Count yet another large corporation among the blogging ranks. Dell launched its business blog in early July, and it’s an interesting case study in how businesses should/should not blog.

Thumbs up to the Dell design team for the blog. It is well-structured and has some features that readers will frequently use on the blog sidebar. Readers can see most viewed posts, posts with the most comments and a suggestion box feature. It also includes blog staples like categories, an archive and a blogroll.

The most impressive feature is the suggestion box. Clicking this link reveals a link that allows you, the reader, to suggest a topic. Many business bloggers suffer from writer’s block, and what’s a better way to get ideas for content than to ask your reader?

On the flip side, the contributors to the blog don’t do the best job of relating to the customer. Read the Dell and The Better Business Bureau post from the VP of Corporate Communications, and you’ll read just that — corporate communications.

Dell really opens itself up to criticism when its Director of Global eCommerce blogs about the new homepage. You’re certainly going to get negative feedback when you ask the blogosphere open-ended questions like “So, tell me, what you think of the home page of Dell.com?” If the Director would have instead posted to the blog that he was looking for some Dell customers to answer some basic questions about the new homepage design and allowed them to contact him, he would have gotten better results. He could then have posted the outcome of that exercise in a more brand-friendly way.

An early post to the blog entitled “Real People are Here and We’re Listening” directly reacts to what other bloggers had said about the Dell blog. As a customer, this probably isn’t helpful to you or something you want to read. As a reader, you expect real people to be listening, so Dell doesn’t need to come out and tell you that. Instead, Dell would have been better-served to read other bloggers’ reactions and make improvements. As the content improves, readers will know you are listening.

Dell has also done some video blogging as evidenced by the Dell Store Opens its Doors in Dallas post, which features a Sales Director at Dell talking about a new mall store in Dallas. While I applaud Dell for video blogging and testing that technology, the content of this video was only mildly interesting to those in the Dallas area. Viewers had to endure the dialog about how the store is “an extension of the direct model” and other jargon-filled conversation. A tour of the store would have been nice, but without the sales pitches and business jargon.

My advice to Dell? Use the blog as a channel for feedback — but not the only source of feedback. Be very careful of your tone and the content of the blog in general. Customers don’t want to hear business jargon like the first three paragraphs of the “Dell and The Better Business Bureau” post — they want to hear how to use Dell products to enhance their computing experiences. Offer the customers ways to use their Dell products in ways they hadn’t thought of and include some how-to advice.

After attending a recent business blogging seminar, I realized that most business managers really want to build a business case for blogging. After all, blogging takes time away from other business activities and requires a good amount of effort, so wouldn’t it be helpful to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of a business blog?

When I’ve pitched business blogs in the past, the client nearly always asked what the benefits of a blog were. The reasons to maintain a business blog include creating a sense of community with your customers, getting feedback from your customers, generating fresh content for your web site, building company credibility and improving search engine visibility, just to name a few. That was always good enough for the client. I’ve never been asked to specify the ROI of a business blog. Eventually, someone will ask, though.

But is there a way to calculate a return on investment of a business blog? I turned to the web, thinking that someone had already answered the question. What I found out is that other attempts to calculate business blog ROI had been somewhat futile.

After some thought, I decided that it would be possible to calculate the monetary value of a business blog by applying ecommerce metrics. Treating your business blog as a sales channel allows you to quantify the monetary return.

Most internet retailers religiously follow many site metrics, including conversion rate (buyers/visitors) and revenue per visit (revenue/site visits). The higher these metrics, the more effective the site is at generating revenue. The same metrics can be applied to a business blog.

I’m making the broad assumption that your business blog follows sound blog effectiveness principles — you have a good web analytics solution in place, you provide links in your blog to products/services on your web site and you provide a way for customers to contact you directly from the blog.

If all of this is true, you can relate revenue back to your blog. Through path analysis, you can find out what pages customers visited. If the path included a look at your blog and later a purchase or a successful completion of a contact form, you can relate the revenue generated to the blog. For a service provider like me, I have the contact form tagged in such a way that I can distinguish blog contacts from regular web site contacts. If a contact becomes a client, the fees get associated to the blog or to the site (or to paid search, offline advertising, other online advertising, etc.).

	actual revenue	% of revenue
Referrals
Face-to-face networking
Offline advertising
Search engines
Contacts from blog

Examining your web analytics will reveal how many visitors read the blog during the given time period, and this number is used to calculate your revenue per visit. The number of purchases or leads resulting from a path through the blog is used to calculate your conversion rate.

What you’ve now got is an apples-to-apples comparison between the blog and the web site. That’s not all, however. There are other benefits of the blog that are a bit less scientific, including search engine visibility. You can calculate the increase in traffic as a result of having the business blog by analyzing the referring sources of your traffic. You can make the assumption that a majority of visitors that find your business blog through search engines might not have otherwise found your site.

For those business managers who need a business case to blog, I hope this helps. I welcome your feedback if you have other ideas.

Business blogging is starting to take hold, so I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about some practical tips for great blog design. Designing an effective blog is critical to the success of your web site since a blog will attract search engine traffic to your site, and it could likely be the first interaction people have with your company. With that in mind, here are some practical tips to make your blog as effective as possible.

Have an objective. Whether you maintain a blog as a search engine optimization tool, a channel to promote sales and promotions or communicate with your customers, you need to make sure that your blog is designed with an objective in mind. The objective for my blog is to establish credibility with potential clients and to share knowledge with others in the industry. This objective keeps me focused on what to write about, how to write and who my target audience is.

Your blog design should have the same design as your web site. It’s usually appropriate to design your blog to look like the rest of your web site. This serves two purposes. First, you reassure readers that the blog content is coming from your company. Second, it gives the reader a chance to explore other sections of your web site after they are finished reading your blog. Many web searchers will find your blog first, and if your blog looks like your web site and contains the same top navigation and footer as your site, it gives them a chance to further interact with you or your company.

Write for your audience. While writing isn’t design-related, it certainly plays a large role in the effectiveness of your blog. Make sure that you use language that’s appropriate to your audience. A non-technical blog shouldn’t be written with a lot of technical jargon. Personally, I like to maintain a conversational but intelligent tone, and I think my audience respects that.

Remember, you maintain a blog because you have something to say. If you’re an expert in your field, make sure you provide the appropriate background for your reader. On this web site effectiveness blog, I assume that my readers are site managers, designers, and small business owners. They may have heard of some of the concepts I blog about, but my blog attempts to shed light on why it’s important and how they can use these concepts to their advantage.

Allow users to search your blog. Since blogs typically have hundreds of posts, it’s a good idea to allow people to search past posts. If a reader comes to your blog and finds a recent post interesting, they may want to search old posts for more information. By allowing users to search your blog, you are engaging them and making your content as accessible to them as possible. Make sure your blog design includes the search box in a visible spot on the page so people can find it.

Include information about you or your company. When people read blogs, they may question the credibility of the author. Giving the reader access to more information about the person or company maintaining the blog is helpful to establish the required amount of credibility. You can include more information about yourself or your company through a link to another page or a short blurb about you, and you’ll want to locate this on a sidebar or secondary spot on the page. It’s best to include this on every page of your blog since readers may find a particular post on your blog without visiting the main blog homepage.

Choose color carefully. My design philosophy is “less is more,” and I prefer a simple design with appropriate splashes of color when needed. I typically like to use black text on a white background as this is easiest on the blog readers’ eyes. There are certainly valid reasons to using colored backgrounds and colored text, but make sure that there’s enough contrast between the two so the reader can easily read your content. Use color to highlight areas that you want readers to see but don’t distract them from the content.

Don’t just write — link. When writing your blog posts, link to content that’s relevant to what you are blogging about. You may want to link to a page on your site but outside of your blog that discusses a particular product or service, or you may want to link to a related blog post. For search engine optimization and usability purposes, it’s best to link phrases in your blog post to other pages on your site that relate to what you are writing about. Don’t overdo it, though‚Äîyou want to make sure your site is easily readable.

Include or link to a contact form. Depending on the objective of your blog, it is usually appropriate to link to or include a contact form on a secondary part of your blog design. Usually this would be the sidebar area or the bottom of the page depending on your blog design. Ideally you should try to put contact info in the same proximity on the page to content that the user finds relevant.

Have separate pages for single posts and archives. While the homepage of your blog is meant to show users a few recent posts, you shouldn’t include all of your blog posts on the homepage. Ideally, the title that you write for a post should link to a page containing the entire contents of that blog post, including comments if you allow users to write them. Additionally, most blogging applications will organize your content into archives, typically by month. You should link to your archives on every page of your blog so readers can find them and search engines can index them.

Blog commenting — friend or foe? Some blogs allow readers to leave comments on their posts, while others don’t allow readers to comment. While each argument carries merit, the ability for users to leave comments is not appropriate for some blogs. If you do decide to include comments in your blog design, they should come at the end of each blog post. Make sure you have a good comment spam prevention system installed.

Include an RSS feed. While RSS is not a mainstream content delivery method to most internet users, it is gaining popularity. Readers can view your content in an RSS reader or aggregator. When readers read your blog via RSS, they don’t actually visit your web site, so putting links in your blog posts become increasingly important. Another RSS best practice is to configure your blogging application to include some information about you or your company in each blog post. A short blurb can automatically be added to your blog post in some of the more common blogging applications.

Wrapping it up

Some practical thought about who will read your blog and how they will find your blog will give you some ideas about the most effective blog design. Remember to keep the objective in mind, and write, write, write!

Small businesses take note — did you know that only 5.8% of the Fortune 500 are blogging?

By utilizing a blog now, you will gain loyal customers and better search engine rankings. There is an opportunity to take advantage of blogging as a marketing technique before the “big guys” catch on, and using these practical tips for a better blog design will help you build an effective online marketing tool that will attract new customers and keep existing customers engaged.

Quite a few friends and family members have asked me recently about blogs. I just created a baseball blog for my uncle (he’s a huge Washington Nationals fan). Besides being fun if you’re a subject matter expert, blogs can help your business get found by search engines. The premise is that a blog produces fresh and orginal content, which search engines like. Blogs are often updated frequently, so search engines “learn” to visit the blog site more frequently for content.

The Ecommerce Times just published a piece on blogs, and it’s an interesting read if you’re unfamiliar with how blogging can benefit your business. Read the article for more information.

Take this search engine marketing blog, for instance. I’m a search engine marketing and ecommerce web design guru, but no one will know unless I can prove that I have a pulse on the industry and can share my own commentary and successes. Blogs are a way to build credibility and exposure.

If you’d like to establish a blog of your own, there are a few platforms you can use. There are some free systems out there that will host your blog for you. They are Blogger (which I use) and TypePad.

You can also install software on an existing server, which costs a little bit of money (less than $100) and extra time. The most popular software for existing servers is Movable Type and WordPress.

Blogging isn’t for everyone and doesn’t benefit every business, but for those with good information to share, it can make a lot of sense. If you’d like to learn more, contact me and we’ll discuss it.