It's All About the Conversation

My take at a Blog Strategy

mpeesel — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:27:41 +0000

Recently, I created a blog strategy for a client that I thought was really pretty good. Maybe a bit aggressive, but after reading Justin Kownacki’s post on “What I’ve Learned From Blogging Weekly Instead of Daily,” I thought that this strategy was pretty close to getting the sort of website traffic that I thought was needed to really make a difference.

It’s really pretty simple, as most things should be, and I know I don’t follow it myself, but as my parents told me several times, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Let me know what you think or if you’ve created similar strategies.

Your Blog should have a purpose and strategy behind it to make sure that it works and doesn’t get blog rot.

Here are a couple questions to consider:

Why are we doing this?
- because it’s fun?
- to find business?
- to show off our thought leadership?
- increase customer engagement?
- PR for media, news, social networking and other bloggers?
- Improve search engine optimization?
- Provide a way to disseminate information?
- Recognize and promote employees, clients, partners, projects, etc.?
How will we know it’s successful. What metrics are we setting for ourselves? Can we put numbers to this?
- Analytics, increased traffic, time, pages, etc
- Comments on blogs
- Links to blog postings
- Increased leads
- SEO
- Social Media mentions.

1. Purpose of the blog. The blog should show that you are a collection of experts that are not only knowledgeable in your respective fields, but excited about learning and sharing what you see, know, experience and demonstrate in your key business areas of expertise.

2. Solve a problem or identify a solved problem. This is somewhat related to number 1. Part of your strategy should be solving a problem, or another way to think about this is responding to issues from clients or to just find a way to be useful and relevant – with examples.

3. Be the Subject Matter Experts (SME). This will help determine your content strategy and help build your brand. Demonstrate what you’ve done and how it’s improved our success or our clients’ success. Wave your own flag a bit.

4. Optimize our content for SEO. Do a bit more work to get the right titles and keywords for the post. Find keywords that support the blog and the post.

5. Be honest, encourage 2 way conversations. Create content that is open and honest and is truly trying to offer solutions. Give of yourselves without needing anything in return accept happy readers.

6. Monitor the world. Create searches on keyword or clients to watch what people are saying in the world. Re-tweet, create a post about it or tell your client. If there’s a client you’re trying to land, monitor what’s being said about them to find a way to respond. See Number 3 “Be the SME.”.

Some bullets on process:

Address a business need
Participate in other industry specific blogs, LinkedIn answers, business.com answers. Guest post both ways whenever possible.
Encourage online reviews of your work
Be strategic not trendy
Focus on long-term engagement, not a short term hit.
Social media is NOT an experiment. It is a proven, strategic, integrated part of your website.
Test, Measure, Optimize, Repeat.
Frequency: 1 major article per week, several supporting per week – create a schedule and trade off.
Social connections. Connect the blog to pre-determined set of social media outlets. Don’t do all of them, but go deep in the ones we do.
Take into account customers, competition, your Unique Value Proposition.

One of the Strangest Twitter Follow Notifications Ever

mpeesel — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 05:26:21 +0000

A short bit ago, I received the typical twitter email announcing that someone had followed me. It was quite strange as you can see…

@Gangsta_Claus tweet

Fortunately, Someone I work with, @paulknipe, translated this for me:

“Have you heard the news that I have a Twitter page? I highly encourage you to follow me right away. Click the follow button. It doesn’t cost anything.”

Thanks Paul, I think you are right on! (But how would I know, I imagine I’m a little out of touch…)

Friday’s Browser Tab Summary of Cool, Interactive (mostly) Links

mpeesel — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 20:18:18 +0000

I regularly find myself with way too many tabs open of good, interesting articles I find via email, twitter, facebook, and you know, all the Social Media avenues that everyone knows about. It really slows my browser down to have so many windows open (more than what I’m listing below). I don’t want to lose all these pages, but I don’t feel like bookmarking them all either as then they just get filed away never to be seen again… So, I thought I’d list them all here so I can FINALLY close my browser windows and be able to find them again…

So, here goes, in no particular order.

Why Should a Business Have a Social Media Marketing System in Place? – Social Media Bits

WordPress Firewall Plugin – SEO Egghead

Here’s What You Should Do to Improve Your Blog Today – Pro Blogger

How to Make an Absolute Fortune From Your Blog (Really) – Pro Blogger

5 Tools I Am Willing to Pay for [And Recommend] to Improve My Blogs – Pro Blogger

Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Schooling in Graduation Speech – Swift Kick Online

15 Excellent Corporate Blogs to Learn From – Open Forum

5 brand blogs to learn from – iMedia Connection

8 Cool WordPress Photo Gallery Plugins – Chase Sagum

Corporate Blogging — Expert Series: Interview with Lou Hoffman. Part 1 – Steve Farnsworth

The 10 Best Infographics for Internet Marketing Pros – Marketing Pilgrim

100 Days of Real Food – Jason Leake & Lisa Leake

Getting started with “Getting Things Done” – 43 Folders

21 Simplicity Tips from the Worlds Most Popular Bloggers – Live Simply

10 Easy To Implement Flash Based Mp3 Players For Your Website – Web Design Booth

Five Rules For How To Make Things Go Viral – Tech Crunch

What I’ve Learned From Blogging Weekly Instead of Daily – Justin Kownacki

Yeah, solar and wind power are nice. But you need the grid to get off the grid. – Christian Science Monitor

50 Surprising Facts About Social Media – EduDemic

Alex Bogusky interviews Robyn O’Brien – The FearLess Cottage via YouTube

Technology to liven up your creative – iMedia Connection

8 Powerful Ways to Use Facebook Landing Tabs – Social Media Examiner

Website design: 12 sites dissected – Going beyond “pretty” – iMedia Connection

How Women Use the Web – Mashable

Watch Out for Twitter Spam!

mpeesel — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 21:05:45 +0000

This is an interesting spam email I received yesterday that looked like it was from Twitter.

But, upon further examination, and something everyone should do BEFORE you click a link, is to hover over the link and see what appears. You just might learn something the easy way.

Remember, always be careful what links you click on in your email.

BP Oil leak live feed

mpeesel — Fri, 28 May 2010 23:06:00 +0000

You’ll probably need to download the silverlight plug-in for this, but it’s interesting in a not fun sort of way…

Or to see it on the BP site, go here:

More on Facebook Suicide and how to delete your Facebook account

mpeesel — Mon, 10 May 2010 20:26:32 +0000

Just as we’re building more and more Facebook apps (stay tuned, they’re pretty cool) it seems more users are bailing on Facebook and committing Facebook Suicide, if they can find the link. So, in case your curious, here’s a link to more info about this.

How do I delete my Facebook account?

Great re-captcha! “orations methexychlor”

mpeesel — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 05:16:29 +0000

I was recently logging in somewhere and came across the best re-captcha I’ve seen. Fortunately, I got the spelling correct!

April 1997 was a long time ago.

mpeesel — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 05:51:36 +0000

I’m a firm believer that change is good. Good for everyone involved. It always has been and I expect it always will be. Sometimes we know right away and sometimes it takes a bit longer to understand this. For me, this change is very good. The last few months has seen a transition for me from FreshCurrent to Vermilion Design + Interactive in Boulder. The change is very good and I’m very excited about it.

Below is my official release:

Let the mountains talk, let the rivers run. Once more, and forever. -David Brower

April 1997 was a long time ago.

The last 13 years was definitely an amazing experience. I followed the currents wherever they led me with this business and recently it became obvious that the next part of my journey no longer included FreshCurrent. So, with a HUGE thank you to everyone I’ve come into contact for the last 13 years, FreshCurrent is officially closing down.

If you need to get a hold of me for business reasons, please continue to use the email address you have, or you can get a hold of me for a while at info [at] freshcurrent DOT com. Phone service won’t last long (and isn’t checked much) so email is truly the best way to get a hold of me. If you still need help with your web project, contact me and I’ll help to make sure you’re taken care of either with the firm I’m with now, or another.

With eternal gratitude, Mark Peesel

P.S. for those of you with domain registrations, spam filtering and/or email newsletter subscriptions, your services will not be interrupted, but I’ll contact you individually as accounts are migrated. Thanks!

Mail Again, Finally.

mpeesel — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 04:48:37 +0000

So it’s been a while, but I did finally get my mail again. It took almost a month and many phone calls, but the the good ol’ United States Post Office figured it out and started sending me mail again. Phew. I know it was something that many of you were concerned about, so thank you. If it happens to any of you, now I know what to do and can help you out. Basically, nothing.

More soon as I’m beginning to get active again. It’s been too long.

Happy New Year!

Post Office Fail – 3 weeks of lost mail!

mpeesel — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 06:15:41 +0000

So, A month ago today, our executive suites notified everyone that they couldn’t pay their bills and were shutting down operations in our Lakewood office. And, to top it off, all of us were being evicted (apparently one firm had JUST moved in the week before). We had or have, until December 1st to vacate.

Almost 3 weeks ago, after I forwarded all of our mail to a new PO Box, I suddenly stopped receiving mail. Nothing but an empty box day after day. I talked to my local post office and they all seemed fine to them, in fact, the postal worker said “the check’s in the mail” referring to having to wait for my mail patiently and that it would probably arrive. Not overly helpful and no other suggestions. He basically left me to deal with it on my own time and not his. Hm.

I called the Post office near our office and a nice woman (Leslie) said that in fact there had been a glitch in the software and that all of my mail was sitting in the forwarding facility somewhere here in Colorado, and that no, I couldn’t go there to collect my mail. She wouldn’t even tell me where it was; only that it was the facility where all the lonely pieces of mail went to get the little yellow forwarding stickers put on. She took my number and said she’d call back.

3 days later and nothing,until I finally get a call back (today) and it’s Leslie saying she found my mail and where should she send it. (I found it quite amusing that she would mail it to me). But, she guarantees I’ll have it tomorrow, apparently by some inter-office mail system and not the “real” mail system, because if you can’t trust your own system, you better have a trustworthy back up.

So, after more than 2 weeks of no mail, I should finally get it all tomorrow – if it doesn’t get lost in the mail again… I’ll let you know.