An introduction to blogging for PR professionals

By Peter Brady, CEO of social media agency Orbital Media

August 2010

Introduction

The world of blogs offers PR professionals a fantastic medium for reaching and engaging with
their target audiences. But how do you set up and generate content for client blogs with
measurable results, what advice can you pass on to clients about how to blog themselves and
what are the best strategies for communicating with and influencing bloggers?

Background

Public relations professionals, both agency and internal, have long professed that their craft is
built around strong relationships and newsworthy press releases that lure weary journalists in
with a targeted hook. They have bemoaned the general public’s ignorance of the behind-the-
scenes frantic calls, which led to all-important column inches.

And then along came online PR, social media and blogging and changed the future of marketing
communications forever.

Those with foresight embraced the emergence of this new way of disseminating news to the
world as a positive move: they recognised that it had the potential to empower individuals to
work alongside PR professionals and journalists, encourage debate and freedom of speech on a
grand scale and bring news to the world far quicker than any medium to date.

Why should PR professionals bother with blogs?

While many public relations professionals already appreciate the value of social media, the world
of blogging is still a largely missed opportunity for the majority. Misconceptions over the reasons
for blogging together with a misunderstanding of blogging etiquette and widespread trepidation
over how to approach the “blogosphere” are the main reasons holding people back.

And yet there are some compelling business reasons why blogs should be high on the PR
agenda. They offer international reach in an era of intense globalisation, whilst blog posts are
permanent and offer cost effective ongoing exposure through organic search engine results. In a
world of rapid communications they offer “viral” distribution opportunities, magnifying the
potential exposure of a PR campaign.

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From a Return On Investment (ROI) perspective, blogs and social media are an excellent way to
create a long term communication connection between user and company via subscriptions to
blog RSS feeds, e-newsletters, Twitter and Facebook. This creation of online communities,
incorporating like-minded individuals, is fast becoming one of the most cost effective methods
for companies to influence, inform and convert transactions – and blogs are at the epicentre of
this.

In addition to helping you build contacts within your industry or your client’s, many prominent
blogs now break news stories and in some cases have become more trusted than more
traditional media. Huffington Post, Lifehacker, Techcrunch and Engadget are some good
examples of this.

Operating a popular blog can provide the ideal platform for seeding a PR message. Why? One
reason is that it can give you a genuine, more subtle reason to contact another blogger, as
opposed to reverting to a cold call or spammy email. Running your own blog gives you the
ability to link to other blogs, which can also be a superbly subtle way to get onto a blogger’s
radar, enabling the cultivation of long term relationships for future campaigns. Finally, blogs can
humanise companies and brands by allowing customer participation and feedback.

Beyond just a standalone social media tool, a blog can become the focal point of your social
media presence. Tools like Social RSS, Twitterfeed and Hootsuite allow you to push a summary
of your blog’s content to a company or client social network page like Twitter or Facebook. This
means you can use a blog for disseminating information and news across multiple social
network channels, all at the same time.

It’s worth noting that Google and other search engines actively promote blogging as a way to
grow presence online. See the opinion of Senior Google Engineer Matt Cutts on this very subject
here. The main reason blogs are effective within search engines is because they tend to attract
inbound links and they help target what’s called “long tail keywords”, or many combinations of
multiple keywords in search engines. In other words, blogs act as natural search engine
optimisers. They can also help target PR campaign keywords in search engines, important if
your client needs a story to be found easily online via particular search terms.

If you’re still unconvinced about the importance of blogs, social media, and online media in
general, bear in mind that as of September 2009 the amount spent on internet advertising in the
UK overtook television advertising to reach a record £1.75bn for the first six months of the year,
according to a report by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

To put this in perspective, in 1998, when the IAB first measured internet advertising, just £19.4m
was spent online. Ultimately, where advertising goes, PR will follow.

So you understand why blogging is important. What next?

The best way to understand how blogs can be used to push out a message is to get your hands
dirty, become a blogger yourself and use your blog to help seed online PR campaigns. Having
firsthand experience of blogging will not only make it easier for you to articulate the benefits of
blogging to your clients, it will also help you understand how to optimise your PR campaigns for
blogs and social networks and gauge the importance of metrics analysis.

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Ten key steps to setting up a blog

1. Choose a good blogging software. One of the easiest and best-performing platforms is
Wordpress, but others include Moveable Type, Drupal, Expression Engine, and Blogger.
Wordpress allows a variety of simple customisation options through downloadable
plugins. Important plugins to consider include Akismet (anti comment spam plugin), All
in One SEO Pack (automated SEO tool), Sociable (social bookmarking plugin),
Contextual Related Posts (pulls in related posts alongside a post).

2. Always choose/purchase your own domain www.exampledomain.com as opposed to

subdomains offered on hosted blogging platforms e.g
www.exampledomain.blogspot.com. This is important because subdomain blogs hosted
by the likes of Wordpress and Google (.blogspot.com) offer severe limitations in terms of
customisation, ugly sub domain URLs and ultimately you are beholden to the company
providing the parent domain. Also, if you’re one of the lucky ones to have a successful
blog on your hands, you’ll find the sale value of your blog is markedly diminished by a
sub domain.

3. Do some keyword research in relation to your blog topic. Use keyword tools like Google
Keyword Tool or Wordtracker to understand what people are searching for. And use
important keywords to label your blog’s archive categories, as this is a particularly
strong location to rank well in search engines for those keywords.

4. Identify what people are looking for and questions that are being asked online in your
niche. Use a tool like Wordtracker Keyword Questions, and then consider how your blog
can provide the answers.

5. Ensure that blog post title keywords appear in the URL e.g www.example.com/tips-
about-blogging as opposed to www.example.com/?p=123. This is believed to be more
effective from a search engine ranking perspective.

6. Submit a sitemap of your blog to Google Webmaster Tools. This tells Google directly
about the structure of your new blog and helps identify any issues or errors. It’s also
important to ensure that Google visits only one version of your URL, i.e either
www.exampledomain.com or exampledomain.com. You can easily make this explicitly
clear to Google within Webmaster Tools by selecting how you want your URL to appear.

7. Provide an ‘about’ page setting out the objectives and purpose of your blog and give
your blog authority by providing bio pages for your authors.

8. Your blog represents an important place to make users aware of your other social
network platforms and to get them following what you are saying in the future. As
alluded to earlier in this paper, the ability to create communities of like-minded
individuals offers long term marketing opportunities and improved ROI. Therefore you
need to set up icons to your social networks in the top part of your blog (above the fold
or in the bit of the site that is always first visible on your home page) linked to the RSS
feed, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube etc.

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 9. Email is still an important means of communication, so providing a summary of your
blog posts in an e-newsletter can be another effective way of communicating. This can
easily be achieved by using a service such as Aweber, which automatically strips your
blog content from an RSS feed and summarises into a weekly or monthly newsletter.

10. Google provide a series of excellent webmaster guidelines for managing an effective
blog or web site. One of its key recommendations is to keep the number of hyperlinks
on any one page “to a reasonable level”. This is widely interpreted to mean below 100
links.

Tips and tricks for popular content

It’s important to launch your blog with content rather than as an empty shell. But generating the
right content is essential to getting the most from the social medium.

Aim to be original, engaging and where possible try to break new ground. Regardless of the
subject matter, you should always set out to be transparent and approachable as a blogger, not
to mention authentic and truthful. You will soon get caught out if you’re hawking half truths. Your
objective should be to provoke discussion and reaction.

Keep blog post titles short and punchy and limit your blog posts to within 500 words; attention
spans are short online. Grab your reader’s attention within the first paragraph of your blog post.
And bear in mind that “top tens” and bullet point lists can be very popular.

A good way to engage with online users is to poll opinion, using software like Survey Monkey
and collating the resulting data into a blog post. This can help identify new trends, which can be
promoted to other blogs.

Tools like Google Trends, Tweetdeck or Twitter Hashtags are helpful for analysing keyword
search trends. These will help you identify popular blog topics in your niche or your client’s
niche.

Link back to related content in your archives from within your new blog posts. This keeps
archives alive and improves the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) of a blog.

Use imagery within blog posts that is properly labelled and obviously with suitable copyright
approvals. You should also consider embedding video (e.g via Youtube) or Powerpoint
presentations (via Slideshare) into your blog posts. This all helps to keep posts engaging and
informative.

Finally, find your blogging rhythm. Identify how often you can post to your blog and stick to it.
Search engines and readers alike will come to expect fresh content at a certain frequency.

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You’ve got your shiny new blog, but what can you do with it?

Creating a new blog is just the start. For it to be successful and work for you, it is important to
grow your blog and reach audiences. Here’s how.

Once it’s up and running, promote your blog content to Twitter using Twitterfeed and to
Facebook using Social RSS. You should also encourage your readership to bookmark your
content within social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Fark, Stumbleupon. Don’t forget to tell
other bloggers in your niche about your blog - more about this below.

Use a variety of metrics data to check where your traffic is coming from, which of your articles
are popular and how you are appearing in search engines - then use this data to tweak how you
blog. Again, you can identify hot topics by analysing keyword search trends using Google
Trends or Twitter Hashtags. Site metrics packages for measuring traffic levels and where your
traffic comes from are invaluable. Ones to consider include Google Analytics, Sitemeter and
AWstats.

Another top ten - this time, using a blog to get noticed in the blogosphere

1. Comment knowledgeably on other blogs, whilst leaving your blog’s URL where prudent
and permissible to do so

2. Use your blog to link to other blogs, you’ll get noticed when they check traffic metrics

3. Ask to interview prominent bloggers in your niche

4. Do a review of the top blogs in your niche – “My Top 10 blogs on Fishing” then email the
blogs you have reviewed

5. Follow top bloggers on Twitter and open up dialogue through Twitter on common
interests

6. Retweet blog posts from the bloggers you want to influence

7. Write “linkbait” - these are articles with the express purpose of attracting bloggers to link
to you. Either because they like the content, think it’s valuable or they have some kind of
reaction to it. Either way, it gets you on their radar

8. Tell other prominent bloggers about your “linkbait” articles

9. Offer to guest post on other prominent blogs

10. Quote other bloggers on your posts, but be sure to give credit by linking back to their
blog. Many bloggers do “ego checks” for their names by using Google Alerts or
Tweetdeck – so they will probably end up checking your blog out as a result

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Engaging with bloggers

If you’ve got a blog already, you’re a long way towards understanding how to influence bloggers
to the benefit of a client PR campaign. But how do you successfully disseminate a PR message
to bloggers and other social media?

The first stage is identifying who the key bloggers are in your chosen niche using tools like
Google Blog Search, Google AdPlanner, Technorati, and Google Alerts. Check out other blogs
linking to important niche blogs and put together a picture of the “blog neighbourhood” using
Yahoo Link Checker.

Check out the bloggers you want to align your blog with. There are various means you can use
to gauge the quality and reach of a blogger. You can look at indicators like Google Page Rank or
Alexa Rank, number of inbound links, the quality of sites linking in, number of page impressions,
number of unique visitors, number of Twitter followers, RSS subscribers etc.

Look also at the type and level of comments on the blog. Is the blog’s tone snarky, intelligent or
conciliatory? It’s important to bear in mind that low-traffic, micro niche blogs can be just as
influential as the busier macro niche blogs.

The key do’s of seeding a PR campaign to bloggers

Treat bloggers with the respect you would accord mainstream media. The starting point is to
make sure your campaign is relevant to the blog you are approaching.

As with other forms of PR it’s essential to identify a blogger’s preferred means of communication.
Don’t assume it’s via their blog, for example. Skype, the humble telephone, email, Twitter,
Facebook, LinkedIn, even the beleaguered snail mail can all have their place within the armoury
of an online PR professional.

Develop a blog-specific press release that is short, punchy and includes keywords that your
client wants to appear under in search engines. Keep press releases factual, “non salesy” and to
the point. Highlight key points you want to get over and bullet point important features. Identify
some key imagery or video that encapsulates your campaign and include with your press
release.

Ideally, you should try and get to know as many bloggers as possible prior to the campaign. If
you are a niche PR in luxury for instance, keep a database of luxury blogs that you need to
contact on a regular basis. Consider offering exclusives to a selection of blogs.

If you’ve got your own blog, prepare the ground by linking to some of your target blogs. A
blogger may be more receptive when it comes to pitching your PR campaign.

Identify resource requests by bloggers. Resources like ResponseSource will provide you with a
feed of call outs for editorial content with increasing numbers coming from independent
bloggers. Alternatively, use Tweetdeck’s search box to track your campaign keywords on Twitter
and you will often discover bloggers requesting info for blog posts.

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Bloggers like to write with authenticity and in fact there are increasing levels of regulation in this
regard (Consumer Protection – Unfair Trading Regulations) so if you’re encouraging a blogger to
write a review about your client’s product you will need to have samples available for testing.

How not to seed a PR campaign to bloggers

• Don’t “hard sell” your client’s PR campaign. Most bloggers are busy individuals and
won’t thank you for a multimedia bombardment

• Bland bcc emails really don’t cut it. Personalise your approach

• Don’t email long press releases or long, ponderous promotional emails

• Avoid emailing lots of high resolution imagery

Analysing metrics from your blog

The thought of metrics will leave most PR professionals cold, but analysing the success of any
online PR or social media marketing exercise is crucial – and blogging is by no means an
exception.

There are several standard metrics packages available including Google Analytics, Sitemeter,
and AWstats. Your blog metrics will show top referral traffic from other online sources. Over time,
this should help you identify the sort of content that is popular within the blogosphere or on
social bookmarking web sites.

Fine tune your blog by looking at how individuals navigate your blog. Do users look around or
do they quickly navigate away to another site? This is encapsulated in your blog’s “bounce rate”
stats highlighted in Google Analytics.

Look at how your blog posts are being picked out in search engines and under which keywords.
Use new blog posts to consolidate your search engine position under these keywords.

Summary

Although blogging has been around for some time, its importance is set to dramatically grow in
the light of search engines tightening up on dubious SEO methods and in turn promoting quality
content production as a means to grow online exposure.

Further, the integration of blog content within Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and many other social
networks means that the humble blog is set to take on the role of “social media hub” for
individuals and brands alike.

So my advice is to give it a whirl.

Happy blogging!

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About the Author

Peter Brady is CEO of Orbital Media - Social Media Agency and has been a blogger and social
media expert for the last ten years. Orbital Media offers consultancy, implementation and
training courses on blogging, online PR, social networking, social media marketing, social SEO
and social media monitoring.

For further information:

Telephone: 0203 411 9111 Extension 900

Email: [email protected]
Website: www.orbitalmedianetwork.com

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DWPub (www.dwpub.com) helps PRs, organisations and the media connect, collaborate and tell
stories more effectively every day. We provide the media and marketing community with simple,
easy-to-use and highly effective online media relations information, management and networking
services which together we call the DWPub Media Suite.

Up-to-date media contacts database, forward features and media management tools. Maximise
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For more information on the DWPub Media Suite or to request a free demo and trial:

• Visit http://www.dwpub.com/media-suite
• Call +44 (0)845 370 7777
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Comments or queries about this whitepaper are very welcome.

© 2010 All rights reserved Daryl Willcox Publishing, Melrose House, 42 Dingwall Road, Croydon, CR9 2DX

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