BtoB Blog Boot Camp: Building a Stickier Site

	\| Contact Us

Return to MWJ Home

August 2009, Issue 66

Social Media
BtoB Blog Boot Camp: Building a Stickier Site
By Larry Bills, Senior Editor, Hoover's, Inc.

More Insight on BtoB Blogging

HealthCareGoesMobile's community manager offers "Three Tips on How to Do It Right."

Read more.

As a subscription-based service offering timely business information, Hoover's needs to be reliable and consistently high quality. As an Internet-based company in a competitive landscape, we also need to shake things up from time to time. Evolve, or die, as they say.

Last month Hoover's launched its redesigned Bizmology blog and editorial feature site. Our goal was to evolve this BtoB blog into a more powerful tool for brand recognition and ultimately, sales.

The care and feeding of BtoB blogs is an ongoing issue for readers of this newsletter. So I've provided some insight here into the decisions we made and how we implemented them.

The new Bizmology incorporates search functionality and more photos to make it a more user-driven experience.

A Stickier Site

Hoover's launched Bizmology in mid-2006 as part of an effort to explore how social media can improve the stickiness of our free site. (Hoover's provides limited access to business information for free. Deeper content requires a subscription.)

Bizmology was meant to help further our branding efforts by highlighting the editors behind the company's content—a huge competitive advantage in an age of soulless information pulled together by Web scraping and commodity data.

In the first three years of Bizmology's existence, we did a good job of growing traffic organically through search engine optimization. But it became clear that we still had some challenges: Bounce rates at times topped 80%. We were confident that the content was not the problem. So we decided to revamp the packaging.

Information Advantage

A typical BtoB blog is written by one person, laser-focused on a particular topic. The original Bizmology, in contrast, was written in a loose blog style by a collection of 10 or so authors with different styles covering a wide variety of industries and business topics.

The content was insightful, but the tone wasn't consistent. And it was never pretty to look at. We didn't incorporate many graphics. The site had big chunks of text stacked on top of each other. Editors were contributing content more along the lines of op-eds and feature articles.

It became clear that we were providing less of a blog and more of a blog/newsmagazine hybrid. And that's not a bad thing. The knowledge and vast content at our disposal are strengths, not weaknesses. So, marrying the two styles became the key driver behind the redesign.

Here's a chronology of the key steps:

We loosened up the production schedule, which had been very rigid. Authors were assigned particular days to blog. This made the blog easier to manage, but stifled timeliness. We shifted to a system where a collection of editors are assigned to Bizmology for a whole week, and they can post as many blogs as they can crank out on whatever topic is in the headlines.
Next we moved to redesign. The new Bizmology is much more pleasing to the eye, with teasers on the home page rather than entire posts stacked up. We incorporated photos into every entry and improved search functionality, which makes it easier to hone in on content about a particular industry or by a specific author.
We made the blog much more nimble so that we can add new content with minimum effort (podcasts, video) and cross-pollinate with data from parent D&B and sister firm AllBusiness.com.

So far we're received positive word-of-mouth on the new Bizmology. For the next two quarters, we'll watch metrics including hits, bounce rates and ad sales to see how we did. And rest assured, we'll continue to evolve.

Return to MWJ Home

Larry Bills is a senior editor at Hoover's, Inc. a Bulldog Solutions client. Read the Bizmology blog at www.bizmology.com.

Marketing Watchdog Journal is a monthly newsletter from Bulldog Solutions, a lead optimization and lead management company dedicated to helping our clients generate more, better leads and turn them into revenue. We welcome your feedback on this newsletter's content and design, and encourage you to share your ideas for topics you would like us to cover in future issues. Please send your comments or questions about Bulldog Solutions to Amy Bills, Director of Field Marketing.