Archive for category: the Say It For You blog

You wouldn’t imagine Food Network would have much to say that’s useful for business bloggers, but, as I found out, you never can tell. An entire Food Network episode last week was devoted  to hamburgers and the business of marketing them.  The show was called “Heavyweights”, because it traced the history of McDonald’s and Burger King and of the competition that has been escalating between those two hamburger chains for decades.

In describing the Big Mac, one of McDonald’s signature products, the show host coined a term – “tottom”.  Alluding to the three-part sesame seed bun used in each Big Mac, she explained that the middle piece of bun (it’s not a top or a bottom – it’s a “tottom”)  is what holds the whole sandwich together.  It’s actually the "tottom" that keeps the patties, the lettuce, the cheese, the pickles, and the onions from sliding over the special sauce and falling out. 

Blog posts typically include several different “ingredients”.  A good post will include some valuable information about the subject the searcher was asking about, perhaps some interesting tidbits that most people don’t know. There might be a “marketing” element to the post, where the writer is explaining that he or she has a unique approach to the problem that might be more satisfying to a customer than the solutions offered by competitors.  Then there should be some form of Call to Action, something the reader can do to get more information, obtain service, or buy the product. 

Whatever the ingredients of that blog post, it’s the “tottom” that holds it all together, just like that middle slice of bread in the Big Mac. With a blog post, the “tottom” is the unifying idea, and each and every blog post needs to have one.  That way, your readers’ interest doesn’t ‘slide away”, and they always know where you’re headed with the blog.

For hamburgers or blog posts, you can have lots of different elements at the top and at the bottom and all the way through, but it’s the “tottom that holds it all together!

If you can imagine a boxing competition with two rings and two matches going on at the same time, you can understand the way online search works.

There’s the PPC (Pay Per Click) and Sponsored Link side, which is where businesses have bought space.  In PPC, every time someone clicks on the link, the business owner pays a fee to the search engine company.

The other "ring", organic search, is where I and all the other bloggers and writers operate. We’ve chosen organic search, my clients and I, (although some businesses also employ PPC as part of their marketing strategy) not only because it offers free placement, but because more than 90% of the action (the clicks) take place on the organic portion of the search engine results page.

Consumers turn to search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and MSN for help finding specific kinds of information, services, products, and expertise.  Using the mechanism of key words and phrases, the search engine "makes a match" and delivers results to the viewer. So, as I’m working on blogging strategy with my business owners clients, we’re looking to use as many key words and phrases as possible that specifically relate to the target clients each business is trying to attract.  Actually, we’re trying to satisfy two "masters", the search engines and the searchers.  We know both of those are looking for the same thing – fresh, frequently changing, and very relevant content that has to do with the subject in the key words and phrases.

The object of business blogging is to "win organic search", and normally, winning is the reward for recency (posting fresh, new content), frequency (posting content regularly, preferably at least two to three times every single week), and, most important, relevancy (providing content that is a good match for the searcher’s needs or problems).

Every once in a while, though, there’s a "disconnect" between what the searcher wanted and what he or she actually finds.  If this happens with your blog, even though it’s not one of your target customers that clicks on the blog link, it’s not necessarily bad news.  That kind of "mistake" can even result in you converting a searcher-gone-astray into a buyer. I call this "accidental organic donating". 

Suppose a dad, trying to help his kid with homework, goes on Google to find information about the state of Hawaii. The search engine uses the key word "Hawaii" to bring that dad to a blog about Hawaii presented by a travel company.  The blog so enticingly portrays Hawaii as a destination, the dad bookmarks the site, and later uses that travel agency to plan a surprise anniversary trip with Mom!

Early in my own blogging career, a mistake ended up first "bumping" me from my #1 slot on Google under the search term "professional ghost blogger".  There was a whole to-do about whether hip-hop star Kanye West was using a ghost blogger or not, and dozens upon dozens of Kanye’s detractors and fans were having a slugfest, blogging back and forth, opining about ghost-blogging. (Once I entered the fray by posting blogs on about ghost blogging and mentioning the name Kanye West, I regained my slot.)  But what is even more important is that, to this very day, some of those blog posts I wrote so many months ago come to Google Page One if you search for information about either Kanye West or ghost blogging!

So, don’t for a moment worry that head of yours about accidental organic donations – just murmur a quiet "Thank you" to the search engine for the miscue!