Can Blogs be Effective Marketing Tools?

by Rick Hendershot, Traffic-Advisor.com,Power Linking Strategies

Blogs (web-logs) have become very popular. If you are not up to speed on what "blogs" are, just think of them as online journals. The owner of the blog makes regular posts on whatever topics he/she chooses, and readers are free (or not) to make comments.

If you think blogging is symptomatic of a youth culture enamoured of brainless activites like "reality" TV shows, text messaging and endless cell phone chatting, you are only partially right.

Like your typical teeanage cell phone conversation ("Hi. Where are you now? I'm at the mall. We're gonna hang out for a while. Got to go...") blog content can be nothing more than navel gazing:

"Well, I'm back after a couple of days. Don't really have much to say, because not much has happened. Think I'll go for a drive to the mall and wander around for a while. Need some underwear and might pick up a pizza. G2G..."

It is probably true that the immediacy and regularity of blogging lends itself to this kind of empty content...

Ooops. Time to make my blog entry. What's that? Can't think of anything to say? Well then, I guess I'll just talk about that... OK... "Here I am again. It's time to make another entry in my blog, but I can't think of anything to say. I hate that. Life can be so boring. Don't you agree? Well, G2G..."

Writing about nothing

That reminds me of the time back in Grade 12 English when I couldn't think of a topic for an essay due the next day. Out of desperation, that became my topic. The title was something like "An Essay About Nothing", and it started out more or less like this "I'm suppose to hand in an esssay tomorrow, but I can't think of anything to write about, so that is what I am writing about." I thought I was being pretty clever, and it was probably as good as most of my essays. But the teacher, expecting the usual earnest effort handed in by Grade 12 students, wasn't amused.

On the other hand, Jerry Seinfeld, turned this concept into the best sitcom ever produced (quite a few years later, I might add). Which only goes to prove that writing about nothing isn't always what it's cracked up to be. Sometimes it can be much more.

So it is with blogs. Blog content can be empty and pointless, or it can be interesting and thoughtful.

Just like ezines and those things we internet marketers pass off as "articles". Some of my content for this site comes from submissions made to article newsgroups. Everybody who joins the group can send out their "articles" to the entire group. So I receive a hundred or so articles every day. Some of them are interesting, original, informative, and very well written.

But, alas, most of them harp on the same old boring marketing themes: "10 Ways to Super Charge Your Response Rate", "5 Tips for Writing Dynamic Sales Copy", "How to Find the Perfect Work at Home Business", on and on it goes, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This stuff would be right at home in most mind-numbing blogs.

Good things about blogs for marketers

On the whole I think blogs have a lot going for them. First of all, everything gets posted right away in a blog, so they have a sense of immediacy and a more conversational tone than even your typical online forum or newsgroup. This also makes them much more "interactive" than many web communication media.

Certainly blogs are more interactive than traditional websites. And they make email-based ezines seem downright old fashioned. But are blogs likely to replace traditional websites and ezines as the go-to formats for online marketing?

No and Yes.

There are things we can do with ordinary static websites that are not suited to blogs. Catalogue or reference material, for instance, must continue to contain reliable, stable and therefore relatively static detail. The same goes for much product description material, legal mumbo-jumbo, and technical information.

But blogging is ideally suited to ongoing communication with clients, customers and prospects. And this is why it is particularly important for internet marketers.

For instance, a client of mine who is a Waterloo Ontario real estate agent wants to make new listing updates available to subscribers. A blog is a perfect place to do this. He can post his regular listings on a daily basis, and mix in other news and promotions along the way. Regular email messages can be sent out to his subscriber base reminding them to "check today's new listings in my blog". He can even turn it into an "RRS Feed" and syndicate his blog information so other webmasters can post it.

The blog experiment. I jump in up to my neck

But I must admint, my real interest in blogs has to do with their potential for influencing search engine rankings. Google thinks blogs are great. They seem to like the simplicity and down home "everyman" character of blogging. And they certainly like two other facts about blogs: they are constantly changing, and they are "content-rich" — even if that content isn't particularly profound.

In fact Google seems to be neutral towards the relatively mindless content presented in many blogs. And this has opened up an interesting "window of opportunity" for search engine optimizers. Experiments have shown that it is much safer to "spam" Google with blog content than with other static web pages.

In other words, blog content that is essentially just a bunch of jibberish with hundreds of embedded links and strategically placed keywords is given the royal treatment by Google. The same sort of content in a "normal" website (for instance the kind generated by a program like Search Engine Cloaker) is absolutely verboten.

In the next couple of articles in this series I will report on my own experiments with a couple* of blogs I have started.

*This is actually turning into a "network" of blogs, as I figure out the best configuration to make posting as easy as possible, and to maximize their "power linking" potential.

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