This is the second post on The Company Blogging Success Formula Series. In the first post, we covered the formula itself. In this post we tackle the first factor: Assets.

Blogging to promote your business is not an equal ground. Some companies are more equal than others performing much better with less effort. That’s because they have something you don’t have. They have more assets: audience and content.

For a blog, traffic is vital. Without traffic, nobody reads your content, and no success can happen. 

Traffic does not happen to a new blog post magically. It happens because you have an audience to whom to promote it e.g. email subscribers and social media followers. And it happens because your previous content is driving you traffic from Google, backlinks from other sites, and that...

Blog launched, not much happening: Welcome the after launch hangover!

You set up your blog, wrote the first blog post(s), and sweated to create that e-book to catch leads. You launched your blog. And waited actively for leads to pour in. Yet nothing much happened.

Now you, your team and especially your boss are questioning whether this was such a good idea after all.

Welcome the after launch hangover!

Opening the doors to your blog is an important step. You have proved that you and your team can create content. Congratulations! You are ready to the next phase: Creating success.

Success just don’t happen. It seldom happens with just great content. It has to be made. You have to make it. And luckily there is a formula for success.

How successful your company’s blog will be is determined by essentially five success factors: assets, volume, greatness, fit and promotion.

Let’s introduce The Company Blog Success Formula:

 

Assets x Volume x Greatness x Fit x Promotion = Success

Assets: Successful blogging builds assets that help you succeed better as you go along like email subscribers, social media followers, blog post archive and backlinks. The more assets you have, the...

An inbound sales and marketing operation is quite different from an outbound operation. I’ll first concentrate on giving you the big picture of how the system works, but will also show how to mix inbound and outbound successfully later on this post.

Sometimes you need to sell. Sometimes the product sells itself. But always, the customer buys. Does she need persuasion or just a bit of help, or can she make the journey on her own, it depends.

Some products and services can be sold to some customers over the telephone or in an online meeting, some require face-to-face meetings, and real enterprise sales are on their own level requiring not just a salesperson, but a whole sales team and a project lasting many months or years. Thus there are so many different leads and situations.

A sales lead is the Identification data of a person or entity that has the interest, authority and budget (i.e. money) to purchase a product or service. (Wikipedia)

In an outbound strategy you define your customer typically in such a way that you can easily buy media or contact information to reach them. You are reaching for CMOs in companies with turnover over 5 million perhaps. Thus when such a person is interested, you already know she is likely to...

In this guide, I will explain how to publish and promote your first ebook successfully. I assume you already have an ebook as a ready-to-share PDF-document or at least a edited copy just needing final designing.

1. Reality check: Is your ebook ready to publish?

DOWNLOAD THE FULL GUIDE (PDF)

It’s always good to start with final quality assurance. You don’t want to end up sending updated ebook later on to your new leads, or feel embarrassed by rookie mistakes.

If you have written the copy yourself, I suggest you take few days of distance with your piece before putting a publisher’s hat on. It’s easier to be critical that way.

• Are the title and content aligned? Does the ebook contain what it says on the tin?
• Is the story flowing smoothly and consistently? No unnecessary repetition? No wide gaps in the reasoning? All terms opened up when first used?
• Are the tone and style correct for your business and audience?
• Is the level of text appropriate for the target audience?...