With Web 2.0 and new media, many companies embraced blogging. But only a few are doing it right.

When executed correctly with a strategic and credible approach, blogging can build thought leadership online and foster dialog between customers and brands.

In this post, I’ll discuss some of the ways you can use blogging to reach these business goals. But first, what are most companies doing wrong?

The biggest mistakes I see are corporate blogs created merely for the sake of doing so. “Other companies are blogging, so we should too” (even if we have nothing to say). And then there are the blogs that function as thinly veiled undercover marketing tools, fake blogs or flogs.

In the blogosphere, there is nothing more important than credibility. What’s more, social media communities will turn quickly upon disingenuous and self-serving attempts at blogging. Worse, they won’t forgive and they won’t forget, so don’t shoot your blog in its digital foot.

So how should you blog if you want to create thought leadership? Corporate and executive blogs are communication platforms, and to get noticed and stand out writers need to share provocative ideas. Whether that means new perspectives on industry issues or discussing strategic concerns, thought leadership happens when you post original and relevant ideas.

Still, having great ideas is only half of the equation. With no attention or readers, your ideas will fall on deaf ears no matter how revolutionary they are.

In order to maximize your visibility and reach, start by researching the most popular bloggers in whatever vertical your going to be writing about. Then, comment on their posts and start a conversation. This helps you get your foot in the door and gain credibility by association. Chances are they’ll link to your blog too, which is a big help from a what marketers call an “influencer.”

As you write, make sure your posts utilize search-engine friendly titles, keywords, and links. A little SEO can go a long way propelling your blog to the top of the rankings, which lends further credibility to your words.

Add video and sound to your blog as well. Studies show that blogs with interactive media, especially video and podcasts, capture more returning visitors and offer a “stickier” user experience.

Don’t overlook social media channels either. By adding social bookmarking buttons, readers can digg, del.i.cio.us, Facebook, etc. your content and expose it to their networks. Again, being connected to these key “influencers” is a proven and effective method to build thought leadership.

None of this will happen overnight, however. It may take months of blogging before you start to build readership and gain recognition. Monitoring your blog with web analytics will provide further insight into your efforts while showing you what content is the most popular with readers.

Remember that a corporate or executive blog must create dialog between management, customers, and readers. Companies and brands can leverage blogs successfully to share information that otherwise would remain internal. Blogs humanize companies by giving a face to an organization, and well-written content can create loyal brand supporters. Always enable comments on your blog to foster conversation.

Allocate the resources for your blog before you start writing. If it’s a company blog, make sure you or whomever manages the blog has time to update it frequently, ideally posting new content every two or three days. Nothing looks worse than a blog that hasn’t been updated in three months.

Creating thought leadership online is tricky business. As you can see, many companies are prone to the mistakes and mishaps that arise when their blogs are used for the wrong reasons. In the blogosphere, credibility is paramount.

Developing thought leadership is about gaining credibility with readers and establishing yourself as the authority on whatever topic you write about. Do this and you’ll become one of the “influencers” I mentioned above. Key influencers are, by definition, thought leaders.

Nick Yorchak is a Search Engine Marketing Specialist at Fusionbox who is actively engaged in the art and science of blogging. Nick enjoys experimenting with social media and its many business applications. For more information, contact Nick at Fusionbox.

Google seems to love blogs. If you use your blog correctly it can be a great tool for boosting your rankings and visibility. Here are a few tips and reminders of how to make the most of a blog from an SEO perspective.

1. Consistency: this is the number one rule or a reason. If somebody (anybody) isn’t posting to the blog on a regular basis the blog loses most of its power to attract users to the rest of the content on your website. A blog with sporadic posts at best lacks any credibility, so blog often. Here are some thoughts that might help.

• Routine – the most consistent bloggers incorporate it into their schedule.
• Keep the goal in mind – it might be tough in the beginning, but once you start to see the fruits of your labor (more traffic/more leads) blogging becomes a lot easier to do.
• Keep it casual – the best part about blogging is that the medium is so informal. Write posts as if you were sending an email to a buddy who wants to know what you do. I like the Cranky Developer title – it gives the blog some character.
• Multiple posters – get several people in the office set up to post on the blog and make sure they’re committed to contributing on a regular basis.
• Potpourri – writers block? No clue what you’re going to post about today? Put something random in. Not every post has to be topical (though the majority should). A light post now and then breaks apart your more serious and informative content.

2. Optimize Your Titles: most blog software will create a permanent separate page for each post in addition to the most recent ones in order on the main page. These individual pages are a great opportunity to rank for keywords. The trick is to carefully word the post title – Wordpress takes that and makes it the page title as well! All you have to do is keep your keywords in mind and you’ll create a powerful new page on your site every time you post.

3. Hyperlinks: remember to link back to the rest of your content. Also link to any authority sites that might be helpful to a reader. And especially link to any other blogs that might have given you an idea for a post. If your blog has led users to it from the search engines, don’t leave them with a dead end. Ideally, you want to funnel them into the rest of your site but don’t be afraid to send them elsewhere if the information is valuable – they’ll remember that.
4. Multimedia: when it’s appropriate I’d suggest throwing in a picture to illustrate a point and break up text. Users see a big block of text and perceive that it’s too much information to take in (like you might be thinking right now!). A picture gives the reader a break.

So there’s some food for thought. Remember it’s simpler than it looks to get the most out of your blog.

A new year has begun, and it isn’t too late to start a blog if you haven’t already. It is easy, and can be entirely free, to create a blog. Here are a few of the top reasons you might want to start a new blog this year…

EARN MONEY: There are many ways to earn money by running a blog, including some income opportunities which are not available to non-blog web site owners. One way to earn money is to use sponsored blog advertisements from services like PayPerPost, Blogitive, and others. These services usually require blogs to have existed for at least a month (in some cases, as long as three months), so the sooner you start, the earlier the date you can start earning from them is. It is also possible to generate income from advertising systems like Google AdSense, or by attracting new visitors to your web site so they will purchase your products or services. As an alternative, some bloggers request optional donations from readers, often via instant payment methods such as PayPal.

GAIN EXPERIENCE: Your blog can be provided as an example of your work when applying for some types of online job opportunities. Such jobs can include writing, blogging (at someone else’s web site), some types of editing or proofreading, web design (if you can design blogs yourself), and possibly forum moderation. Operating blogs can also give you practice in writing, editing, managing comments, search engine optimization, and creating ad revenue. On the other hand, if you don’t have the time or expertise, it is not particularly expensive to have someone else perform one or more of these tasks for your blog.

EXPRESS YOURSELF: Another one of the reasons to start a blog in the new year is that blogging is a good way to express new ideas or theories you may have. Unlike with other web sites or publications, your ideas won’t have to receive an editor’s approval before they will appear on your own blog. If desired, you can also receive feedback from others about what you have to say. Additionally, blogs can help draw attention to important issues which are being ignored, or connect multiple events or pieces of information in a way which has been overlooked. All of this can be combined with earning money, using the above-mentioned methods.

When writing new entries in blogs, their titles should not only be descriptive and attention-getting, but also help make them easy to find in search results. Here are some tips on creating great SEO (Search Engine Optimization) titles for blogs you are writing.

1. Put words and/or phrases in the blog entry titles which people regularly search for. Preferably, these should be sentences or keywords which have not already been used by a massive number of other blogs and websites.

2. Use words from your blog entry in the title; don’t put the word “automobiles” in the title and only use the word “vehicles” in the body of your entry. This is beneficial for SEO because search engines give priority to blogs and other web pages which repeatedly use words the user searches for, not just in their titles. Remember that the title’s phrasing must still be appealing for search engine users to click on.

3. If the blog website itself has a fairly long name, put it after the titles of your individual blog entries, not before. Another option is to put the name near the top of the page, but not in the title tag, and use the titles just for describing the individual blog entries.

4. Unless your information is very time-specific, don’t bother writing the date it was posted in the title. An entry from 1999 about photography techniques is probably just as relevant today, but having the date in its title makes it appear outdated and distracts from the rest of the title.

5. When writing new posts for your blogs, determine the titles after you are finished (unless you have particular keywords already in mind); you will have a better idea of how to describe it and which SEO keywords to use in the title.

6. Don’t use individual entry titles which are too long or short. Aim for a title length of four to ten words, as fewer than four words is not descriptive enough, while over ten (possibly fewer if they are long words) is bad for SEO because it will only be partially displayed in search results, with the remaining words replaced by an ellipsis. If the most important word is near the end of a very long title, its meaning could be lost.

Keeping these tips in mind should be helpful in writing great titles which are effective for SEO, thus bringing a larger amount of traffic to blogs which have been optimized in this manner.

No one indicator can be reliably used for measuring a blog’s level of success; several different factors have an impact on how much success it can be considered to have achieved. Criteria for measuring the success of a blog also varies depending upon the goals of its author.

One important measure of success for a blog is how many repeat visitors it receives. If many of the same people return to it daily or weekly, the blog’s content is probably of interest to them, updated regularly, and considered to be of good quality. It is less costly in time and money to retain repeat visitors than to promote the blog to new readers. If statistics show many people reaching the blog without a referring URL, they are probably typing it into their web browser’s address bar or accessing it from their favorites/bookmarks. A blog can still be considered to be a success if most of its readers come from links on other web sites, but it will be more dependent upon the other sites and may suffer if they disappear or change ownership. Positive comments to blog message postings, and voluntarily links from other web sites, can also be seen as indications of a blog’s success in offering interesting, high-quality content.

Some bloggers desire to earn advertising revenue or promote a product/service they are selling, while others want to express an important opinion or do both. Measuring success is somewhat different for each of these goals, but receiving a substantial amount of “traffic” or “hits” is important to all of them; all want their message to reach as large an audience as possible. While bloggers most interested in expressing an opinion may be satisfied if enough people read their blog posts, bloggers who want to earn advertising and/or sales revenue will be displeased with a large number of readers who are unresponsive to their promotional efforts. This may be a problem of attracting the wrong type of readers, or because the blog is improperly designed to encourage purchases or clicks on advertisements. Measuring how much success a blog has attained also depends upon how long it has existed; if it was started a couple weeks ago and already has several readers who frequently visit it, this is a greater indication of its successfulness than if it were several months or years old.

Overall, measuring a blog’s level of success involves determining the number of voluntarily-placed links to it, regular/repeat visitors, positive comments regarding it, total number of readers, and the advertising or sales revenue it generates.

Micro blogging is a form of blogging in which bloggers post short messages, usually under 200 characters each. It is often possible to subscribe to such blogs using a web feed such as RSS. Two of the more well known micro blogging services are Jaiku and Twitter.

Micro blogging services Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce offer free membership to bloggers. Twitter and Jaiku both have short registration forms; Pownce’s form is somewhat longer and requires an invitation code. Pownce is substantially different from Twitter or Jaiku, and offers a paid “Pro” membership with additional features. Blog postings can be sent in using multiple methods; for example, Twitter allows them to be submitted via instant messenger, mobile phone, or their website. Jaiku lets users post comments on other members’ micro blogs, while Twitter does not. Allowing comments may or may not be desirable depending upon your blog’s subject and personal preferences.

It is also relatively easy to start a micro blog on a regular website; this gives bloggers more control over the page design, advertising, and message length. This can be accomplished by simply updating an HTML or text format page on your website with your latest message/post, and removing older messages if desired. Even starting a new micro blogging service is a goal which can be achieved by those with moderately advanced website programming expertise; not as many features are expected and less storage space is needed, as compared to a typical blog hosting service.

Some micro bloggers post short updates of their current activities, while others provide a brief description of larger articles they want users to read, with a website link at the end. If links are to be used in a micro blog, they must have relatively short URLs so as not to exceed the character limit when combined with a description; services such as TinyURL.com can be used to reduce their length (these services redirect a shorter website URL to the longer URL you want to send people to). Another option for shortening URLs to use with micro blogging is to register a domain name with a registration service which includes redirection, then redirect the domain to the desired URL and change it when necessary.

Overall, micro blogging services offer a good alternative for bloggers who only want to post brief messages, or desire to use a blog for the promotion of articles which appear on a traditional website.