Coloring Contests For Business Blog Readers?

A favorite lunch spot for me is the Illinois Street Food Emporium in Indianapolis. Well, the other day, besides a very tasty salad and soup lunch, I got something extra in the form of ideas about ways to use blogs to drive business.

Here’s how it happened: Waiting for my number to be called, I noticed something.  Fastened low on the wall near the door of the restaurant was a metal thing-a-ma-gig with coloring sheet handouts for kids to color.  That day’s handout had an outlined picture of a snowman talking with some penguins.  There was space on the paper to fill in the child artist’s name, age, and phone number, and a pocket in which to deposit the finished work.

My first thought was how simple, yet ingenious a tactic those coloring sheets were – keep the kids occupied while Mom or Dad finish up a conversation. (As a professional ghost blogger, I’m always alert for ways business bloggers can engage readers.) Then I realized there was even more to it than that – some kid was going to win the contest and get his picture posted up there and want to keep coming back to the restaurant, perhaps bringing Auntie or Grandma to see the beautiful job he’d done on the penguins! (One benefit of engaging blog post readers is they want to come back to your site, or bring your site to them in the form of an RSS.)

There was one thing missing about those coloring sheets, I realized. As so often happens, even the best of business ideas falls short in some detail when it comes to execution.  I saw snowmen and penguins, but nowhere on those coloring pages did I see the name, address, or phone number, or email of Illinois Street Food Emporium!  Coloring’s a great way to keep the kids happy while they’re in the restaurant (maybe they come back to show off their winning entry or claim their prize). But at least a third of the page was white space that might have been used for advertising.  Uh-oh – a business blog page with no Calls to Action! 

FutureNow‘s  Brendan Regan teaches business owners to "optimize a marketing outreach from the driving point to the landing page and on through to conversion." In other words, for any business blog to enjoy bottom-line success, there needs to be a smooth process, a navigation path,  that begins when a customer first becomes conscious of your existence to when you’re closing a deal.  The CTA’s, or Calls To Action on your blog page, even sometimes in the text of the blog post itself – need to be there and be square!