http://www.happykatie.com

This is a recent presentation I did for an Internet Marketing for Small Business class at the UHSBDC last week.  It's always a challenge to know exactly what a varied audience is looking for when discussing Blogging for Business 101, so this presentation gave a wide overview of companies making a success of it in different ways and the tools they use to get there.

This particular presentation has a few general points on defining a Blog's success (the message primarily being that you need to be creative, pro-active and diligent in finding a definition of success and measuring it – lots of pre-launch evaluation action):

• What are you specifically telling your visitors to do?
  • Eyeball those driven hits to specific areas of your Blog, your services/products page, a special landing page on your main Web site, etc.
• Action in your comments area
  • Try www.intensedebate.com for a more social approach to commenting
• Are you getting talked about, linked to or visited by Influencers?
  • Prolific Bloggers vs. Influential Bloggers – use Technorati or IceRocket rankings to determine who is who influence-wise (you want Influential btw)
• Pick your reader's brains with polls (like www.polldaddy.com)
• Get people signing up for your newsletter (www.mailchimp.com)
• Raise funds (www.chipin.com) and track your campaign goals

Not a comprehensive list, of course – but a basic starting-out kind of thing.  I look forward to running classes where the Social Media training is more hands one versus example-driven and theoretical.  Fun to really get your hands dirty, whether with clients or passionate marketers diving into the Social Media world.