Debbie Weil is a corporate blogging and social media expert, online marketing consultant, speaker and author of The Corporate Blogging Book (Portfolio). She consults with large companies, CEOs and senior executives on how to create blogs that connect with customers and attract media attention.

Been collecting these for a week or so.

• Ran across this nifty page on Robert’s Echo blog. Includes everything from the "origin" of blogs, stats on blog readership, recommended PR blogs, link to a Forrester Research executive summary, lists of internal and external corporate blogs and more.

• Another page with all things blog (including links to RSS tutorials and basic blog definitions) penned by the Singapore-based Rambling Librarian.

• Comprehensive list from Dave Taylor’s Intuitive Life blog with links to other articles.

• 101 writing tips from Kari Chisholm on writing a thought leadership blog. (He writes a grassroots advocacy blog.)

Great article by MarketingSherpa’s Anne Holland on why “exact verbiage” is so important online. I.e. the specific words you use on landing pages, in text ads, on your site, on (yes) your blog…

You need to be aware of what keyword phrases your customers search on. That translates into how you’ll be found in the search engines. And you need to be absolutely consistent in your use of words and phrases in order to get higher response rates (more click-throughs) from online readers.

People like consistency. Sounds boring. But it’s not. When the title of your sponsor text ad matches the headline on your landing page, visitors know they’re in the right place… and what to do next. Click & buy.

Paul Rosenfeld, General Manager of Intuit’s QuickBooks Online, and his team had a great idea: why not start a blog to communicate with - and learn from - their 35,000 customers?

Paul is an informal kind of guy. A staff member suggested the blog one sunny Friday in Mountain View, CA. Paul said, "Why not." When he came in on Monday, lo and behold, the staffer had created a QuickBooks Online blog using TypePad. It was customized with the green header of the QuickBooks Online product page but wasn’t an exact replica.

“Hey,” Paul said. “This is great. Let’s go with it!”  Or something to that effect. The point, as he puts it, was to just start. (And by hosting the blog externally, he didn’t have to get on corporate IT’s lengthy action list.)

More Action / Less Talk
“Everyone (in big companies) thinks in terms of PowerPoint and big projects and lots of money. Our blog is an example of a lot of action and very little talking,” he said in an interview. “We’re very proud of it. It’s the first blog at Intuit.” (One other exists, for TurboTax, but it’s only open to registered users.)

Here’s a look at how Rosenfeld has developed the QuickBooks Online blog with the help of a handful of staffers, what they write about and lessons learned for other corporate managers harboring secret thoughts of blogging…

Continue reading Case Study of QuickBooks Online Blog

Halley Suitt is one of my favorite blog writers. Read her lovely, lyrical Beginning, Middle, End capturing the essence of her early morning routine at home with her son.

reBlog is a new service that I’ve been hearing about. I haven’t tried it yet but it sounds cool. In a nutshell, it enables you to re-publish snippets of content from other blogs you find interesting and useful. Check out the just-released reBlog v. 1.0. It works as a plug-in for Movable Type and WordPress. Thanks to Blog Business Summit for the reBlog tickler.

Amy Gahran’s Contentious outlines 7 formats for writing a blog. Want to learn more about writing a business blog? Tune in Wednesday, October 20th at 1 PM EST for BlogWrite: a 75-minute WordBiz teleseminar. Don K. Crowther and I will reveal a step-by-step formula for writing an effective business blog. We’ll answer questions such as:
- Should it be edited?
- Who should write it?
- What do you write about?
- How do you develop a blogging “voice” & style appropriate for your company or organization?
- How do you develop a corporate blogging policy?

If you can’t attend on Oct. 20th, you can order the Audio CD and edited PDF transcript.
Continue reading “BlogWrite: how do you write a blog?”