I remember taking a journalism class back in college where the professor harped on using the same adjectives more than once in a story. He urged us to be more creative to come up with different adjectives, and would even dock points if we duplicated words. Since then, I’ve always had a thesaurus at my desk.

Admittedly, this was before today’s search engine revolution, with its emphasis on keywords. Now, instead of using a thesaurus to help write a press release we turn to the Keyword Tool on Google AdWords, which allows you to test keywords or phrases and see how often they are being searched. You don’t want to select words with poor search results.

This presents a dilemma for many writers who like to use their official company lingo, abbreviations, or even generic wording (e.g., the word
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In my last two installments on Creating and Maintaining a B2B Blog, I offered suggestions on who should write your company blog, how often you should post and how to develop a content strategy for your blog.

In this third installment of my blogging series, I’d like to make some suggestions on how to promote your blog.

If you are going to invest the time, resources and discipline to create a blog you’ll want to be sure it’s getting read. It is not as simple as, “Build it and they will come.” You’ll need to promote your blog, let people know it exists. Consider all the tactics you can use to announce and then promote your blog including email, your website, search and other blogs. You’ll need to be proactive. Think about active and passive forms of promotion. Here are a few suggestions.

1. Start with your company website. Make sure there is a link to your blog somewhere on your site, or multiple pages if relevant.
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The list of potential media channels that you can use today to reach your customers and prospects can be exhausting. Blogs, wikis, podcasts, vodcasts, social networks, mobile, web portals, webinars, e-newsletters, traditional print magazines, trade shows, RSS feeds, industry web sites, on and on and on.

How do you know which are the right channels to reach your audience? In the B to B market, it varies widely and can change often. Mechanical Engineers in the HVAC market are probably utilizing a different media mix than Interior Designers that specialize in the Healthcare field.

Where do you start? Here are 8 ideas for getting a good handle on where your audience lives online:

1. Check your web site analytics to determine the top referring sources to your website.
2. Utilize sites like www.technorati.com or www.blogpulse.com to search your
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B-to-B marketers are looking for the most efficient ways to use dwindling marketing dollars. As the economic situation worsens and marketing budget cuts continue, the tactics to survive are the ones that are highly measurable. And more importantly, show an ROI. It’s no surprise that search marketing and search engine optimization are still a part of b-to-b marketing plans.

In 2008, only online video ad spending grew faster than search. Recent reports show that search marketing spending is slowing, but still dominates marketing budgets. (U.S. search ad spending is predicted to grow 14.9% in 2009, compared with 21.4% in 2008.)

However, in this weakened economy, b-to-b markerters are still looking for ways to minimize their investment, even in search-related efforts.
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Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is becoming a vital component of many advertising programs. Without keywords a search campaign cannot function. However, keywords are only one element to think about. In a SEM program keywords are simply the key that opens the door for an ad to appear.

The ads triggered by keywords are the real bait, and what the user actually sees. The ads need to motivate someone to take action. They need to convince the searcher to click on the ad, and hopefully lay the foundation for spending time on the landing page.

Think about how long you spend on search results pages. I bet it is not very long. With that in mind, think about how hard SEM ads like Google’s Adwords must work to convince a searcher that the answer they are searching for is provided on the other side of the click.

Developing effective SEM ads can be a real
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It’s generally true that the more keywords you put on your site, the better it does in organic search. But not always. 

In fact, many business-to-business sites suffer from keyword confusion to the point of keyword cannibalization.

When search engines spider your site, they are looking for more than just a jumble of words. They are looking for logic and consistency about how those words are used.

Say, for instance, that your main product, widgets, is used as a keyword throughout your site. That’s a good thing.

But what if the titles, descriptions, keywords and page content for several different pages all use widgets? And links, inside and outside your site, point to different pages? The simple answer is that the search engines get confused.

And the result is keyword cannibalization, with your pages actually competing against each other for search ranking.
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