Blog Marketing Has A Lobster Eye

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"Search engines are the key to finding specific information on the vast expanse of the World Wide Web," explains Webopedia. There are robot-like engines called "web crawlers" and human-powered search engines that submit data to be indexed.

Each search engine visits a website, reads the information on it, follows any links that connect that site to others, and uses an "algorithm" to measure the relevance of the material it finds to what the online searcher appears to be looking for. Periodically, the crawler returns to the site to see if any of the information has changed.

When you type in a phrase on Google (or Yahoo, MSN, About.com, etc.), you’re actually searching the index for that phrase.

Remember me saying in a former blog post that business blogging uses both science and art? Proper use of keywords to enhance Search Engine Optimization is the "science" part the equation; writing interesting and relevant content for the blogs is where the "art" comes in. In fact, the reason ghost blogging is so fascinating a profession for me is that very combination of art and science.

One of my favorite "reads" is a magazine called MentalFloss, and a recent article dealt with modern technologies whose discovery was based on studying the animal kingdom. 
A featured creature was the lobster.  A new x-ray technology is based on the way lobsters see things.  X-rays don’t like to bend, and are therefore difficult to manipulate. The only way we have been able to scan bags at airports or view bones and organs is by using very large machines that emit a torrent of radiation.

Lobsters, crawling 300 feet below the surface of the ocean, have more efficient x-ray vision.  They can take different reflections and focus them together to a single point, forming an image by "bending" those reflections. (The Department of Homeland Security has already invested millions in the LEXID  – Lobster Eye Xray Imaging Device – they hope LEXID will find contraband).

In a way, web crawlers use a LEXID-like process to gather many bits of information from many different locations on the World Wide Web and index that information into one source.  Web crawlers are the ultimate lobsters of the Internet!

 

 

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Blogs Tell A Tale Of Tails

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Bob Truett from Alabama wrote an interesting piece in his Mensa group’s newsletter about animal tails.  Truett cites five purposes for tails:

Balance:
As the animal runs, leaps, or climbs, the tail helps it stay in balance.

Temperature Control:
In cold climates, an animal covers itself with its bushy tail; in warm climates, the tail may be waved like a fan.

Defense:
Brush-tailed porcupines swat enemies with their tails, while garden lizards wiggle their
tails to distract their opponents.

Grasping:
Monkeys come to mind; they can hang by their prehensile tails.

Social Purposes:
You can almost read a dog’s mind, says Truett, by observing his tail.

"Did you ever wonder what our world would be like if humans had evolved with tails?" asks Truett. 

Well, at least in the marketing sense, we do, explains Chris Anderson in his landmark book The Long Tail, referring to the niche marketing that is so relevant to business blogging.

The concept of the Long Tail is based on the fact that, in the physical world, there isn’t enough shelf space to carry everything for everyone, and so a chart showing the demand for different products and services would "tail off" the end of the page. In the digital world, by contrast, there’s room for everything.  The Internet can offer the entire gamut of products and services by connecting consumers to providers.

So, while you have no tail, long or otherwise, "your small business itself has a long tail, one for you to mine and monetize," says Anderson.

Can a small business benefit from having its own blog?  Make that answer a definite "yes".  In the online world, you don’t need big numbers – or big dollars – to make a big difference.  The people who find your blog (and from there your website) are precisely the ones who were searching for your kind of product and service in the first place!

 

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Blog, But First, Find Out What’s Working

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"The first mistake that an adviser can make is to come in with a solution before understanding the problem," writes Fred Barstein in Employee Benefit Adviser Magazine.  "Start by asking what is working with the plan," is Barstein’s best advice.

These days, many businesses are lightening up on traditional forms of marketing in favor of reaching out to the online world through "pull marketing". Blogging for business is all
about the new pull marketing, but the traditional principles of planning and strategic analysis still apply.

The standard question I pose to each business owner considering adding a corporate blog to her marketing strategy is, in fact, about what’s working well now. 

Next, I ask "Do you envision blog marketing enhancing what you’re already doing, targeting the same type of customer, or will you use the blog to attract a new segment of your target market?   By what standards will you measure the success of your blog?"

"What’s working NOW with your website?" is the question TopRank online marketing blog recommends as a starting point.  When prospects visit, what type of content are they looking for and where do they click on your website to find it? What CTA (Call To Action) in the blog posts will guide prospects in a direct path to fulfilling their needs, thus converting from prospects to buyers of your products and services?

The bottom line in all this?  Blog – but first, ask what’s working. Then, begin your business blogging strategy with more of the same in mind!

 

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Cause A Little Creative Destruction With Business Blogs

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Economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase "creative destruction" to describe the process of new technology continually replacing the old. Nowhere is creative destruction more evident than in business marketing.  "It’s a whole new ball game," say David Verklin and Bernice Kammer, authors of the book Watch This. Listen Up.Click Here. Blogging for business is certainly one of the new ways to play ball when it comes to marketing strategy.

By the time you’ve finished reading one page of their book, Verklin and Kammer point out, 200,000 would-be car buyers and 5,000 would-be brides will have researched wheels and weddings on Google. In fact, using "search" to navigate the Net is so ordinary, google has become an accepted verb! 

If your business isn’t being "creatively destructive" by adopting online marketing strategies, the implication clearly is, you’ll be inhaling competitors’ dust! Roughly three new blogs are started each second of the each day, according to Technorati. Only problem is, keeping them up with enough consistency and frequency to make a difference has proven a problem for more than half of business blogs.  In fact, my profession of ghostblogging was born out of this very not-so-creative "destruction" on the part of business owners too busy running their business to also write about it!

A small business owner’s or professional practitioner’s business blogging efforts can have a disproportionately large effect on marketing results – IF those efforts are kept up.  Those positive effects are enhanced when the information in blog posts is "re-purposed" for print newsletters, brochures, and ads, as professional website copywriter Matt Rouge remarks.
It’s ironic, but true.  With blogging, business owners can have the "creative" without the "destruction"!

The newer technology of blog marketing and more traditional marketing methods can enhance each other, with "old" and "new" playing off each other’s strengths, creating business as they go!

 

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Small Blogs, Small Birds, Big Payoff

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When I’m talking to new clients about setting up their blog, I sometimes need to address their fear of giving away valuable information "for free". Those "giveaways", I hasten to explain, are exactly what makes blogs successful in positioning you, the business owners, as "go-to" guys and gals.

Business bloggers can take a lesson from a Wild Birds Unlimited Nature Shop "advertorial" I found in the paper.  Along with color pictures of the American Goldfinch, there were some 500 words of text.  I counted a mere eight of those words that were used to promote the company; the rest were devoted to interesting facts about goldfinches.

Wild Birds stayed true to feature/benefit format, sharing with readers that goldfinches don’t nest until mid to late summer, long after most other birds have started their families.  "This very delay in nesting affords bird enthusiasts the opportunity to focus their attention on goldfinches during this exciting time of song and activity, especially since other birds are less active because of their new family lives."

In short, I found no "Buy our goldfinches!" messages, only lots of information that might make me want to buy goldfinches!

True, the Wild Birds article is a printed piece, not an online blog.  A well-crafted blog, however, might use this same feature/benefit formula, adding key phrases to help online searchers find their way to the blog post, and from there to the company website, through search engine optimization.

Blogs need to provide just that kind of immediate value to readers, making those online searchers glad they found your blog and inviting them to learn even more by clicking through to your website.  Like small birds, small blogs provide big value – and a potential big payoff to your business.

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