Can Blogs Be Useful Marketing Tools?
by Rick Hendershot, Linknet
Marketing Resource Library
Blogs (web-logs) have become very popular. If
you are not up to speed on what "blogs" are, just think
of them as online journals.
The owner of the blog makes regular posts on whatever
topics he/she chooses, and readers are free (or not) to make comments.
If you think blogging is symptomatic of a youth culture enamoured
of brainless activites like "reality" TV shows, text
messaging and endless cell phone chatting, you are only partially
right.
Like your typical teeanage cell phone conversation
("Hi. Where are you now? I'm at the mall. We're gonna hang
out for a while. Got to go...") blog content can be nothing
more than navel gazing:
"Well, I'm back after a couple of days. Don't really have
much to say, because not much has happened. Think I'll go for
a drive to the mall and wander around for a while. Need some underwear
and might pick up a pizza. G2G..."
It is probably true that the immediacy and regularity
of blogging lends itself to this kind of empty content...
Ooops. Time to make my blog entry. What's that? Can't think of
anything to say? Well then, I guess I'll just talk about that...
OK... "Here I am again. It's time to make another entry in
my blog, but I can't think of anything to say. I hate that. Life
can be so boring. Don't you agree? Well, G2G..."
Writing about nothing
That reminds me of the time back in Grade 12 English
when I couldn't think of a topic for an essay due the next day.
Out of desperation, that became my topic.
The title was something like "An Essay About
Nothing", and it started out more or less like this "I'm
suppose to hand in an esssay tomorrow, but I can't think of anything
to write about, so that is what I am writing about."
I thought I was being pretty clever, and it was
probably as good as most of my essays. But the teacher, expecting
the usual earnest effort handed in by Grade 12 students, wasn't
amused.
On the other hand, Jerry Seinfeld, turned this concept into the
best sitcom ever produced (quite a few years later, I might add).
Which only goes to prove that writing about nothing isn't always
what it's cracked up to be. Sometimes it can be much more.
So it is with blogs. Blog content can be empty and pointless,
or it can be interesting and thoughtful.
Just like ezines and those things we internet marketers
pass off as "articles". Some of my content for this
and other sites comes from submissions made to article newsgroups.
Everybody who joins the group can send out their
"articles" to the entire group. So I receive a hundred
or so articles every day. Some of them are interesting, original,
informative, and very well written.
But, alas, most of them harp on the same old boring marketing
themes: "10 Ways to Super Charge Your Response Rate",
"5 Tips for Writing Dynamic Sales Copy", "How to
Find the Perfect Work at Home Business", on and on it goes,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This stuff would be right at home
in most mind-numbing blogs.
Good things about blogs for marketers
On the whole, from the publishing and marketing
points of view, blogs have a lot going for them.
First of all, everything gets posted right away
in a blog, so they have a sense of immediacy and a more conversational
tone than even your typical online forum or newsgroup. This also
makes them much more "interactive" than many other web
communication media.
Certainly blogs are more interactive than traditional websites.
And they make email-based ezines seem downright old fashioned.
But are blogs likely to replace traditional websites and ezines
as the go-to formats for online marketing?
No and Yes.
There are things we can do with ordinary static websites
that are not suited to blogs. Catalogue or reference material,
for instance, must continue to contain reliable, stable and therefore
relatively static detail. The same goes for much product description
material, legal mumbo-jumbo, and technical information.
But blogging is ideally suited to ongoing communication with clients,
customers and prospects. And it is particularly useful for "excerpting",
"citing", or commenting on other articles, blog posts,
or websites.
Blogs are at their best when the posts are short
and they link to some other resource as a point of reference.
That is why blogging is particularly important
for internet marketers. For instance, say (like a client of mine)
you are a Waterloo
Ontario real estate agent. And say you want to make new listing
updates available to subscribers.
A blog is a perfect place to do this. You can
post your regular listings on a daily basis, and mix in other
news and promotions along the way.
Regular email messages can be sent out to your
subscriber base reminding them to "check today's new listings
in my blog".
You can even turn it into an "RRS Feed"
and syndicate your blog information so clients can pick it up
on a feed reader, or other webmasters can post it on their sites.
The blog experiment. I jump in up to my neck
But I must admit, my real interest in blogs has
to do with their potential for influencing search engine rankings.
Google thinks blogs are great. They seem to like the simplicity
and down home "everyman" character of blogging.
And they certainly like three other facts about
blogs: they are constantly changing, they are "content-rich"
in a very focused way — even if that content isn't particularly
profound. and they are often extensively interlinked with other
websites and blogs.
In fact Google seems to be neutral towards the relatively
mindless content presented in many blogs. And this has opened
up an interesting "window of opportunity" for search
engine optimizers.
Experiments have shown that it is much safer to
"spam" Google with blog content than with other static
web pages.
These experiments have shown that blog content
that is essentially just a bunch of jibberish with hundreds of
embedded links and strategically placed keywords is often given
the royal treatment by Google.
The same sort of content in a "normal"
website (for instance the kind generated by a program like Search
Engine Cloaker) is absolutely verboten.
In a series of articles within the Linknet Marketing
Resource Library I discuss other blogging topics, and share some
of the tips and techniques I have discovered along the way.
Rick Hendershot is a writer and internet publisher
whose major project is a series of Linknet Resource Libaries:
articles and discussions on tightly focused topics such as Marketing,
Linking, Search Engine Optimization, Real Estate, Golf, and many
more. He currently publishes a number of blogs including Marketing
Bites, e_Marketing,
Trade
Show Buzz, The
WEG, and Inside
Real Estate.
