Your Blog Is A Desire Path

In architecture, a desire path is one that isn’t designed but instead is worn away casually by people finding the shortest distance to where they want to go.  Visit any campus or any city park, and you’ll find trails pedestrians have worn into the grass.

Park service volunteers at Great Smoky Mountains National Park know all about desire paths.  I read an article in Home & Away magazine about Great Smoky, often called the “People’s Park”. Realizing that almost 95% of the parks’ nine million annual visitors never explore more than a quarter mile away from their automobiles, park service workers have created “quiet walkways”, so people get out into the park on relatively smooth, walkable terrain.

In an earlier blog post, I compared searchers browsing the internet to people visiting a trade show. I advised thinking of your blog as a great trade show booth.  People are walking around the exhibit hall on the lookout for a product or service that meets their needs. When they pass at your "blog booth", you want them to find something that draws their interest.  That "something" is the appealing, fresh content of your blog.  From there, you have the opportunity to invite the customer needs to come inside to your website.

If you’ve ever observed attendees at a trade show, you know they don’t all approach the exhibit in the same way.  Some very few seem to go systematically through each aisle of trade booths, looking at each one in order.  Most folks, though, approach the show in "desire path" fashion, skipping a large portion of the show and making a beeline for the one or two areas that appear to feature the information and products they’re seeking.

When people browse the Web, they seem to behave in similar fashion. Some have already decided what solution they think will fix their problem or satisfy their need. 

                     The air in their house isn’t circulating properly through 
                     different rooms?
                     They use search terms such as "attic fans", "portable
                     fan" , or "portable heater".
      

                     They’re researching vitamins? 
                     They might type in "ginko biloba" or "St. John’s Wort",      
                     because they’ve heard about those.
  
                     They’re shopping for organic coffee? 
                     Those are the words they type into the search engine.
     
 
 Others describe their problem or dilemma:
  
          "I have Rosacea on my face"
 
          "How do I overcome fear of public speaking?"
  
          "How do I get my car back after it’s been repossessed?"

In other words, different people will find their way to your blog via their own desire paths. In planning the key words you’ll use in your blog and then in your website, always consider people’s desire paths. It’s your blog, but you need to think about it from their point of view. As campus architects and park designers learned, people are going to get to their destinations by the paths they choose. But, by whatever path they arrive, you want them to arrive at your blogsite!
 
 

 

 

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Blogging – Pay Per Clip?

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!”
 

 

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Speed Cleaning 101 For Your Blog

Indianapolis realtor friend Katrina Basile sent me a newsletter with an article about speed cleaning my house.  "Most of us like a clean house, with sparkling sinks and clutter-free coffee tables.  We just don’t want to be the one to make them that way," the piece began. 

Funny, seems to work the same way with business blogging.  As I pointed out in "Blogging Is A Concierge Service", blogging is an essential customer acquisition tool in our increasingly web-based world.  Still, few business owners can spare the time to post relevant, new material with enough consistency and frequency to have much of an effect on search engine rankings. (As a professional ghost blogger, I’m providing that concierge service.)

For the blog-it-yourself-ers, though, four of the home cleaning tips really seem to apply to blogging for business:

EQUIP YOURSELF:
(Prepare a pail with spray cleaners, rags, brushes, etc.)

For blogging prep, line up facts and statistics you want to quote to your target readers.  For example: "According to Technorati search engine, by June 2006, there were 34,000,000 blogs."

START WITH THE BIG STUFF:
(Kick-start cleaning with taking out trash and clearing away clothes – whatever tasks will make the greatest impact.)

As this applies to blogging, put the key words and your key idea in the title of the blog post and use the most important key words early in the blog.

TOUCH EVERYTHING JUST ONCE:
(Putting everything back in its place cuts cleaning time.)

Each blog post should focus on one key idea.

MAKE IT A FAMILY AFFAIR:
(Enlist the help of family members in the cleaning project for faster results – and a commitment to keep things clean.)

Involve all members of the marketing team, plus as many employees and stakeholders in your business blog. (Even if your professional ghost blogger is doing the writing, employees themselves can provide anecdotes and information, plus post comments on the blog.)

"Landing in a home that’s just right for you makes every step of the journey worth it," concludes the newsletter.  For online searchers, nothing beats "landing" on a blog and then on a website that has just the information, the products, and the services they came to find.  "Landing" is what blogging for business is all about!

 

 

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Thinking Bigger With Blogs

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.

 

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Blogs As White As The Meat Of A Coconut

To get your point across effectively, advises Dale Carnegie, "compare the strange with the familiar."  Carnegie tells the story of some missionaries trying to translate the Bible into the dialect of a tribe in equatorial Africa.  The missionaries came upon the line "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow."  Realizing the natives had never seen snow, the missionaries changed the line to read "They shall be white as the meat on a coconut."

Even if the target audience for your business blog isn’t African natives, Carnegie’s advice is apropos.  Searchers come to your blog to find answers, but, remember, they lack your knowledge and expertise.  To help readers relate your products and services to their own needs, you must communicate with them in their terms.  Drawing a comparison with something familiar is a great technique, all the more useful if you’re in a highly specialized profession or line of business.

I found a perfect example of this is a blog about a bioceutical product that helps calm fear of public speaking. In explaining the human fear mechanism, the blogger compares the human brain to the central post office. "From this shipping hub, millions of messages are transmitted to the cells of our bodies, directly and powerfully influencing our emotions and our physical reactions. These neurotransmitters are inborn and unconscious.  In fact, while our cells are "reading the mail" from the brain, our minds ‘turn off’, to allow our bodies to obey brain orders automatically." The familiar image of a post office and reading the mail makes it easier for readers to understand the unfamiliar – neurotransmitters.in the brain.

Going from the simple to the complex, and from the familiar to the unfamiliar is a perfect strategy for business blogs.  It sets you up as the expert, yet allows your potential customers to feel smart as well as understood.  Readers understand they’ve come to the right place!

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