Oh, The Only-ness Of Blogging!

It’s sort of hard to ignore 250,000,000 of anything, wouldn’t you say? One quarter billion is actually the number of blogs on the Internet as of this writing.  And that’s not all, mind you – 175,000 new blogs are coming online every day! This "blog thing" has fast attained impossible-to-overlook proportions, I’d say. Who’s doing all this blogging and why?

Blog maven Seth Godin describes three categories of blog:

Cat blogs are personal and idiosyncratic, he says, written out of a need for self expression, or sometimes to gain converts to the writer’s way of thinking.

Boss blogs are work project-centered, used to coordinate the different steps of a project being worked on by several different people.

Viral blogs, as the name implies, are used to spread ideas, and particularly to spread the word about businesses. Virals are the blogs I deal with in my professional ghost writing business, Say It For You, with the whole idea being to "win search" and attract buyers to your business who otherwise might never have shown up.

The other day I heard nationally-known speaker, business coach and author Jim Ackerman teach marketing to a group of entrepreneurs.  He urged each to find a "point of only-ness", meaning one statement to differentiate that business from all similar businesses, in a way that appeals to the kind of customers that business is targeting.

Any business owner needs to be able to start a sentence with "I am the only", as in "I am the only_____________________ in___________________ who ___________________." 

This crucial statement is not the same as an advertising slogan, Ackerman hastens to stress, but a marketing mission statement.  Your "only-ness" business statement always puts the emphasis on them and the benefits they will reap by dealing with you, and never on all the wonderful things you know, that you have, or that you know how to do.

Blogging for business, you remember, is "pull marketing".  Potential clients arrive at your blog because they’re searching for information, for a solution to a problem, or for a product or service that matches up with the content in your blog post. (In other words, you didn’t send out a mass mailing or put an ad on a billboard, which is "push marketing".) Now that they’ve located you, it’s up to your blog to engage them.  That’s where your "only-ness" must come across loud and clear:

Your blog has just the information searchers want:

It’s "on-the-money" (that’s what says "relevancy" to search engines)

It’s up-to-date (that’s what says "recency" to search engines)

It speaks your message in a very personal way to each one of them (that’s what makes prospects say "Yes, I want some!")  

Back a few decades ago, there was a hit song called "Only You". Well, that’s exactly the tone you want to set in your blog. Searchers must understand that only you can give them exactly what they came for!

Oh, the "only-ness" of you and of your virally on-the-money blog!