I was recently asked by our friends at Compendium Blogware to help judge an internal blogging contest they were holding among the employees. I was chosen to be the impartial outside observer (thanks, Doug) to judge the entries.

The rules were simple. Come up with a creative and relevant way to use keywords, use photos or videos to support content. They had their wealth of knowledge about corporate blogging software to draw on.

The idea was a simple one: show business owners why and how to start a business blog.

That’s easy to explain. Blogging is all about search. People search for answers to their problems. Your goal in blogging is to have people find you at the top of the search engine rankings, and recognize you as having the answer to what they need.

Chris Baggott, Compendium’s CEO and co-founder, tells a great story about one of their clients, a small liquor store in Greenfield. The owner will write about different exotic liqueurs and products she gets in from time to time, and talk about different recipes and drinks her readers can make. When she talks about root beer schnapps, sales for the product goes up. When she writes about a particular wine, sales for that wine jump.

One week, she wrote about absinthe, the liquor often consumed by Ernest Hemingway, Oscar Wilde, and Pablo Picasso. She only had a few bottles in the store, so she thought she would see what would happen if she wrote about it.

A few weeks later — if I have my details straight — a new customer showed up and bought up all the bottles of absinthe she had in the store (one bottle went for nearly $100). How did you find us? she asked.

The customer explained that he was going to the Indianapolis 500 that weekend, and wanted some absinthe to share with his friends. He did a quick Google search for local liquor stores carrying the stuff, and found the Greenfield liquor store — the only one in the area carrying it. Or at least the only one that showed up in the search engines.

The guy flew into town, landed at the Indianapolis airport, drove east 1 hour to buy the bottles, and then raced to the track. Talk about a blogging success story!

This is just one example of a business who patiently plugged along with their blogging efforts, not doing anything out of the ordinary. She just wrote something new, week after week, focused on what her customers needed. She made sure to employ best blogging practices, and stuck with the fundamentals. As a result, she sold her entire stock of absinthe to one customer.

And sometimes, that’s what blogging is all about. It’s a great tool for search engine optimization (SEO) that leads to some great Long Tail opportunities. That one-in-a-million or even one-in-a-thousand opportunity that comes along only to those people who were prepared for it.

Not everyone is going to be scrambling for absinthe in the Indianapolis area. In fact, if I were a betting man, I would have bet that no one would ever search for absinthe in Indianapolis. But one guy did, and the liquor store won that Long Tail search.

As a business blogger, you need to focus on winning as many Long Tail searches as you can. Write frequently about topics that are related to your company’s mission. If you’re in the blogging business, write about the different ways people can use blogging and social media. If you’re in the liquor business, write about great liquor recipes. But write a lot, and then measure it.

The key is to write about these topics frequently and regularly. If you just poke around at it, throwing up a post every few weeks, you’ll still be relegated to the dregs of the search results, never to see the light of day.

If you want some ideas for blog posts, want to know how to create great content several times a week, or just want to find out more about how you can get those regular, frequent posts without ever having to lift a finger, get in touch with us and we’ll tell you everything we know.

Photo: Qole Tech

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