The Two-Letter Word That Makes Magic For Blogs

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My friend Bill Stanley sends interesting emails to all of us members of the Scientech group.  His latest was about nuances of our English language, in particular the word "up".  "Up" seems to have a greater number of meanings than any other two-letter word, and a greater number of functions as well – the dictionary lists it as an adverb, a preposition, an adjective, a noun, and a verb!

Without repeating Bill Stanley’s entire message, I’ll share some highlights.  Bill asks us why, at meetings, topics come UP, why we speak UP and write UP reports, and why officers are UP for election. The email ends with Bill challenging all of us, if we are UP to the task, to build UP a list of the many ways UP is used.  It might take UP a lot of our time, he explains, but if we don’t give UP, we can come UP with a hundred or more examples for our list.

Well, as a ghost blogger for business, Mr. Stanley, I can tell you I’m always thinking UP ways to help my clients’ blogs get picked UP by Internet search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or MSN.  That helps move those blogs UP in ranking so they will (my hopes are UP!) show UP on Page One.  When a corporate blog is launched, we don’t expect it to move UP immediately in ranking, but if we keep UP with our posting of blog content which is UP to date and relevant, it will stir UP interest among online searchers , who will then show UP at the blog, end UP at the business’ website, and wind UP doing business!

For business owners considering how to beef UP their online marketing efforts, there’s nothing to be mixed UP about.  Don’t give UP on blogging, and keep picturing revenues moving in no direction but UP!  

 

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Blogging About WIndex Might Cure Baldness!

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Sometimes marketing’s not about what’s it’s about, you know what I mean? We all saw an example of how that works when the surprise hit movie, "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" made a star out of Windex Glass Cleaner®.

In the low-budget comedy film, Mr. Portokalos, the Greek family patriarch, uses Windex to cure everything from acne to baldness. When "Wedding" turned out to be one of the most profitable films of all time, it made a star out of actress Nia Vardalos, and, as an "aside", resulted in a 23% increase in sales for SC Johnson’s product  WIndex!

Business owners, just think about that one for a moment.  The blue bottle of glass cleaner appears seven times in the film, for a total of less than 30 seconds.  The four additional mentions of the product in dialogue makes a total Windex exposure of less than one minute out of the movie’s 95-minute run. That’s been one momentous minute, I tell you! Brand marketing experts estimate that well over one hundred forty four million people have been exposed to the miracle Windex cure.

There are so many parallels here to corporate marketing through blogging, I hardly know where to begin. First, box office results for "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" followed a pattern reminiscent of blog marketing.  The movie attracted a mall audience and earned only $822,000 in its first week of release in April 2002.  But, says Igor Muravyow of ePROPSHOP, Inc., "the praise of movie patrons resulted in the film’s gradual spread from city to city, and….this sleeper became…the highest-grossing independent film ever." The blogosphere is the ultimate word-of-mouth arena, but business owners who expect their corporate blog to generate overnight business success will be disappointed. 

Back in November, I advised including unusual combinations of things in your blog to offer readers a new way of looking at your topic and showcasing your expertise (See Get Tammy Dancing With Elvis In Your Blog). The "Big Fat – Windex" connection, in my view, succeeded because it was so outrageously unexpected. Even so, my professional ghost blogger instinct tells me, the association with the movie wouldn’t have done nearly so much for the Windex bottom line had there been one minute-long mention of the product in the film. The effectiveness came from the eleven short, repeated exposures to the blue bottle.  This is exactly the way blogging works to attract attention on the Internet. Consistent, repeated, short blogs satisfy two crucial search engine criteria: frequency and recency of posting your blog.

If you’ve got psoriasis or acne, or you’d love a thicker head of hair, I really don’t know if either blogging or Windex can help.  What I do know is that in today’s economy, the most cost-effective way to get the word out about your product or service, to exactly the audience you’re targeting, is to incorporate blogging into your online marketing strategy.

 

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Do Kanye West’s Blog Ties Tell The Truth?

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Hip-hop star Kanye West’s making blogging headlines – again.  Last summer, I was just one among hundreds of bloggers with stuff to say about Sandra Rose’s claim that Kanye uses a ghost blogger.  A professional ghost blogger myself, I understood Rose’s question ("How the h— does Kanye have time to update his blog so often?") only too well, because most business owners I meet don’t have time to keep up with blogging. As I explained (see Does Kaye West’s Ghost Blogger Say It For Him?) in my blog, that’s exactly why the demand for ghost bloggers is growing.

By my lights, Sandra Rose’s latest accusation is a lot more serious. "Is Kanye West A Ghost Jacker?", she says in her own blog, claiming the singer uses content and graphics from other blogs without crediting the source or linking to the source.

No hip-hop fan myself, I have no inkling whether there’s even a grain of truth in any claim of plagiarism on the part of Kanye West. In an earlier blog, Ties That Tell The Truth In Blogging, I stress the important of attributing content to its rightful owners, explaining that search engines actually reward this citing of sources through linking and back-tracking because it creates online "traffic" to and from sites.  So, even if you’re convinced you’ve added your own unique twist on material, you can link to the websites that gave you the original idea or that have other things to say on the subject.

As I’ve pointed out before when discussing comments posted to blogs, even critical comments help blog rankings.  Whatever Sandra Rose may think about the quality or the honesty of Kanye West’s blogs, there’s no doubt she’s done much to enhance Kanye’s search engine rankings by keeping all the controversial conversation about him alive!

 

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For Business Blogging, This Space For Free

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The inside back cover of a magazine I read caught my attention – a plain white page with four large-type words in the middle:


   THIS SPACE FOR RENT
 
Small print on the page’s bottom corner explains the magazine is looking for an advertiser.  What if you saw pages and pages of space, with these four words:


THIS SPACE FOR FREE


You do see that.  Every single day.   On the Internet. No fooling.


According to Chris Baggott, CEO of Compendium Blogware, “Consumer spending might be slowing, but Internet search is alive and well”.  Pay-per-click advertising “rents” marketing space to businesses for advertising.  But there’s far, far more room online sporting “Space For Free” signs available for posting corporate blogs.  In the time it’s taken you to read this far into my blog, hundreds of thousands of new blog posts have been introduced into the blogosphere, some of them by your competitors..


Comprehensive research developed by Universal McCann shows 73% of online users read blogs; 39% request a subscription, or RSS feed to blogs.


It’s never too late, but it’s definitely time –  for you to get a blog started to grow your business.  The blogosphere is very big, and the space itself is free.  The people you want to reach are there.  Statistics from the Pew Internet Project tell us that search for information on the Internet is outstripping search for news and weather information and even surpassing email. 


Everybody’s there on the Internet, it appears.  Is your company’s blog there, ready to be found by all your customers and clients-to-be?


Got space?



 

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Blogs Can Give It Away And Sell It, Too!

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Whenever my grandmother was dealing with a situation she thought was ambiguous, she’d remark, “I don’t know whether to use a fork or a spoon for that one!” Sometimes business owners embarking on a blogging strategy for marketing feel that same way. Their ambiguity about their blog seems especially keen when the business involves professional expertise and not just a tangible product. 


First, some business owners are afraid that, if they share too much information about their field, clients won’t need to pay them to provide expertise!  Web designer Mark Carillion, quoted in Employee Benefit Advisor Magazine, has something valuable to say about that concern.  “Many advisers won’t share information with potential clients until they’ve been hired”  “But”, he points out, “.…the guy who gives out the most information freely is the guy who ends up winning the traffic war.”


The opposite concern business owners often express to me is that they don’t want to come off boastful and self-serving in their blog, or be perceived as using hard-sell tactics to promote themselves. That concern is addressed by Steve Wamsley in his book “Stop Selling And Do Something Valuable“, which was reviewed in the Financial Planning Association website. Here’s what Wamsley has to say: “We have to sell ourselves to potential clients so that they choose to work with us rather than the competition…in our role as advocates (he’s speaking to financial planners), we need to persuade people to act.”


Talking with new business owner clients about the ambiguities they sense when planning their blogs (for which I’m to be their “voice”) is undoubtedly the most important part of our work together. As I explained in The Don’t Do It Yourself Trend Hits Clothing And Blogging, I’m part of that business’ marketing team, and we need to find the exact right approach for their blog, their business, their target readers.  Yes, through their blog, they will be giving away valuable information, and it will be “for free”!  Yet their blog will become their way of selling themselves and their services to online searchers.

Once the business owners and I have agreed on the tone and look for the blogs, it won’t matter whether online searchers show up with a fork or a spoon – they’ll know they’ve come to the right place!



 

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