Last year UtiliPoint, undertook a snapshot survey to look at blogs in the energy industry. That survey suggested that, whilst 98 percent of the survey respondents knew what a blog was, only around one-third of them ever visited blogs in the energy space¹ and around one- third of those told us that information from those blogs factored into their decision making. Amongst our conclusions from the study were that blogs were becoming an increasingly important source of data, information and opinion in the industry. However we also sounded something of a cautionary note stating that while blogs were certainly a growing source of industry opinion and information, the credibility of the blogger should always be carefully considered in accepting information and opinion posted on blogs. Some respondents to the study also made this important point. Some provided further input stating that they monitored the various environmentalist and other pressure group blogs to gain intelligence and information about such group's activities to gauge the likely future impacts on their own companies. Perhaps more importantly some 33 percent of all responding companies stated that they too had a blog or were planning to create one and 60 percent of all respondents viewed a blog as at least a nice to have corporate communications tool.

Why Build a Blog?

Without a doubt, since that study was conducted there are now many more blogs in the energy industry and perhaps many more planned. Blogs are simply extremely useful and easy to use tools that have become accepted by internet browsers and users as acceptable if not desirable places to visit. But if you create a blog just how do you compete with the billions of other blogs out there for attention? The "blogosphere" is perhaps the most competitive arena that exists today by virtue of the ease of creating a blog in the first instance and because there are just so many of them. It is not enough to simply create a blog. You have to have a strategy to support it, too.

The first questions to ask in thinking about creating a blog are, "What is its purpose? Who is the intended audience and what actions do you want that audience to take as a result of reading the blog?" The original concept of a blog was essentially an online diary where others could post comments, so how does this help an energy company or a utility with corporate communications? It can help because the blog can become an online community of interested parties that provides a sense of "ownership" for its users. For example, a utility could engage with its customers through a blog that discusses issues, regulations and the practicalities of serving those customers, in which customers can respond, comment and make suggestions. In fact, if executed correctly, the blog can help build a sense of loyalty on the part of the customer that may make a difference in a competitive retail market, for example.

How to Build a Blog

Blogs are simple to build. Most bloggers use Wordpress, Drupal or some other "freeware" readily available and designed to set up blogs. Such tools are these days supported by droves of knowledgeable "techies" willing to build custom templates and/or features for blogger clients. There are no shortages of tools or skills to build a blog. The biggest issue associated with a blog is creating a constant stream of quality and informative content. As my colleague, Patrick Reames posted on one of our blogs—www.etrmcommunity.com —recently, his day job was beginning to get in the way of his blogging!

Promoting Your Blog

Building the blog is the easy part. The more difficult side of blogging is getting visibility and gaining an audience in what is a very competitive arena. The most important aspect of promoting your blog is actually the one mentioned above—posing fresh, informative and quality content on a regular basis. Fresh content is required for two reasons. The first is obvious: it keeps your readers and hopefully loyal community coming back for more. But, the second reason is not so intuitive: fresh content keeps the web crawlers coming back to our site and indexing it. What is a web crawler or bot? It is a piece of code written by the search engines like Google and Yahoo that explores your site following all of the links determining things like:

• The site's relative (to all other websites out there) importance; and,
• What key words are being used by which the search engine can produce its search results when users make queries.

You should also populate the blog with useful static information and tools that make it compelling for your community. For example, a blog around energy trading might include a foreign exchange conversion tool and a customer service blog may include local weather information or an energy efficiency calculator.

It makes a great deal of sense to press release the launch of your blog and to run marketing campaigns to promote it of course. The press release, if picked up by websites like Google and Yahoo, will also help to start building your Google page rank (see below). The exact marketing campaigns that you run will depend upon the nature of the blog and its intended audience. But once the blog is launched, there are a number of non-traditional marketing techniques that can be employed to grow the community.

First, however, some definitions. There are several measures of your blog's popularity. The first is its Google Page Rank expressed as a number between 1 and 10, where 10 is important. Google's algorithm for determining page rank is complex and changes frequently, but in essence it is measuring your website's relative importance based on the inbound links to your site. The more inbound links the better. Even better are inbound links from sites that already have a high page rank. To be clear, an inbound link from a web site with a Google Page Rank of 1 is worth significantly less than an inbound link from a site with a page rank of 3 (In fact, every page on every site has its own page rank!). Google page rank is important in determining how your blog comes up in a user query. The second measure is perhaps its Alexa rank. Alexa use data to establish the most visited websites and periodically calculate each websites Alexa rank expressed as a number—say 1,100,000. This means that the ranked website is the 1,100,000^th most popular website.

Key words and meta tags are also important in blog promotion. With blogging software like Drupal or Wordpress, you can set up a list of meta tags for your blog and for each article or page on the blog but what is a meta tag? It is essentially a key word or phrase that someone may use to search for websites like yours that is placed within the HTML code of the site where it can be identified to the bots. Selecting the right key words is important and you have to adopt the mentality of your prospective users—what terms and words might they query on in a search engine? Some key words are over used and will not help your site very much, simply because so many other sites are using them. For example—and while this would not be a keyword for an energy blog!—the word “sex” is the most searched on term on the internet, so using it as a key word or meta tag will not get you in Google's top 10 websites displayed on that term. There are internet tools such as one at Google that can help you to find key words and assess their popularity to use on your blog.

As page rank is important, one thing to be sure to do is create links to your blog from your other websites. By using a simple HTML statement to create that link you can add key words, too. The idea is that you don't simply write “www.myblog.com” in the text to create the link but that you use the <a href="website url"> key word </a> HTML code. The text that you use in the “key word” position is what appears as a highlighted clickable link to your website and the bots pick that up as both an inbound link thus helping raise your page rank and as a key word for searches. As an example, I could say the following;

Please visit our new website at www.commodity-point.com.
(the HTML code would look like this: <a href="http://www.commodity-point.com">www.commodity-point.com</a>)

—or—

Please visit our new commodity blog.
(the HTML code would look like this: <a href="http://www.commodity-point.com">commodity blog</a>)

The second example is significantly better in promoting your site.

Using Other Bloggers

Which brings me to some additional tips. There are many services around the Internet such as www.sponsoredreviews.com or www.payperpost.com that allow you to contact other bloggers and have them write an article on their blog about yours. They are paid to do this and will incorporate whatever key words and links that you ask them to. A blogger will charge anywhere between $5 and $500 to write this short article depending on the rank and traffic to their own blog and there are hundreds of thousands of them waiting to earn a little cash doing this via these services. You can select which blogs and bloggers you want to do this meaning that you can select other blogs in a related space but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what they write so long as they embed the keywords. By having 100 bloggers write a short post using the same keywords and links, you can see your page rank jump and the position of your blog on Google rise very rapidly. It is a few hundred or thousand dollars well-spent in marketing your blog.

Conclusions

These are just a few suggestions and tips to promote your energy-related blog. UtiliPoint sees the values of blogs which is why we maintain quite a few blogs, ourselves. If you or your firm is thinking about building a blog, do contact us as we can assist you in developing your blog and promotion strategy.

One last word, though … blogging can become somewhat addictive and truly get in the way of your day job!

¹ Energy and Natural Resources Blogs Snapshot Survey Results, UtiliPoint Report, 2008