Are You Blogging for Business? See What These 3 Blogs Do Well

Blogging is a staple of content marketing – and one of the few content marketing tactics that is used more often by small businesses than large ones. Blogs aren’t difficult to start, but they take a lot of time to maintain and do well.

If you are thinking about blogging or looking for ideas on how to improve what you are doing, check out these three blogs.

The HairBook Online

Hair Book Online is a blog devoted solely to your hair – because when your hair looks great, you’re ready for anything.  The blog and (accompanying magazine) are created as branded content for Regis Hair Salons (a client). Hair Book Online helps women express their true beauty by providing them with tips, tricks and techniques from some of the premier experts in the fashion, beauty and hair care industry.

The site is simple and easy to navigate, filled with vibrant imagery and useful information including product reviews, the latest celebrity trends and style how-to’s. Have a question about your hair? Ask a stylist and see your question answered on the blog by the pros who know hair best—those that work with it every day.

The blog offers lots of content to help the reader with their hair and fashion needs. It is solely focused on providing readers with valuable and useful content. It’s a great way to engage with readers between print issues of the magazine, which is distributed to all Regis Salons.  The blog is well-designed and not clogged with ads.  It is also easy to connect to other channels including Flickr, Facebook and Twitter with Hair Book Online-branded identities.

Here’s what marketers can learn from Hair Book Online:

• Engaged consumers want valuable information without any hard sales push
• Content needs to be all about the audience — make sure you’re providing helpful tips

User engagement on the site has been impressive, with the average visitor clicking through more than four pages per visit.

Contributed by Chiqui Cartagena

The Cleanest Line

One of my favorite examples of a great B2C Blog is The Cleanest Line, the “weblog for the employees, friends and customers of the outdoor clothing company Patagonia” as stated at www.TheCleanestLine.com.

What’s exceptional about this blog is that it has a clearly-defined mission, vision and strategies laid out for all to see on its “About” page. As a result, everyone on The Cleanest Line team is “on the same page” in regard to what they are working to accomplish via the blog, and readers know what they can expect – and look forward to – in every post.

It’s a strong belief of mine that one of the greatest impediments to success for corporate blogs is a lack of clarity around the mission and vision for the blog.  Without a clear vision, there can be no alignment of strategies – and thus no alignment with measurable objectives.

The fact that Patagonia succeeds out of the gate by clearly articulating each piece places them in a very exclusive group.

I encourage Content Marketing Institute’s readers to take a look at The Cleanest Line’s “About” page and see how they’ve woven their mission, vision and strategies so beautifully into the picture they paint through their description of the blog.  I think it’s a laudable example and I applaud Patagonia for being leading-edge.

Mack Collier and I will be discussing this example further at the January 5^th, 2011 MarketingProfs Free Virtual Conference where we’ll be presenting, “The 3 Cs of Profitable Business Blogging.”  We pulled a great deal of information for our presentation from the Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs B2B study done earlier this year and hope you’ll consider joining us to take your corporate blog to the next level.

Contributed by Lisa Petrilli

Project Open Kimono – Series from Velocity Partners

Velocity Partner’s blog (my company) has been doing a series of posts called Project Open Kimono, and it has been a really effective experiment — and a lot of fun to do. Essentially, over the course of ten blog posts (so far), we’ve shared our experiences behind the B2B Marketing Manifesto campaign. We started with our goals, then moved on to some experiments — including an A/B test to see how many downloads we lost by requiring registration.

Clients don’t usually want us to share the inside scoop on their campaigns, but we can always talk about our own marketing activities. So this ‘living case study’ has been really powerful. We’ll definitely do more like it.

Contributed by Doug Kessler

Blogging is a complex art, but these three examples give you something to think about. What other companies do you think have good blogs and why?