked at three more ‘not quite’ Commandments of marketing with business blogs, podcasts, social networks, and any other type of participatory media.

They were:

#3. Thou shalt keep thy marketing an ongoing conversation
#4. Thou shalt understand your target audience and honor their wants, needs, and desires
#5. Thou shalt listen, learn, observe, and adapt

You can check out the full details on these two ‘not quite’ Commandments, why we say ‘not quite’, and also discover how you’re in danger of being hacked to pieces by a hoard of midget Ninjas if you ignore them — all here in Part One and Part Two.

Here are the next three ‘not quite’ Commandments when blogging for business and marketing with New Media.

#6. Thou shalt participate, comment, and converse in context

If you enter a conversation on a blog, find out what’s being talked about and whether the conversation is relevant so you’ll have a better chance of successfully contributing.

Observe your target audience. Remember the group’s wants, needs and desires. What are they looking for? How can you solve a problem, meet their needs, or remove pain? If you can answer these questions, you will be successful in the online networking world.

Contribute in context. Make sure your comment adds to the conversation in some meaningful way. Don’t just say, “Oh yeah, I wrote an article about that on my blog, go check it out.” This is the fastest way to break rapport and ruin relationships in the online community. It’s seen as self-serving.

Your comment is your opportunity to prove that what you have to share is valuable – the more valuable, the more likely people are to check you out further.

#7. Thou shalt only call it content if it’s linkable

If you post any type of content (written, audio, images, video), people need to be able to reference it on their blog with a permanent link for all of your content.

Blogging software takes care of this automatically. However, as you create new content, it needs to be searchable, and able to be indexed and referenced. There should be no “rotting links.” This happens when a site posts an article then moves it to an archive. The original link changes with no auto-forwarding feature, or worse, you get a “404 error: page cannot be found.” These annoying things stop the new-media marketplace from working properly, and stop your credibility almost immediately.

#8. Thou shalt assume that readers will enter your site from any and every page

Old-school Internet thinking: Put up a Web page. Visitors will come to your site though the home page and then spider out into those other pages.

Today, your search-engine rankings come from the keyword-rich content anywhere on your business blog. When people visit your domain coming from a regular search engine, they’re going to be coming in through any page on your blog.

E-mails can reference you. Other blogs can reference you. If that happens on a post that went up three weeks ago, there may have been a dozen posts since then, so they’re now entering your site through the archives section.

Think about what your blog site looks like – how it is structured for name capture, taking the conversation to the next level, and making the relationship with your readers even more personal.

Marketing with business blogs and winning in the New Media Marketplace requires a different mindset. Begin practicing these ‘not quite’ Commandments in combination with successful “non-interruption” marketing strategies, and you’ll watch your online marketing results soar.

In the fourth and final part of this series we’ll cover participation on individual pages; and testing and tracking.