In some cases, the blog always had a definite end in mind. A blog about being unemployed ended when the blogger got a job. Another blog about being an ex-pat who moved to Vancouver dried up after the writer had pretty definitively covered every aspect of his transition between the USA and Canada.

In other cases, the blogger just ran out of steam. A blogger who wrote about their personal life surely hasn’t stopped having a personal life; they just stopped feeling the need to document it. Another blogger who wrote about American politics similarly would not have run out of material; but for whatever reason, their passion died.

Blogs die all the time. It often happens when the blogger doesn’t have another reason besides passion to keep going. Bloggers usually need something behind a sheer bloody-minded writing urge to keep the blog alive:

• Financial incentive. Whether you’re being paid to write the blog by a client, taking Google ad revenue or using your blog as a marketing strategy to bring in customers for a business, money is a big motivator to keep blogging. Heck, money is a big motivator to do anything. (This is also a reason why some of my clients keep me on as a blogger on their site — they’ve lost the passion to keep blogging, but they don’t want to lose the revenue they get from social media marketing).
• An engaged audience. Particularly when bloggers are starting out and not getting a whole lot of attention, the isolation can be really demoralizing. If a blog manages to engage its audience to leave comments and share links, and traffic seems to be growing, a blogger will keep up the hard work in the hope of even greater reward and attention.
• Collaborators. Getting friends and colleagues to contribute to a blog doesn’t just help keep the blog fresh. Being part of something bigger also imposes certain psychological obligations. Now you’re not just writing for yourself; if you don’t write your heart out, you’re letting your team down. With community blogs, you can also have a kind of succession. The original blogger who started the thing moves on, but the blog takes on a life of its own beyond what the prime mover foresaw.

It’s a little bit sad when blogs die, but no more than when a magazine or television series stops production. If there’s an audience, a blog will emerge to cater to it. When the audience’s tastes change, other blogs will rise up to cater to them. An online version of natural selection takes place in a world of ideas. There will be death. There will be life. But so long as you take care to update your Google Reader to keep track of all the new stuff, at least it’s always interesting.

Marketing in it’s purest form is not about selling, it is simply a form of communication and as such is a neutral concept that can be used for good or for evil.

I’ve had newsletter subscribers tell me that even though they are not in business or marketing, they read my newsletters cover to cover and always find something that helps them. From the librarian who wants kids to know about the many fun, educational programs they can become involved in, to the kindergarten teacher who needs parents on board with her classroom policies, they find ideas on improving communication and getting better buy-in whatever their valuable, beneficial message.

Have you used a “marketing” tool or idea in a non-marketing context? I’d love to know about your experience. Leave a comment.

The company had a creative campaign, a focus on their objectives and metrics to measuring ROI – and success followed.

“As a rule of thumb, we recommend that a company start by spending 25% of its web-oriented resources, which might include site design and development, email marketing, SEO, online advertising and so forth, on social-media marketing,” says Darren Barefoot, founder of Capulet Communications Inc., the Vancouver-based social-media consulting firm that worked with ThoughtFarmer. “They can always tweak it up or down based on their performance.”

• Do you use Paper.li for building traffic to your websites? Does it work?
• Do you like reading the Paper.li digital newspapers more than, say, a Google RSS feed?
• If the answer is “no” to the above answers, how the heck do I use it?

1. Blog title including keywords
2. Tags for SEO
3. Categories for SEO
4. Keyword-heavy opening paragraph
5. Call to action
6. SEO-optimized internal links
7. Outbound links to helpful resources in anticipation of reciprocal promotion
8. Media such as videos or photos to increase visual appeal and improve SEO through Alt Tags
9. Byline (Generic “Editor” or a real name to provide an “authentic voice”?)
10. Syndication already set up through Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms

Whether we’re blogging for a software startup, construction company, B2B consulting firm or non-profit organization, we use this same checklist every time. It’s based on best practices for SEO, blogging and web marketing that we’ve learned over years of doing the work in the trenches.

Do you have a blog but the latest post is from six months ago? Just not happy with your current web content? Not getting the results you want? Contact WRITEIMAGE and we can write blog posts for your company or non-profit organization

Most of what SEO is about was built into the copywriting process even before there was a “thing” called SEO. Basically, SEO is all about keywords. “Keyword” basically means “important words” – as in, the ones that tell people what your website is about and are likely to be the ones people type into an online search. The process of coming up with keywords and figuring out how to include them in content has gotten more refined for web publishing, but it’s not that different from the process copywriters used before the Internet existed. It’s about figuring out the key messaging that describes what you do in a way that’s more compelling and direct than what your competitors have got.

Assuming you already have a business website and want to improve the SEO, here are a few tactics you can use:

1) Make sure you tell your copywriter what the keywords are that you want to be known for. If you don’t know what keywords you want, you’re going to have to come up with some. If you need help with that process, you might try getting professional help from the Online Strategy House or a comparable service provider.

2) Put keywords into your page titles.

3) Make sure that when your website publishes a page URL (the web address at the top of your browser), it includes the words in your title, not just random letters or numbers.

3) Put keywords into your articles. But don’t necessarily use them all. For instance, if you’re creating a web page for your flower shop about roses, you don’t need to include key words for all of the other types of flowers that you sell.

4) Using photos and embedded social media apps on your page? Great. Make sure your keywords go into anywhere you can leave tags. Otherwise, Google doesn’t have a clue what your photos or videos are about.

5) Keep adding content. Imagine two competing companies and they’ve both invested a lot of effort into SEO. How does one get ahead in the search rankings? By creating new SEO-friendly pages. After a while, those once-a-week blog posts start to add up and build a critical mass of SEO awesomeness.

Courtesy of Kenneth Cole’s Twitter moderator and the ever-vigilant FAIL blog, here’s a social media insensitivity debacle:

Check it out. Here’s the synopsis:

How does your company get the word out? From websites and blogs to newsletters, brochures, direct mail sales letters, case studies, white papers and press releases, you’ve got plenty of tools. But different tools are used for different purposes. Learn how to use them to reach different target audiences effectively.

Presenter: Jonathon Narvey, President of WRITEIMAGE, Website Copywriting Professional

Cost: BBB Accredited Business $25, Non BBB Accredited Business $35 (includes light lunch)

Register online: www.eplyevents.com/BBBSeminarFeb