Blog With the Rendezvous Search Problem in Mind

A famous logistics exercise, called the Rendezvous Search Problem, involves two people who lose each other while wandering through the aisles of a large supermarket. If they want to find each other, should one decide to stop moving while the other continues to search, or will they meet up sooner if both move through the aisles?

This problem has been debated in many a college classroom on logistics, and published in many a magazine as an amusing mental exercise. For us blog content writers, though, this is serious stuff.  One of the purposes of our work is to help our clients’ businesses and professional practices “get found”, and get found as quickly as possible. When business blogging works, in fact, they call it “winning search”.

Only problem is, the people in the ”other aisles” of the Internet not only don’t know where our clients are;  they don’t even know the business’ or the practice’s name!  They don’t know that our clients have exactly the information, the products, and the services they’re looking for, and they won’t know that until they’re “introduced” by the search engine through the blog.

Years ago, NewScientist Magazine offered advice to the lost supermarket shoppers: “Walk along the edge of the supermarket where the cash registers are, looking down the aisles for the person you seek.”

For blog marketers, that advice might translate as follows:

1.  The more relevant content you can post on the blog, the quicker the “find time” is likely to be. You can’t get to the “front of the store” without consistent content creation.

2.  Just as in the supermarket story, you need to know what you’re looking for. The blog content must be perfectly focused on your target market.

3.  The blog content must humanize both “shoppers” and providers. Content writers should imagine one specific person who’s experiencing one specific problem, suggests “Mo the Blog Coach”.

One thing we know for sure at Say It For You – whether at the supermarket or the blogosphere, you can’t just stand in place and hope to get found!