Blogs Bring The Genie Out Of The Bottle

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Remember the story of "Aladdin and the Magic Lamp"? I can’t think of a better example for demonstrating how web searches work.  SEO expert William Flaiz says in Search Engine Watch, "People don’t go to websites any more; websites come to them."

Chris Baggott of Compendium Blogware interprets that statement: "People aren’t concerned about remembering your business web address or even your name or brand.  Search engines like Google have opened up a wonderful new world for consumers where they simply have to enter their wants, needs, or problems into a little box and magically, several solutions immediately appear and give them what they are looking for." Doesn’t that remind you of the genie rising out of the bottle, saying "Your wish is my command."?

An increasing number of dollars is being redirected from traditional forms of "push marketing" such as TV, radio, yellow pages, and directories to the Internet.  The power of business blogs to drive traffic to websites through "pull marketing" is one of the major reasons for that change.

Your wish may be the "genie"’s command, but while he was inside the bottle, he couldn’t possibly have kept up with developments in your business. Make sure your blog site’s calls to action lead in a clear path to your main website. One way to accomplish that is to include in your company title what you do. Sanders and Forster Co. doesn’t help your genie do magic nearly as much as Sanders and Forster Tools in Indianapolis or Sanders and Forster Indianapolis Dry Cleaning or Sanders and Forster Indianapolis Family Restaurant.

Remember, you’re trawling for customers who may never have heard your company name and who are searching the web based on categories of what they need.

For that very reason, the key words and phrases that relate to your business should, wherever possible, be the first words in your blog and then reappear in the first few lines of the text.

Your blog posts can release a lot of business magic, but you might need to rub the lamp a bit first!

 

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The Big Blog Bank Is A One, Two, Or Three

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Mark Tibergien, nationally known business consultant to financial planning practitioners, visited Indianapolis to address a meeting of the Financial Planning Association.  Tibergian was very blunt about the importance of growing a business as opposed to staying small. "If you are recognized as one of the top three firms in your market," he said, "you will be given twice the opportunities to acquire new clients as the firm that is #4."

Tibergien produces business succession plans, not blogs, but without realizing it, he captured the essence of "winning search" through business blogging. Search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and MSN love frequently updated content, and companies that provide these things through business blogging earn high rankings.  That’s because Google attracts advertisers by bringing visitors who have come to rely on Google as the place to most quickly and easily get the information they need.

Just as Tibergien points out, ranking in the top tier in your market is enormously important in customer acquisition.  Having your blog show up at or very near the top of Page One of a search engine geometrically increases your chances of getting your link clicked on, which is the first step to converting a searcher into a customer. Almost no searchers ever go as far as Page Four, and most don’t look past Number 4 on Page One!

The need to "rank" in order to "get found" is the one of the main reasons blog strategist Michael Belicove defends the practice of ghost blogging. He sees the role of ghost blogger to be articulating clients’ thoughts and unique business propositions with the frequency necessary to achieve and maintain those top search rankings, something most business owners simply cannot manage along with all their other responsibilities.

According to Mark Tibergien, an owner of a financial planning firm focused on growth needs to be able to say to himself: "I need to focus on where I make an impact, and hire other people for where they make an impact." That decision, says Tibergian, is the one that was most responsible for the most successful firms’ ability to grow.

As a retired financial planning professional now part of a small, elite group of specialty writers for hire, I found value on a variety of levels in Tibergian’s talk. His words made me more dedicated than ever to the task of helping each of my corporate blogging clients get to one of those top three spots on search engines’ results pages.  (That’s where they begin leaving their competitors in the dust!)

 

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In Blogs, 350 Words Are Worth One Picture

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Fellow blogger Michael Fortin believes most blogs miss the mark because of lack of proof. There are several kinds of proof you can use, he points out, but one of the most powerful is a "visual representation of the product, the business, the person, the quality, the claims, or more importantly, the benefits of the product or service.  This kind of proof gives your copy a strong advantage.

There’s some science behind Fortin’s observation. Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine found that pictures allow patients with very mild Alzheimer’s disease to better identify a subject as compared with using just words. Head First Labs explains that for all of us, anything that increases brain activity aids learning.  When words appear within a picture, or there is a combination of words and a picture, that causes our brains to try to make sense of how the words and the picture relate.  "More neurons firing = more chances for your brain to get that this is something worth paying attention to."

Whenever you can include an actual photograph illustrating the content of your business blog post, that adds power to the words in the blog. If you’d like to use an image from another website, be careful to respect copyrights.  Hundreds of thousands of high-quality, royalty-free images may be purchased online to enhance your blog posts, explains buyingpicturesonline.com, including five resources in their partial listing:

           iStockphoto    http://www.istockphoto.com

           Shutterstock   http://www.shutterstock.com/

           Big Stock Photo  http://www.bigstockphoto.com/

           Fotolia   http://us.fotolia.com/

           Dreamstine   http://www.dreamstime.com/

Since it’s important to keep blogs brief, one photo image per blog post is a reasonable ratio. The proverbial picture may be worth a thousand words, but for business blogs, 350 parts words: one part picture is usually just the right ratio!

 

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No Joke – The More You Know About, The More You Can Blog About!

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While being Interviewed for the cover story of the Chicago Reader, Robert Smigel was asked how good of an education he’d needed to become a humor writer. "You mean an academic education?",Smigel replied. "You don’t necessarily need one.  What’s just as important, I suppose, is to be self-educated – to read and soak in as much as you can from the world at large." Smigel ended by quoting comic Del Close: "The more you know about, the more you can joke about."
Whether you’re writing your own business blog or getting help from a professional ghost blogger like me, Del Close’s statement is on the money. One of the services offered by Say It For You is training for business owners and their employees on developing content for business blogs.  Of course, blog posts need to keep a sharp focus, in order for searchers to quickly confirm they’ve come to the right spot for the information, products, and solutions they need. At the same time, interesting, different, content is what keeps those searchers reading rather than "bouncing" away from your blog.

To be able to use some of the strategies for blog content development I outline in "Six In A Fix For Blogs", it’s going to take reading and learning. Preparing blog posts that capture online searchers’ interest by blending "ingredients" that don’t seem to match, by tying your content to the news, by relating your content to a celebrity or historical story,  or by debunking myths – that all takes curiosity and self education on a broad scale. Constant curiosity is the secret  – reading, clipping, bookmarking (think magazines, newspapers, websites, and other blogs)  listening (think radio, TV, concerts, lectures), and thinking and "processing" all the way.

Milestone Internet Marketing’s 2009 Online Marketing Predictions are extremely bullish on blogs in 2009 and beyond.  "If done correctly, blogs can help you to communicate with target audiences in a more personal, informal, online setting. Blogs will become essential for business owners who are committed to retaining their customer base and "providing compelling information and true value."

Comics Smigel and Close, and Milestone, you’ve all really hit the proverbial nail on the head.  Simply put, the more you know about, the more you can blog about!

 

 

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Just Watch Those Blogs Brachiate Through The Web!

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Morning Coach J.B. Glossinger’s "word of the day" a couple of weeks ago was "brachiate" (pronounced BRAY-kee-ayt). Brachiate means to progress by swinging from hold to hold by the arms.  Smaller members of the ape family, such as gibbons, get around this way.  Chimps, gorillas, and orangutans are less likely to use this method of travel, due to the heavier weight of their bodies.

That movement of gibbons swinging through the jungle by their arms is a perfect metaphor for the way blogs move around the Web.  Traditional websites are more like the heavier chimps and gorillas – they’re not flexible enough or small enough to swing from site to site, or to move with ease among online conversations the way smaller, constantly renewing, blog posts can.

In the few moments you spend on this blog post, for example, you can easily link to Morning Coach to learn more interesting vocabulary, take advantage of a mini-coaching session on corporate blogging, or learn that the word "pretzel" is related to the Latin "brachiatus", meaning "having branches like arms".

Blogs, by their very nature, are available not only for reading, but for acting and interacting. Inviting readers to post comments and then responding to those comments, encouraging RSS subscriptions to the blog so that individual readers can get back to earlier posts to read more about topics of special interest to the them, and linking readers to other sources of information – these are all ways blogs brachiate nimbly through the world wide web, taking readers along for an extremely exhilarating mental ride.

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