Herbert Spencer, who died in 1903, was the engineer, philosopher, and psychologist who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”.  (I’ll bet you thought Darwin made up that term – I know I thought so until I read the truth in The Book of General Ignorance.) An even more interesting detail I learned from the book is that Spencer was the inventor of paper clips, which were originally named Spencer’s Binding Pins. 

Most of us spend almost no time thinking about paper clips, but more than 11 billion of them are sold annually. But since, as a professional ghost blogger, I do spend a lot of time thinking about marketing, and particularly blog marketing, I was struck by this amazing paper clip statistic: Of every 100,000 paper clips sold, only five are actually used to hold papers together! (Most paper clips end up as poker chips, pipe cleaners, safety pins, toothpicks, or just getting dropped, lost, or bent out of shape during awkward phone calls!)

Keep that 5/100,000 paper clip ratio in mind when it comes to online search. There are basically two ways for your business to use online search for customer acquisition: Pay-Per-Click advertising and blogs. Blogging is part of organic search.  A study by Marketing Sherpa found that as many as 99% of clicks on a search engine are on organic results, not on ads! Just as only a very small percentage of paper clips end up doing the job for which they were designed, Pay-Per-Click ads, designed to attract all the online searchers, end up winning only a very small percentage of search.

One of the reasons that’s true, according to Chris Baggott, CEO of Compendium Blogware, is that search engines determine relevance (and therefore assign higher rankings) based on the ratio of keywords found on a web page as compared with the words used in the search. Baggott goes on to explain that “blogs have a significant advantage with respect to keywords because, by nature they are comprised of a lot of words”, with the number growing over time as new posts are put online. “It is ideal to appear in the organic results because the vast majority of action takes place there.” 

99,995 paper clips and 99 out of 100 clicks on blogs versus Pay-Per-Click ads.  As Businessweek predicted all the way back in May, 2005, “Blogs will change your business!”
 

I remember, back last summer, Indianapolis Mayor Ballard saying something I thought was really important.  Of course, he was talking about the new Lucas Oil Stadium, not about blogs, but the reason Ballard’s statement comes to mind right now is that, as you’ll see,  the principle’s the same for stadiums and online business marketing.

"I never look at Lucas Oil by itself.  I always look at it in conjunction with the expanded convention center," Ballard said.  "If people have been paying attention at all, they understand this has done more for conventions than for the Colts," he added.

People have been paying attention to blogs.  In fact, in the few seconds it’s taken you to click on this page and read this far down into my blog, thousands of new blogs will have "gone live" online. But, just as people became enamored of Lucas Oil Stadium’s sheer size and newness, (forgetting that the real long-term benefits to their city would come from areas not directly related to football), I think business owners can get enamored with blogs for the sheer size and relative newness of the blogosphere.

Effective business blogging drives traffic.  But traffic has to have a destination in order to bring any dollars to the bottom line.  So (to continue with my not-so-far-fetched comparison), the convention center needed to be expanded and new hotels build in order for the city of Indianapolis to reap the benefits of their big new football stadium. For blogs to give "bang for the buck" to a business, the website needs to be revamped.  I don’t mean just coordinating key words to link to search terms used in the blog, but designing the website for convert "lookers" into buyers.

"The direct and indirect effects of a corporate blog can be amazing," says Paul Woodhouse, one of the first British business leaders to use blogging strategy.

My caution, though: Remember the convention center in Indianapolis, and remember that your website and your overall online marketing strategy (your blog is just one tactic within that overall strategy). When it comes to corporate blogging strategy, by all means think big.  Perhaps even more important, think smart.