“Does This Blogging Stuff Even Work?” is an excellent question, for several reasons. There are so many “new and shiny things” happening in online marketing that investing in any of them without success criteria is downright puerile. However, the corollary to your question has to be around what success means with regards to blogging.

For some business people, blogging is a good way to extrovert thoughts or meet pent up needs to communicated and become “published”. OK, fair enought.

For us at WiderFunnel Marketing, blogging on http://www.widerfunnel.com/blog on a regular basis has helped us improve our search engine rankings, so we get more and better qualified traffic to the site. It jas also positioned us as thought leaders in a new and fast growing field, Conversion Optimization. Week after week, our blog ranks among the msot visited web pages on our site.

(BTW, Conversion Optimization is the ‘art and science’ of converting more website visitors into leads and customers by running online experiments that determine what copy/offer/layout etc combinations yields the most conversions from the same expensive traffic coming to your website).

Best,

Raquel Hirsch
WIDERFUNNEL MARKETING INC.
WiderFunnel is a Google Authorized Consultant
ph. 604.512.0799
fax 604.222.1461
e. Raquel.Hirsch@WiderFunnel.com

http://www.widerfunnel.com

Metrics are a tricky thing with a blog…it’s hard to say if a post answered a support question or gave someone a great marketing idea just by looking at the readership and responses (if there are any–one of the most frustrating things about business blogs is the lack of comments/interaction). Just today I was trying to tell a story with our blog stats and was finding it difficult to do.

I agree with Bob’s comment above that you probably shouldn’t go into the game looking to immediately turn ROI. If you have a clear audience and focus, I bet you’ll see positive results.

So, let me take a moment to answer some of the questions Craig has posed, especially the one about lead gen. As we state in the last MC post, “We hoped to raise our own corporate profile, encourage blog readers to learn more about our solutions and promote the discipline to which we devote our every working hour – Marketing! … The key question for us, however, was whether blogs mattered to our target audience and our conclusion is that today, they are not a critical channel.” These comments were written last year.

It is now August ’08. Two years have gone by since we started our blog. By now, I would hope there are a lot more marketers paying attention to this channel, but back then, it didn’t seem like we were really meeting our objective of engaging in conversations with a lot of them — even though the blog had steady visitors. It may have been that since this was our initial foray into corporate blogging, we didn’t quite get it right. While we had great bloggers, by changing ‘voices’ monthly, we may have lost the continuity needed to get a consistent flow going.

However, Unica hasn’t really stopped blogging. Not only do we have an internal company blog hosted by Yuchun Lee, our CEO, but we’re fortunate to have several employees who blog, for example, Akin Arikan (http://www.multichannelmetrics.com/). And recently, Elana Anderson – The Marketers’ Consortium’s first guest blogger – joined Unica as VP of product marketing and strategy. Elana’s an active blogger (http://nxteramarketing.wordpress.com/, http://www.customerthink.com/user/eranderson/) and she has championed the idea of re-starting the Unica blog ever since she landed. (Hey, we didn’t say we were shutting down forever. In fact, there are plans to re-ignite the blog fire here… we’ll be happy to let you know as soon as we get started again.)