Link to Podcast - http://www.blubrry.com/engaging/342296/show-219-10-golden-rules-of-b2b-social-media-marketing-pt1/
Jay Berkowitz: So, having that great content and formatting it differently for different people, I think, it’s one of the first opportunities on your website and it translates out into social media. So, if you consider blogs to be social media and Twitter, and podcast, for example this podcast, and my podcast, I mean both of us are in the consulting business, and I think we both use our podcast in a way that we provide a lot of free information. We interview people that we both admire, and then that content becomes a platform for us to popularize our own brands.
Anna Farmery: Yeah. So, what’s #2 then, Jay?
Anna Farmery: Well, the second strategy or the second approach is about really monetizing blogs. And I think that blog monetization – there’s a number of different approaches. Again, it comes back to rule #1, which is, you know, great content. So, if you have really good information on your blog, you now have an opportunity to actually generate some revenue from your blog. And there’s a number of business blogs that are, you know, covering an industry, for example. They’re not just a blog about the company. You really have to have great content. And typically, the latest research from the Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere report, says, “The blogs with a 100,000 or more unique visitors a month can earn an average of $75,000. So, if you have a business blog and you have great information, there’s a number of different ways you can generate some revenue on that blog. So, the first one and the easiest one is Google AdSense or working with the Yahoo product as well, and basically what you’re doing is you’re running contextual ads that look like Google ads, but they’re not served based on a Google search. They’re presented based on the words in the blog. So, if you have a blog, it’s all about your business, and all about your business category. The ads are also going to be connected to the words that were in your blog and your blog posts. So, you can then share revenue with Google or Yahoo by presenting their ads. And you share a per click revenue of information to your blog.
Anna Farmery: Well, I’m not – would I be in danger of advertising a competitor?
Jay Berkowitz: Actually, in select advertisements that you don’t want carry on your blogs. So, you can definitely block your main competitors. So, that’s the first most common and easiest, just Google AdSense. And obviously, we say Google because it’s a much bigger and more recognized brand, but Yahoo has a product and there’s a number of other products that deliver the same type of service.
The second approach is affiliate revenue. And for those of you who are familiar with affiliate, basically you can sign out to promote another company’s product and services and get a finder’s fee or percentage of the sale. So, there’s a number of different affiliate programs you could sign out for. And in a lot of cases, it might be beneficial to promote complimentary types of products. So, if you sell copiers, you might promote the refill ink, if you’re company doesn’t do the refill ink. Or, if you know, if you sell copiers, you might sell other business products on your blog as an affiliate. So, having a popular blog with a lot of subscriptions and a lot of traffic, you can have affiliate ads and share revenue when those products sell on other people’s sites.
Anna Farmery: So, you’re almost a hub of information?
Jay Berkowitz: Exactly. And you know, it comes back again to the great content. I mean, if you have great content, regularly updated, people are gonna come to your blog, they’re gonna start bookmarking your blog and they’re going to subscribe to your blog using e-mail subscription services and RSS subscription services. RSS being really simple syndication. And you get those RSS feeds to your webs – to your computer or to your smart phone. And more and more of us are customizing the way we receive our news, and when I find the great blog, I always subscribe to it right away. So, I’m gonna get that news fed to me on a regular basis.
Anna Farmery: Yeah. So, the first two in that sense are almost you could use those to fund somebody looking after your social media?
Jay Berkowitz: Exactly. I mean, that’s a great way of looking at it as a cost affirmant. Like if you could just generate enough revenue to pay for someone to do all these stuff, that’ll be great.
Anna Farmery: Yeah. Brilliant, right. So we’ve got two on the wrap out, what’s our third, Jay?
Jay Berkowitz: The third is something that I call MicroSelling. And there’s a few different terms for it. There’s a company called woot.com and this is – their product happens to be a little bit more consume-oriented. But woot.com sells one product a day. It’s spelled W-O-O-T.com. And they put that product up on their Twitter and their blog and their website. And they sell out almost every single day. So, they’ll have a great deal on a big screen TV or a great deal on a hard storage drive. And woot.com is a really great example of a business execution in Twitter and blogs and social media. And this type of micro-sort of approach –MicroSelling approach has worked in a lot of different categories. For example, a lot of companies are using Twitter, where there is a backchannel going on, where they’ve set up a Twitter site. Of course, Barack Obama use social media incredibly to do – you know, microdonations.
Anna Farmery: Yeah.
Jay Berkowitz: Where typically in the past, election campaigns got large donations from large wealthy donors and companies. Barack Obama averaged something like $25 for his donations. And he had 790,000 MySpace friends, and the single largest number of twitter followers, well over a 150,000 today.
Anna Farmery: Yeah. Yeah. And you can see that lurking in the business to business context in the fact that I don’t know, say, you have a business supplies company. You could still have a product of the day. I don’t know, 50 pens or ten lots of reams of paper or something like that, that you know, you’re – especially, actually that would work really well during this recessionary times, wouldn’t it ?
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