Secrets of Blogging Success

Ottawa/Toronto PR guy Joe Thornley would make a great reporter (if he could take the pay cut).

In his blog, ProPR, Joe is on a one-man mission to chronicle growth of blogging and other social media from every blog/Web2.0/social marketing conference he can find – and his writeups are great. So reading his blog can save you thousands of dollars in travel and convention costs.

This week he writes up Alec Saunders’ presentation to the recent CaseCamp Ottawa, in which Alec makes the, well, case for corporate blogging. I am not convinced that blogging is the solution for all companies, but everybody should be looking at it as a possible strategy. And Saunders makes a great, well, case study for blogging as a core marketing strategy for young tech startups looking to build profile and credibility.

Saunders, founder of Ottawa-based Iotum, a VOIP application provider, offered three essential benefits to corporate blogging, sez Joe:

Thought leadership. Trying to magnify a point of view and thought and to get other people to pay attention to it.

To grow communities around your product. A blog is a fabulous tool for creating a conversation around your product and your company. Microsoft has done an extraordinarily good job with this.

Pure visibility. A blog is a way to create more visibility for your company, if properly tied to your corporate website.

Alec’s blog , Alec Saunders.Log, now generates more than 184,000 visits a month – equivalent to a national magazine. The difference, of course is that this is, for the most part, a self-selecting audience of business people who take the VOIP space seriously – so it’s precisely the market he wants most to attract and influence. (Of course, Alec crosslinks regularly to the Iotum site to remind his audience why he’s here.)

The result: Saunders has created a community of like-minded individuals who join his conversations and link to him. He has now built up over 23,000 links from other blogs to his site – which generates the “Google juice” that makes sure he’s a player in any almost any online conversation in his field.

So what’s the secret of blogging success?
I've stolen enough of Joe’s thunder. For great tips for more powerful blogging, check out his original post here.