Archive for category: the Say It For You blog

Can a small business, serving a niche market, benefit from having its own blog?  You betcha. According to Chris Anderson, Internet marketing is absolutely different from anything that came before it.  Anderson coined a phrase for blogging and other forms of digital marketing – The Long Tail.  Originally the idea applied to the selling of music.  A traditional music retailer, he explained, has only limited space to stock CDs and DVDs, so a store would probably choose to carry only the blockbuster hits it knows will move quickly off the shelf.  But a digital music store, he explains (think i-Tunes or Napster) can keep all  the tunes in the catalog, even obscure songs no one’s asked for in years  What Anderson found was that digital music stores were actually selling as much of these less widely known songs than the “blockbusters”!  (Anderson’s term The Long Tail refers to a chart showing sales figures for each song.  The chart “tails off” as the list gets down to the less popular numbers.)

The whole idea, says Anderson, is that, in the digital world, you don’t need big numbers to make a big impact.  When I thought about it, I realized that, if your business is targeting a certain niche, there probably aren’t a whole lot of other blogs being regularly posted about your subject.  The competition for those top spots on Page One of Google, Yahoo. or MSN isn’t likely to be very fierce.  And remember, the people who find your blog are exactly those people who are looking for your kind of product or service in the first place!

Regular, high quality content, posted consistently on your blog, can have a huge effect in a small market.  As Chris Anderson might put it, your short blog posts can give your business a very long and powerful tail!

As I drove home after a downtown meeting the other day, my eye was caught by four words on a billboard.  My first thought was that someone had designed the perfect ad for my ghostblogging business. But, no, it turned out to be a billboard ad for Indiana University: “More brain, less drain.”

Talk about an effective “word tidbit”!  It wasn’t necessary for I.U.’s advertising folks to use any more than those four words – Indiana’s “brain drain” has been the stuff of headlines, talk shows, and even political rhetoric for decades, deploring the number of students who get their degrees here in Indiana, then take off to work out of state.  In one sense, while this was a billboard I was looking at, not a blog, the ad followed good blogging principles by keeping the message short.  Quamut, the “go to how to blogging guide”, advises bloggers to get right to the point.

But, in making the connection between that billboard and blogging, I found the words “brain” and “drain” most important for business owners to keep in mind.  In my earlier blog post  In Blogs Or Tennis, Start Strong, Avoid Fizzle, I stressed the fact that many start out blogging with the best of intentions, only to find themselves unable to keep up with regular blogging while also keeping up with the demands of their own business.  Since frequency and recency play such a large role in search engine rankings, what a professional ghost blogger can add to the marketing mix is a discipline of consistently posting high quality content on behalf of the business.

Put briefly, hiring that extra “brain” relieves the “drain” on the business owner’s resources of times and energy.  Business owners can devote themselves to taking care of business, rather than writing about it.