Thursday, September 6, 2007
Blogs are one of the most recent and personal trends in online marketing. They started out as online web logs, intimate journals kept by dedicated bloggers about their own lives, their work, or whatever they were thinking about at the time. Today they are growing in popularity as marketing tools; blogs, whether you love them or hate them, are a new form of communication that is here to stay.
There are several traits to a blog that make it an excellent marketing tool. It is:
* Immediate and personal.
* Updated regularly.
* Very casual in tone.
* Flexible enough to include just about anything you want to discuss.
The "immediate and personal" may be the most powerful feature of a blog. People often mistake the candor and intimacy of a blog for a personal relationship with the blogger; it's very tempting to talk back to those who blog. And when you have a personal relationship with another person, you tend to trust them.
By keeping (or hiring someone else to keep for you, as many GM executives have done) a blog of your own, you are inviting readers to share your personal life and to trust you. This is a powerful marketing tool.
Information in Blogs
One of the useful side effects of this intimate tool is the tendency of people to trust what they read in blogs. This makes it a great place to spread information about your site and your niche market. For instance, if you say in a blog that you think a particular herbal remedy for pain has done you good in treating your arthritis, that's a very personal statement. Anyone who reads your blog regularly has almost certainly built up a trust for you, and talking about this herbal remedy in your blog is going to make them think about trying it.
Now, if your website sells paper dolls, this will have no effect on your bottom line (unless you are an affiliate salesperson for the herbal remedy, which is entirely different). But if your website sells herbal remedies, you may have made some sales. And if you've just introduced this remedy, or you've been talking about it in your blog for a while and would not sell the remedy until you tried it out yourself, this increases the level of trust customer have in this item.
Basically, you're bartering built-up trust (saved from long-term blogging) for sales of this remedy, which, if it works, will recoup for you the trust that you bartered for it and then some. Blogs and other intimate sales tools like this are all about the trust relationship, so be sure before you spend that trust that you will get it back.
Using Articles in Blogs
Blogs are in general an intimate tool designed for sharing personal thoughts with the world at large. But sometimes you might want to include an article in your blog for some reason – perhaps the information contained will push sales, or you think the information is something that your readers should really pay attention to. Or perhaps you just don't have anything else to say this day and think this would be some good information to share.
Whatever your reason, there are three basic ways of using articles in blogs. First, you can just modify the article to read like your blogs and post it as an original blog. Second, you can say that you wanted to share the article with your readers and copy the article wholesale into your blog. Or finally, you can post a link to the article as your blog entry, and let your blog readers access it on your website.
There are advantages to each of these methods. If you treat the article like a blog entry, you should be prepared to expend some of your stored-up trust for it; if you are cynically using it to drive sales, you'll pay for it in trust, but if you really think the information is valuable, you may receive your trust back when it has proven to be of value to your customers.
The other two ways – citing the article with a link or posting it wholesale and noting that it's an article you found – are much safer as far as using trust. By doing this, your blog readers are noting that you are not the author of the article and if the advice in it fails, you won't lose as much trust.
Regardless of how you use articles in your blogs, remember that your ultimate purpose is to drive sales. You want to do this with a minimal loss of trust, but you should also be ready to stick your neck out if necessary.
Article Directories: Good Idea, or Dead End?
So you were browsing the Internet and stumbled across this amazing thing – a huge database filled with articles, many of them about your very specialty, and all of them free to use! And now you want to know why on earth you should ever pay for anyone to write articles for you; after all, you have access to all the free articles you want.
There's a principle you should remember here: nothing is ever, truly, free. Even when you give away things for free on your website, it's with the hope of generating a sale from it. Article directories are no different.
Finding Article Directories
There are several major article directories online, including the following:
* http://www.goarticles.com
* http://www.ezinearticles.com
* http://www.ideamarketers.com
* http://www.marketing-seek.com.
It's a great idea to contribute articles to them. In general, however, it's a bad idea to use articles they want to give you.
Every article in these directories is a viral marketing scheme. The idea is that you'll download their article and place it, for free, on your website. But with each of these articles, you also have to download what's called a resource box. This is a box with the name of the author, his or her URL as a clickable link, and sometimes a bio. You are barred from deleting this resource box if you're using the article for free.
Here's what happens: you have a website you've carefully developed to display your expertise. All over the website, you've used your knowledge, tastes, and personality to bring your customers what they want. But now you place an article with someone else's name on it, and a handy clickable link. Aha! says the customer. Another expert! And, because Internet audiences are notoriously fickle, he or she clicks on the link, taking them away from your website and into the website belonging to the article author.
The article has done exactly what it was intended to do – bring someone else more business. And you may lose more than the customer's momentary attention. If the writer of the article has a website that competes directly with yours, then you may have lost that customer entirely.
How To Use These Articles
There may be times, however, when you feel you really must use an article from an article directory. There is a right way and a wrong way to do this.
First, never violate the terms of the agreement of the article directory – in other words, don't remove the resource box from the article and try to pass it off as your own, and don't tamper with the link in the box in any way. It's ethically wrong, and besides, in small niche markets people talk more than you might realize; if the author catches what you've done (surprisingly easy to do) and starts talking about it on bulletin boards and egroups, you could find your reputation ruined very quickly.
Second, use articles from an article directory sparingly and with great care for what they say. Ideally, only articles that contain information or news of major importance should be used on your website. Articles by recognized experts in the field are also fine, though, particularly if you know that most of your customers know who this person is.
You can also use articles from an article directory if you have an affiliate link with the person who has written the article anyway. You get the free article from someone who's sending you traffic, and if you let them know you're running their article, they'll be flattered and might return the favor.
Look around in the article directory's terms of use. You may find that the directory allows you to purchase the right to use articles without the resource box. If you have this option, you should take advantage of it.
Using Article Directories Yourself
A better use for article directories is to upload your own articles and allow people to download them on the same terms as the other authors. It's viral marketing: you're giving away something and allowing other people to spread the virus – your information and the fact you are an expert – using their own resources. Next to active word-of-mouth advertising, viral marketing of this sort may be one of the best tools you'll ever find to publicize your business.
Using Reports to Build Subscription Rates
What do you think your most powerful tool is for selling products online?
A lot of people answer "a great web site." Others think it's having a product that sells itself, or good testimonials from customers.
In reality, your very best tool and guarantee for success online is the repeat customer.
Businesses everywhere pour money into attracting new customers to their business – and that's important. New customers help a new business get established, and an established business to grow. But the real problem is that many businesspeople take their current customers for granted.
It's like getting married. You have the excitement of the wedding, and then the honeymoon, and then all of a sudden you just don't really notice the other partner anymore – you take them for granted. And when the spouse up and leaves you, you feel betrayed.
Well, it's usually your own fault if you've been taking them for granted. And the same thing can be said for the established customer. Reward them! Send them frequent thank-you's if possible, and when they haven't bought anything from you for a while, send them a special deal – discounts, opportunities to buy things on clearance, or anything else to get them to pull out the credit card.
But what if you don't know who your customers are?
Of course, if someone has purchased an item from you, you have their name and contact information. But they're not the only people you should count as customers. The faceless people who visit your site regularly but haven't bought anything yet are also customers, or can be converted into them much more easily than the average consumer.
Yet a lot of web businesses ignore those in-between people even more thoroughly than they ignore their own customers.
Instead of doing this, take action to get these people to give you contact information. Try offering a free report in exchange for registering with you.
Free Reports
A free report is really an informative ebook you've compiled from articles in your newsletters, articles from your website, and even original articles. It's a perfect tool to get your lurking pre-customers to come out of the shadows; these people are visiting your site for the information they've found there, and are always happy to get their hands on more.
What you do is advertise on your home page the free report you've got available. You can even write a short article or a blog entry about the report if you like. Then you set up a download link that can only be accessed by registered site users, or by entering your email into a text field. Your customers don't have to agree to let you email them stuff; all they need to do is let you know they exist. You should include an opt-out option next to the text field so they realize that you aren't out to spam them.
Alternatively, you can have your customers fill out a form to have the report emailed to them. This is generally less successful; people like to have power over downloads, even if the file in either case is the same file. It is, however, a good way to make first email contact with a customer, a sort of icebreaker.
When they receive your report, they should be impressed with the quality and quantity of information available in it. Never give away worthless information. You should always be striving to impress your customer with the level of your knowledge, the amount you care about the customer, and your generosity and honesty. All these things lead to a trusting relationship, which is the key you'll need to seduce your customer into eventually buying things from you.
Reports as Viral Marketing
Getting people to register with you is not the only thing you can do with your report. After a reasonable amount of time has passed for people to register – maybe a couple of months – offer the report for free either through your website or through an article directory service. And encourage anyone who downloads it to share it with other people.
Containing your information and knowledge, a report can be a wonderful marketing tool to draw in new customers interested in the things you have to offer. And by distributing it as a viral document, you ensure it will get the broadest possible spread, and continue working for you long after you've moved on to other things.
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