Most of the blogging advice you read online today is aimed at “solopreneurs” who are looking to build an audience to sell info-products or affiliate products to.
That’s fine, but what about the startup bloggers? Specifically, I tend to get a ton of questions about the business-to-business community (about 1/3rd of the email that I get from my site is from new startup founders).
Today I’d like to discuss 3 simple (but effective) B2B blogging strategies that you can implement immediately.
Yeah, I said it.

Social media buttons are awful for page load speed (and even worse for mobile), yet many bloggers hang on to them like children, afraid to do away with even the most obscure buttons in hopes of getting that one additional share… bleh.
While this advice is useful for ALL bloggers in every niche, it’s especially critical for B2B blogs.
Check out this recent tweet from from Smashing Magazine:

We removed FB buttons and traffic from Facebook increased. Reason: instead of “liking” articles, readers share it on their timeleine.
— Smashing Magazine (@smashingmag) May 22, 2012

Many articles have since been published both for and against this change, but the general consensus seems to be this: you need to adjust the social buttons that you use for your audience. Know your customers and the networks that they use.
Here’s a first hand example.
Over at Help Scout, we’ve been tracking our social shares & conversions with HubSpot to see which ones are performing the best.
Check out the results:

We started out being concerned with our Facebook likes just like anybody else, but boy was that a waste! It turns out, LinkedIn is amazing for B2B sharing (jot that down B2B startups).
The lesson here is that social sharing needs to be focused, don’t just add everything you can think of. Your blog isn’t the Huffington Post, you need to worry about quality traffic, not mass amounts of traffic.
Find out what is working for your site and target those sites only, after all, psychological research has PROVEN that choice is demotivating: the more choices you have, the less likely people are to use them.
You’ll notice that I also have SlideShare highlighted… as for that…
Yup, SlideShare has been converting at nearly 50%, which is INSANE.
That doesn’t even count the leads we receive from the opt-in forms that you can enable directly on your slides!
I’ve been ranting and raving about SlideShare for a long time now, maybe after this post a few B2B marketers will finally start listening to me…
Anyway, the key to being successful with SlideShare is that darn homepage, it gets hundreds of thousands of visitors, so getting featured in the top 3 for the day is going to result in a huge bump.
The main strategies are to create data-intensive content that SlideShare’s professional audience loves, get your slideshows embedded on other sites, and pay attention to great design.
Getting the design down pat can be tough without a designer, you’re going to have some stiff competition:
It’s tough to go toe-to-toe with designs like that, but you DO have the option of picking up some of the incredible designs available on GraphicRiver.
Here’s a link to the PowerPoint templates available.
Many of them are really slick and will give you a fighting chance with the designs you’ll see on the SlideShare homepage.
If you’re a B2B startup or a blogger that writes about business topics, you are missing out on a MASSIVE, professional, and highly engaged audience if you aren’t on SlideShare (just check those stats above, they speak for for me).
This is taking over in the B2B realm, and I highly advise that you get in on the action too.
Joint webinars are incredibly powerful: you have two or more folks with audiences all putting together great content in a single online webinar that anyone can attend, awesome!
It’s great for your blog because you can use those emails that signed up and add them to your list (with permission of course, notify people beforehand). You can also do this automatically with WebinarBridge.
Rand (SEOmoz) and Dharmesh (HubSpot) recently did this and were able to host one of the biggest webinars ever, entitled the “State of SEO & Internet Marketing, 2012″.
Here’s the best part: You can host the webinars slides on SlideShare afterwards for even more exposure!
Check it:
That’s a lot of mileage out of one presentation.
Plus, webinars are one of the most engaging forms of content available (readers get to hear your voice and maybe even see you, live).
For all of you B2B bloggers out there, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
As for “regular” bloggers (you’re all special to me ), what did you think of these strategies?
Thanks for reading, I’ll see you down in the comments.
Gregory Ciotti is the founder of Sparring Mind and the marketing guy at Help Scout.