Birds Do It, Bees Do It – Hire A Ghost Blogger, I Mean!

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If you decide to hire a professional ghost blogger or ghost Twitterer, you’ll be in prestigious company.  A recent New York Times piece informed readers that Britney Spears is advertising for someone to create content for her Twitter and Facebook accounts.  Politician Ron Paul’s way ahead of Britney, with staffers Tweeting and blogging away.    Rappers Kanye West and 50 Cent each use ghostwriters to keep up their blogs and Tweets, and no less a personage than President Obama employs a social networking team. Ghosts are in vogue!

"In its short history," relates the Times, "micro-blogging Twitter has become an important marketing tool for celebrities, politicians, and businesses."  However, explains reporter Noam Cohen, "Someone has to do all that writing."

A professional ghost blogger myself, I’m always on the alert for what others in my field are blogging – and for whom.  Guy Kawasaki, a new media consultant with a big following, has this to say about the two employees who post updates for him while he’s onstage addressing conference audiences: "For 99.9% of people on Twitter, it is about updating friends and colleagues about how the cat rolled over.  For a tenth of a percent, it is a marketing tool."

By contrast, for every one of my Say It For You business clients, blogs are marketing tools, and, believe me, "cats rolling over" have no place in the content of their blog posts…

The simple fact is, very few business owners can take the time to post relevant, new material on their business blogs with enough consistency to improve search engine rankings.  Recruiting  the right professional ghost blogger to join their marketing team is business owners’ way to reach potential customers and clients. To be sure, 140-character "Tweets" might be easier to manage, but search remains the fastest growing marketing tool of all social media, according to Chris Baggott’s Guide To Blogging, and Twitter is not designed to drive traffic to corporate websites.

A year ago, when debate was raging about whether Kanye West was writing his own blogs or whether a ghost blogger was the power behind the blogs, I commented: "It’s a matter of ‘So there you have it!’  Blogging works to drive traffic. Period."

Got ghosts?

 

 

 

 

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DO Ask, But Ask How Blogging PAYS

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Many years ago, I heard "First lady of financial planning" Venita Van Caspel lecture to a crowd in a Houston, Texas shopping center on how to develop a winning money attitude.  Van Caspel said something then that’s stuck with me ever since. Asked by prospective clients how much she charged in financial planning fees, she’d reply, "Don’t ask what financial planning costs.  Ask what it pays!"

Business owners contemplating starting a business blog often ask me about costs, and, since solid business decisions must consider expected return on investment, that question is perfectly in order, as far as I’m concerned. 

At the same time, every business owner must be prepared to consider the corollary question – How will I know blogging’s paying off for my business?  Based on my experience with business blogging, as well as the insight I gained all those years ago from Venita, I’m convinced it’s the answer to that second question that’s most important for business owners to discuss.

For beginning business bloggers, you can use your own website and your own server to post your blog, or sign up for a blogging "platform" hosted by a blogging company.  Two popular free platforms are Blogger.com and, WordPress. TypePad offers a one free trial month free, and then charges a modest monthly fee. Blogware companies such as Compendium offer platforms with extra features to amplify business bloggers’ influence and "reach".  Compendium helps answer the second question by providing weekly analytics on searchers who clicked on the corporation’s blog. Depending on the budget and the goals for the blog, blog-it-yourselfer small business owners can expect "platform costs" that range from zero to several thousand dollars a year.

Adding a professional ghost blogger to the marketing team can boost the marketing tab by $3,000 to $8,000 a year.  In addition, business owners who want to reap maximum benefits from their long-term online marketing strategy may pay a professional to "optimize" their website in coordination with the blog, as well as to promote the blog in directories and even adword campaigns.

To put blogging costs in perspective, any entrepreneur should check out the list of advertising costs in David Verklin’s book Watch This, Listen Up, Click Here. A 30-second national radio spot on, say Rush Limbaugh, costs almost $5000 (yes, for just one!), a healthclub panel ad in Chicago costs $18,000, and the price of a 30-second commercial on Desperate Housewives is more than $250,000. (Verklin breaks those numbers down to an average cost of $20 to reach a thousand TV viewers in one brief encounter.)

All these marketing and advertising dollars are spent to achieve the one thing blogging does best – giving companies customers who want to be sold!
   

Back to Question #2 – How do you know your blog marketing’s working?   When blog readers follow your "calls to action" – by phoning your business, faxing in a request or an order, signing up for a newsletter, or proceeding to your shopping cart to buy your product or service, you must have systems in place to differentiate these contacts from others that came through word of mouth marketing, ads, billboards, or commercials.  Along with getting your content out there on the blogosphere, you must know precisely how much incremental business came as a direct result of the blog. 

So (begging your pardon, Venita!) do ask how much blogging costs, but remember the more important issue – What does it pay?

 

 

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In Blogging, Personal Can Get Away WIth Platitudinous

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Whenever I’m working with business owners to plan their blog, I challenge them to think about two important questions.

My first question is, "Would you find you?"

Imagine, I ask each business owner, someone’s navigating the Web from home or perhaps from the corner café, searching for the kind of products and services you offer.  Keep in mind, though, the customer has never heard your business name!

Since a business blog targets organic search, people will get introduced to you by a search engine (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) matching up the words the searcher typed in with the words you used in the title and content of your blog post. 

Skillful marketing through business blogs is a science as well as an art.  The answer to this first question relates to the "science" part of blog marketing, and to the importance of using key phrases for "search engine optimization". Other tactics such as linking and "back-tracking" to other blogs, purchasing analytics for your blog, and which blog software to use all figure into this conversation about "finding".

My second question is longer, and requires some deeper thought on the part of the business owner: "If you had only eight to ten words to describe why you’re passionate about what your sell, what you know, and what you do, what would those words be?"

In other words, as I emphasized in "Your Brand ‘R You In Your Blog", whether you propose to do the blog writing yourself or collaborate with a professional ghost blogger partner like me, the very process of deciding what to put in the blog is one of self-discovery.  The content in the blog posts will be a way to continually think through and reinvent your business brand. This second question relates to the "art" aspect of blogging, the creative and very personal twist that will mark your blog as yours.

Earlier this week I mentioned attending a marketing strategy session with business coach and author Jim Ackerman.  Ackerman told about a highly successful marketing campaign run by a car dealer in Salt Lake City, Utah.  The tag line appearing in all the ads and marketing materials for this dealer was "You know this guy!"  On the surface of it, the slogan was old-hat to the point of being hokey, but, as Ackerman, pointed out, it worked wonderfully! 

Why did "You know this guy!" work well? Because "this guy" was down to earth and a straight shooter. "This guy" was personal and genuine in the way he treated customers, to the point that people seeing the commercials really did feel as if they knew him. According to Ackerman,: even "platitudinous" marketing works if it’s genuine, up close and personal!

Getting started on a business blog is simply a matter, then, of answering my two questions, the first about finding and the second about what they’ll be finding when they get to you!

 

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Oh, The Only-ness Of Blogging!

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It’s sort of hard to ignore 250,000,000 of anything, wouldn’t you say? One quarter billion is actually the number of blogs on the Internet as of this writing.  And that’s not all, mind you – 175,000 new blogs are coming online every day! This "blog thing" has fast attained impossible-to-overlook proportions, I’d say. Who’s doing all this blogging and why?

Blog maven Seth Godin describes three categories of blog:

Cat blogs are personal and idiosyncratic, he says, written out of a need for self expression, or sometimes to gain converts to the writer’s way of thinking.

Boss blogs are work project-centered, used to coordinate the different steps of a project being worked on by several different people.

Viral blogs, as the name implies, are used to spread ideas, and particularly to spread the word about businesses. Virals are the blogs I deal with in my professional ghost writing business, Say It For You, with the whole idea being to "win search" and attract buyers to your business who otherwise might never have shown up.

The other day I heard nationally-known speaker, business coach and author Jim Ackerman teach marketing to a group of entrepreneurs.  He urged each to find a "point of only-ness", meaning one statement to differentiate that business from all similar businesses, in a way that appeals to the kind of customers that business is targeting.

Any business owner needs to be able to start a sentence with "I am the only", as in "I am the only_____________________ in___________________ who ___________________." 

This crucial statement is not the same as an advertising slogan, Ackerman hastens to stress, but a marketing mission statement.  Your "only-ness" business statement always puts the emphasis on them and the benefits they will reap by dealing with you, and never on all the wonderful things you know, that you have, or that you know how to do.

Blogging for business, you remember, is "pull marketing".  Potential clients arrive at your blog because they’re searching for information, for a solution to a problem, or for a product or service that matches up with the content in your blog post. (In other words, you didn’t send out a mass mailing or put an ad on a billboard, which is "push marketing".) Now that they’ve located you, it’s up to your blog to engage them.  That’s where your "only-ness" must come across loud and clear:

Your blog has just the information searchers want:

It’s "on-the-money" (that’s what says "relevancy" to search engines)

It’s up-to-date (that’s what says "recency" to search engines)

It speaks your message in a very personal way to each one of them (that’s what makes prospects say "Yes, I want some!")  

Back a few decades ago, there was a hit song called "Only You". Well, that’s exactly the tone you want to set in your blog. Searchers must understand that only you can give them exactly what they came for!

Oh, the "only-ness" of you and of your virally on-the-money blog! 

 

 

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Brother, Can You Spare A Loanword For My Blog?

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Loanwords are words adopted by speakers of one language from a different language.  There are many, many foreign words and phrases used in English, and often these have become so familiar that people use them every day without considering their foreign origin.

Some Scandinavian words that have become part of English are husband, kindle, lump, thrust, and scrub.  France gave us the words judge, noble, priest, lady, pork, and salmon, while the words tattoo and taboo each come from the Pacific islands.  From Australia we “borrowed” the words kangaroo and boomerang, while banana, banjo, and jitterbug come from Africa.

As a ghost blogger, I’m a wordsmith, and it occurs to me that the language of computers and of blogging includes many, many loanwords of its own.  These words come not from foreign languages, but from everyday English words given a slightly different meaning for Internet and computer use. When I compose my blog (“web log”), I navigate using my “desktop”. My information might be protected with a “firewall” against “viruses”.  When I look at a website, it might have “wallpaper”.  I “scroll” down to read the content and decide to “bookmark” it. I might email documents in a “zip file”. There’s no end to computerspeak using loanwords! 

Professor Suzanne Kemmer of Rice University explains that a loanword can also be called a borrowing. “Loan” and “borrowing”, she hastens to add, are metaphors, because there is no transfer from one language to another, and no “returning” words to the source language!

With literally trillions of words being added daily to the World Wide Web, the Internet has become the largest repository of information in human history. Blogging activity has become a rapidly growing part of this information swell, and (inadvertently or on purpose) there’s undoubtedly a lot of “borrowing” going on. My college students are taught to avoid plagiarism by properly attributing statements to their proper authors. 
The blogging equivalent of citations is links.  Even if you’re putting a unique twist on a topic, it’s good practice to link to websites from which you got the original news or idea (the link in the first paragraph of this blog post is an example of that).

Not only is the practice of attributing “loans” to their sources, as Alfred P. Doolittle of My Fair Lady might say, “the right and proper thing to do, there are actually rewards to be gained. Electronic links enhance search engine rankings for your blog by creating back-and-forth online "traffic".

 

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