How much time does blogging take?

If you’re considering to start a blog, how much time will it take? If you’re already blogging, do you spend too much time, or not enough? The answer to these questions depend on many parameters, but at least, a few benchmarks can help.

The monthly time to run a blog is simple math. Multiply the average hours you spend per article by the number of articles you intend to post. Then add an overhead percentage for the nurturing time to promote your blog, moderate comments, participate to the blogosphere, …

Is microblogging suitable for business marketing?

If you're a business marketer and worried that you're missing the boat on microblogging, don't be too much concerned. The uses for microblogging in business are rather limited. But microblogging has some potential to become a productive part of the future business marketing mix.

40 online marketing methods

Inspired by an article from Junta42, hereby the ultimate list of web-based methods to provide relevant content to users. These can be used for business development, non-profit marketing or to build strong reputations and brands online.

Establishing thought leadership
First a group of techniques to upgrade your users, while establishing you as a thought leader on your subject.

#1 Blogs: the ideal method to build up audiences, to integrate your various content streams on the internet and to support your corporate web presence. With their natural fit to SEO and social bookmarking tools, a blog in your niche can be invaluable.
#2 White papers: build a library of white papers, i.e. persuasive briefing documents on issues in your sector. A white paper is typically 8-10 pages long, and contains about 15,000 characters in a simple, airy layout with ample functional graphics and tables.

10 ideas to liven up your blog

So you’ve set up your web application and have been consistently posting for a couple of weeks/months. Visits have grown, but you seem to be stuck at a few dozen visitors per day, or 100 visits on a good day. Here are a few ideas how you could bring your blog to the next level:

1. (Minor impact) Use social bookmarking - self-promotion is frowned upon in social bookmarking; adding social bookmarking buttons however facilitates your users to bookmark your pages.
2. (Major impact) Ensure easy syndication of your feed(s). In a future post, I’ll have to write an article on feedburner, a one stop source of promotion tools for your blog, which can save you a lot of time and trouble.
3. (Minor impact) Comment on other blogs: something that you should do anyway (provided you have something to say). As an added benefit, most blogs allow you to specify a link to your blog when commenting.
4. (Minor impact) Register your blog on various blog directories - a huge effort to become one in a large crowd.
5. (Major impact) Establish contact with like-minded bloggers. I don’t mean ‘add them to your blogroll’, but become a regular reader and commenter on their blogs, inviting/offering guest editorials, performing interviews, …
6. (unknown impact) Organise a blog marathon (at an appropriate time). Doing this too early, and the effort may be wasted. A marathon is also a great means to increase the content on your blog. The marathon does not need to be 24 hours blogging. It might as well be spread out over a week - a couple of hours per day.
7. (Major impact) Write a few pillar articles, i.e. longer articles of about 500 words than can act as a reference on their subject. Typically, these articles have a much longer lifetime than the typical blog article.
8. (Major impact) Set up a top 10 of most popular or most voted stories. This tends to bring in 1000s or 10,000s hits for the most popular stories over time. Consider also a bottom 10.
9. (Major impact) Send out a monthly digest to a permission based e-mail subscription list. Or include the digest as an article in your newsletter.
10. (Major impact) Add pictures, provided they are functional.

Applying these tricks consistently over a period of time, while continuing to write premium content is a sure recipe for success, but easier said than done.

The Corporate Blogging Book

If you’re a business marketeer, considering blogging for your organisation, or a blogging evangelist preparing to introduce blogging in your organisation, Debbie Weil’s book is for you.

Not only does it contain a 360 degree description on the blogosphere. The book also includes a selling kit for the skeptics, and prepares you for the cultural barriers you might face. A few of the arguments:

• Blogging allows organisations to communicate more easily, more broadly and more regularly
• From talking to the media, you become part of the media, and have the possibility to communicate directly with your target audience

A common theme is the continuum between e-mail and blogs. If you accept that blogs are a logical extension of e-mail, it can be quite liberating to write blog posts as if you were writing e-mails. This gives blogs their conversational style and puts a face behind the communication.

It also works the other way - write e-mails as if you were writing blog posts. If you keep in mind that you’re e-mail will ‘live forever’ on the web, it helps to avoid some of the pitfalls of using e-mail. And in some cases, the e-mail you’ve taking trouble to compose might be a very suitable blog posts, re-using the content you’ve already created for other’s benefit.

In between e-mails and blog posts, we have group mails, typically used by project teams for planning and decision making. Why not manage your project through a blog? It gives you the benefit that all project team members have the same repository to refer to, and gives an access point for briefing new team members joining in the middle of the project. And for older team members more comfortable with e-mail than blogs, you can offer e-mail subscription in parallel to a blog feed.

Debbie Weil devotes some pages to describe the emerging trend of executive blogging, a small but fast growing niche of the blogosphere. Especially for this group, blogging is not without a downside, which can be managed, if properly taken into account.

This book is not a practical step-by-step howto guide into the blogosphere. But if you’re tasked within your organisation to evaluate the pros and cons of blogs, you should not do it without reading Debbie Weil.

What’s next for (business) blogging?

Some changes in the marketing blogosphere may be a signal of things to come.

This view is necessarily colored by the sub-segment of the blogosphere I observe, i.e. blogs about business marketing, technology, knowledge management, content management and social entrepreneurship. It represent a particular view, focussing on content-rich, technology-oriented business blogs.

Amazing tools for marketers

Content management and knowledge management are important for business marketing. Some amazing tools are available such as diigo or drupal. Diigo is absolutely fantastic for annotated browsing and collaborative bookmarking, while drupal is a unique content management system.

Also Junta42 deserves mentioning, a vertical bookmarking tool for content marketers that makes the internet a better place for professionals in this sector. Google rolls out one relevant tool after another. The list could go on for a while, but for those among us willing to try new things, exciting times are most certainly ahead.

Content is king, and value/relevance to readers its queen

Last year, Jakob Nielsen published a widely read and discussed manifesto that bloggers should write articles, not posts. If we go today through Marketo’s list of 138 business blogs, one cannot help to observe, and should be grateful that most blogs limit themselves to one or few posts per week, but posts are becoming longer - typically about 2 pages long or about 3,000 to 7,000 characters.

So less frequency and more depth - a bit of reflection is not a bad thing for the marketing blogosphere.

From mantra’s to experimentation

The presumptions on how blogs should be written have calmed down, and we’re becoming more open to learn from each other on how to use a relatively new and complex medium.

Increasing interest from non-bloggers

The skepticism of non-bloggers is making way for interest to explore the medium. It remains a daunting task to launch and run a blog for a prolonged period of time - setup is easy enough, but it’s quite something else to define a blog project, and organising it for delivering regular quality content over time. IT illiteracy may also be an influencing factor.

Concluding

So good news overall. We’re getting much better tools and more interest, while we can continue to experiment and learn. But with increasing competition, we’ll have to work even harder to deserve and retain reader attention through relevant quality content.

Do you agree, or better, disagree? I’d love to hear from you on your views where (business) blogging is going.
See also
INTERACTIVE MARKETING BLOG: Blog, Blog & more Blogs; So where are we heading?

What no one ever tells you about blogging and podcasting

Ted Demopoulos bundled 101 case studies on blogging and podcasting in 8 themes (basics, business uses, planning, making money, promoting, podcasts, other and the future). The idea is simple, but inspiring through its excellent selection of the case studies.


With 101 bloggers covered, the book gives a broad description of the blogosphere in its various segments: blogs, book blogs, podcasts, blog networks and even splogs.

The book lends itself well for modular reading. Just flip it open, and read any of the case studies. A few of the fascinating case studies:

• #17, the use of blogging as a sales research tool
• #27, 800-CEO-READ, a website, blogs and podcasts about business books
• #35, GMP Training, using their blog as a web portal
• …

This book targets bloggers who have already covered the basics, set-up their blog and want to broaden their horizon on the blogosphere. But even seasoned bloggers could pick up an idea or two.

And as a small bonus, the book is also full of benchmarks from other blogs that allow you to check how well you are doing as a blogger.

How much time does blogging really take?

Another year’s gone, and the time-sheets are processed. Hereby a few benchmarks for our blogs at Leonardo ENERGY.

The length of our posts varies between 100 and 500 words, and takes us between 0.5 and 6 hours, depending on the amount of fact checking needed (as well as insight checking) and how straightforward it is to structure the story. Taking a median of 2 hours per post and 2 weekly posts consumes half a day per week for content.

Added to this comes scouting for new stories. We monitor a number of RSS feeds through Google Reader. Clearing these takes about half an hour per day, but not all this time should be allocated to blogging. Keeping up to speed on your sector has value and you probably should do it, even when not blogging.

Count an hour per week for maintenance, i.e. editing your about pages, managing your tag cloud, installing plug-ins, editing the side bar, handling occasional server problems, etc

Joining the blogosphere means participating. It means commenting on other blogs in your sector, promoting your blog through forums, directories, social bookmarking etc. Another hour per week?

So overall, a content blog producing a couple of articles per week takes about 20% of a person-week, though it does not need to come from a single person. You can divide the roles of blogmaster (20%), editor (20%) and copywriter (60%). The role of copywriter can be easily outsourced.

Above applies to a single blog. Running multiple blogs rapidly produces scale economies. At least, you can share systems, intelligence and even content. In our experience, we spend about 60% of a person to run 7 blogs.

Not all blogs need to be in-depth content. For example, our photoblog takes about half an hour per week. As a side benefit, its indexed photostream is very popular with search engines, giving us the kind of advertising that money couldn’t buy.

The ultimate lists of business marketing blogs

Two must-have resources for any business marketer

Thanks to Jon and Joe, we now have 2 ‘ultimate lists’ of business marketing blogs, which complement each other very nicely.

Many of you will already know Jon Miller (Marketo)’s big list of b2b marketing blogs. With its recent addition of 50, it lists 138 b2b blogs. But best of all, Jon also offers an up-to-date OPML file allowing you to subscribe to this list in your reader with a few clicks.

Big List of B2B Marketing Blogs | Modern B2B Marketing Blog | Marketo
50 New B2B Marketing Blogs | Modern B2B Marketing Blog | Marketo

Complementary to this, Junta42 has just launched its list of top and upcoming content marketing blogs, which lists 82. The additional twist is that registered Junta42 users can vote on the blogs listed, adding a user ranking to the Junta42 rank.

The bloglist of Junta42 is only one of the site’s features. Mainly, Junta42 is a vertical social bookmarking site for content marketers. Registering for a free Junta42 account not only allows you to vote on your favourite marketing blogs, but also submit your favourite bookmarks, or vote and comment on others’ submissions.

So if you’re a professional marketer, involved in business marketing, the following actions should take less than an hour, and offer the best return ever on your time invested:

• get Jon’s OPML listing, and subscribe to the ultimate list of marketing blogs in your reader
• register for a Junta42 account and vote on the recent bookmarks and top blog listing

Voting on content

Voting on resources is about the leanest feedback you can set-up for users. It provides a first step to involve users in a community.

It can be done in several ways:

• a vote (e.g. Digg)
• voting up or down (e.g. Reddit, Squidoo)
• a 5-star rating (e.g. Google Groups)

What’s the value of votes? Users may rate quality, but they might as well be voting on interest, relevance, novelty, visual appearance, or even entertainment value. Giving guidance on voting is basically a waste of time - most users will not read it. As a result, votes are a metric that requires substantial interpretation.

Extreme votes (all 1 or 5 stars) give strong signals about reader approval or disapproval. Typically though, voting converges on the 3 to 4 star ratings, and the metric becomes the number of votes, rather than the rating itself. What matters is that readers have responded. The impact is deeper than a page view, but lower than a comment received.

For B2B sites, it makes sense to limit voting to registered users only. It ensures that only your target audience votes, and also improves the homogeneity of the vote. But it limits the voting universe

Voting allows you to make a ‘highest rated’ list, in parallel to the typical ‘most viewed’ list.

RSS in 3.5 minutes

A great 3.5 minute video to introduce the power of RSS. If you’re new to rss, watching this video could be your best 3.5 minute investment for this year.

Social bookmarking

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.


Many blogs offer social bookmarking buttons to promote posts. According to Wikipedia, social bookmarking is a web-based service to share Internet bookmarks. Social bookmarking (SB) sites are a popular way to store, classify, share and search links. One of the more popular SB sites is del.icio.us. After creating an account in minutes, users bookmark favourite pages. A first major feature of bookmarking sites is tagging - rather than organising bookmarks in directories, as would happen in the favourites folder of internet explorer, users attach multiple tags to bookmarks. Secondly, bookmarks are shared, giving users an indicator of their popularity. Finally, users can comment and sometimes rate/vote on bookmarks.

Now what happens if you offer SB buttons on your blog: users having an account with an SB site can bookmark your articles with a single click. If a user bookmarks a page of your blog, this link will have a prominent position on the roll of some SB sites, until the next link is bookmarked. This prominent position is a great way to launch content. But for a tool such as del.icio.us, the appearance on the home page will be normally less than a minute, which will not do much. Here, your hope is that several users bookmark the same article, so that it becomes popular in its tag category.

Social bookmarking does not come without pitfalls. Self-promotion tends to be frowned upon. And because of its ease of use, SB is a highly competitive and noisy environment. It’s also a medium more oriented towards a general public than towards professionals.

It’s worth checking the culture of various SB tools before getting involved. Digg.com is more (internet) technology oriented. Care2.com focusses on environmental and social causes. And some sites, such as reddit.com can be a bit abrasive at times.

Finally, if you want to avoid going through the trouble of selecting and adding individual SB buttons on your site, use addthis.com, giving all buttons in one, leaving the choice to the user. At the same time, addthis gives a comprehensive overview of SB tools currently available.

Interview with Dave Jung, lustrum blogger

Dave Jung has been running b2blog for 5 years. Thanks Dave for accepting to participate to this e-mail interview:

1) What started b2blog?
The original title of the blog was “The one-man marketing blog”. I am the solo marketer here at my employer, and I wanted to reach out to others like me.

I was struggling with decisions about when to quit traditional promotions like trade directories and magazines, and how much to invest in ‘new media’. It was a time of flux and seemingly important decisions that had to be made. I was hoping to find others to discuss them with–or at least discuss with myself (which is how a blog works for me).

2) Is b2blog the oldest b2b blog?
Hmm. That was five years ago. Looking through my bookmarks (from before RSS was invented), I did find one. It was Poelog, and interestingly enough, it was written by a fellow in the same city, working for a major manufacturer here. He started in May of 2001, lost steam in 2004, and finally called his blog dead last year.
It is still rare to find ‘marketing cogs in the machine’ like myself blogging. Most of the b2b marketing bloggers are working at agencies or are consultants.

3) What was the concept behind b2blog 5 years ago? How has it evolved?
I’m surprised by how much hasn’t evolved, to be frank. It apparently was a fully-realized concept at the start, I just couldn’t see the end-product without making it. Kind of like getting married: you look at this woman, feel like getting married, and do it. Then, ten, (or in my case 17) years later, you look back, satisfied.

4) During the period, did you experience (m)any blogging dips? How did you overcome them?
I’ve had a couple periods where I hadn’t posted in two or three weeks. But blogging was still in the back of my mind. To get out of the dip, I’ll pick a simple, timely, and fun subject to post about.

A couple times I’ve burdened myself with a subject that was too complicated to easily post about and get stuck with writer’s block. In those cases, I’ve found it easier to turn the post into a ‘questioning’ article just to get it done and past–and hope a couple readers comment on it and help me out.

5) How do you evaluate the experience after 5 years? What’s the main thing that made it worth your while?
Without a doubt, the greatest thing about blogging is talking to my readers. Comments on the blog, private emails, and even the occasional phone call are things that you don’t see on the the blog itself, but that really are the heart of B2Blog. As much as blogging is a solitary pursuit, it is also all about community.

To that point, I encourage readers to reach out to the bloggers they read. Post comments, ask questions, even contradict them. Both bloggers and readers will get so much more out of the blogoshere.

6) What’s next for b2blog?
Good question. I still write for myself, so the question kind of is, what is next for Dave Jung? I think I need to grow into my ‘manager’ title, so you may see more posts pondering what it takes to be an effective marketing manager.

Starting your b2blog - choices, choices, ...

So you decided to start a b2blog. Take a moment of reflection to decide a few important parameters of your blog:

1. Think who you will be blogging for? Your customers, your employees, your industry? But beware! Blogs are not surgical market instruments
2. Define the scope of your blog: this can be your organisation, market, industry, a project, … The scope can be either broad or narrow, and can evolve over time.
3. Find (a) good blogger(s): one or more individuals with both knowledge and writing skills to animate your blog
4. Decide frequency of updates: blogs are typically updated daily, but can you maintain this rythm? Frequent posting buries premium content, but gives the impression of a lively blog, and induces recurring visits. I suggest you start low (1-3 posts /week), giving each post a few days of exposure. You can always increase, in phase with your growing readership.
5. Decide user interaction: Can users post? Can they comment? Do you allow anonymous users to contribute? (beware of comment spam!), or only registered users? You need to think about the hierarchy of users and moderators, and preferrably qualify users before allowing them more privileges.
6. Your feedback to users: some blogs allow users to vote on comment. Some include hit counters per post, with lists of popular content. Also, a tagcloud can help users understand what your blog is about.
7. Define a blog policy, and publish it: this is your contract with your readers, and also your defense against abusive comments.
8. Select a blogging platform: there are many good systems available, e.g. Typepad, Moveable Type, Wordpress. Some content management systems, such as drupal, also allow blogs.
9. Check how your blog project integrates in your website, and other marketing communications.

But don’t overdo it! Take a few days or weeks to reflect on above. But don’t set up a corporate review committee, which would go quite against the spirit of blogging. And remember, the only way to learn blogging is by doing it.

How easily can you become a successful blogger

Referring to this ProBlogger post, it appears to be the marketing blogosphere is divided into those who blog about blogging (or internet marketing), and those using blogging as part of a broader approach. For both, traffic is a main goal, but towards a different end.

The former category needs to develop traffic for ad revenue. Only a fraction of visitors viewing pages will click-through on the ads, and for the freelance blogger, only these count for generating revenue.

For the blogger using the medium as part of a marketing approach, it’s page views that count, or actually, the action taken by the user. Again, only a fraction of visitors will enquire and become prospects. But the value of a prospect in B2B will be much higher than the value of a click.