This morning I attended my first Newfangled webinar, entitled How to Blog. The session, which was hosted by the firm’s President Mark O’Brien, gave a very good overview of blogging best practices. While attempting to pay attention, I made these brief notes:

General Rules

• Develop an editorial calendar
• Don’t get rid of any content from your blog that is still relevant
• Use the blog as a response mechanism to common client questions – you can then give the client even deeper content – allow comments to these to add value and knowledge
• Ask guest bloggers to post and offer to reciprocate
• Conduct interviews
• Encourage comments on the blog – we should do everything we can to encourage this – this builds indexable content but it can take years to develop
• The more people who blog in the company, the better (but these should be good bloggers!)
• Ideally post two-three times a week

Using Google Analytics

• Ideally you want a bounce rate (people who leave directly after viewing a specific page) under 40%
• Ask: “Where are the visits coming from?”
• Facebook is becoming a good way to drive traffic – people trust this site and the bounce rate tends to be low from referred sources
• Be aware: if a blog post has a very high bounce rate consider deleting it if it is not helping to build your brand, develop leads etc