Blogging to Drive Business: Create and Maintain Valuable Customer Connections

Use Blogging to Supercharge Sales, Customer Loyalty, Innovation, and Profits

“To connect with today’s buyer, you need to stop pushing your message out and start pulling your customers in. And there is no better tool for this than the blog! Blogging to Drive Business is an essential guide for any business wishing to use a blog to attract a steady stream of inbound opportunities.”

—Paul Dunay, Global Managing Director of Services and Social Marketing, Avaya Inc.

Blogging can help you deepen customer loyalty, reach new customers, gain indispensable feedback, and drive more sales. This no-nonsense guide shows how to craft a business blog that does all that, and more—building your business and increasing your profits. Top e-marketers and business bloggers Eric Butow and Rebecca Bollwitt help you define clear goals, generate the right content with the right tools, attract visitors, build communities, and avoid costly mistakes. They draw on their own extensive experience, as well as the work of innovators from companies such as Intel, Wal-Mart, Google, HP, and BusinessWeek. Whatever your role in the business, you’ll learn how to:

‧ Launch a blog that truly represents the best of your business

‧ Create a comprehensive, long-term blogging strategy

‧ Staff your blogging initiative

‧ Integrate blogs with other offline and online marketing programs

‧ Use your blog to drive customers and prospects to the business

‧ Push up-to-the-minute information to customers via RSS

‧ Build a thriving online community—and learn from what it tells you

‧ Manage comments (and decide whether to have them)

‧ Utilize podcasts, vlogs, microblogging, and other new techniques

‧ Gain business value from hot new Web 3.0 technologies, including widgets, mashups, personal agents, and the Semantic Web

Eric Butow is CEO of Butow Communications Group (BCG), a Web design and online marketing firm in Jackson, California. Eric has written a wide variety of computing books since 2000, and his latest titles include User Interface Design for Mere Mortals, How to Succeed in Business Using LinkedIn, as well as custom For Dummies titles for F5 Networks and Hewlett-Packard. When Eric isn’t writing or running his business, you’ll catch him reading and enjoying the weather of the Sierra foothills.

Rebecca Bollwitt is the co-founder of sixty4media, which specializes in WordPress design and development as well as social media consulting in Vancouver, British Columbia. Rebecca has been blogging since 2004 on Miss604.com, and podcasting about music and hockey since 2005.Miss604.com was voted “Best Vancouver Blog” of 2009 in The Georgia Straight and in 2008, she was listed within the top ten “Most Influential in Canadian Social Media” by Profectio.com. She has organized social media conferences and charity fundraisers, including Blogathon Vancouver, Twestival Local, and the Best of 604 Awards.