February 20, 2007
The Do's and Don'ts of Marketing to Bloggers
Why is marketing to bloggers a good idea? Inbound links from blogs improves Google rank, which increases traffic from search engines. Exposure from bloggers can land a company's website on a social bookmarking site like Digg or Del.icio.us, driving thousands of new visitors to the site. But bloggers are a more fickle bunch than most traditional media people. Marketing to them appropriately can yield great results; approaching them the wrong way can backfire.
As someone with a well-trafficked blog and a high Google rank I get bombarded with marketing requests every day. "Your site would be great for my SEO, would you please link to it?" "You obviously love food. I would love to send you some of my ice cream for dogs and you could write about it if you wanted to." (Both real examples.) Most pitches receive a cursory glance and get deleted without a second thought. A few get a response from me, especially if the pitch is respectful and polite. Even fewer get the response the marketer was hoping for.
So, what's the trick?
If it's your job to reach out to bloggers, here are a few guidelines that may help you be more effective in your approach. Note that marketing to bloggers is sort of like selling vacuums door-to-door in a neighborhood where almost everyone knows each other, and most are chatting with each other over their fences. In any strong blogging community there is a lot of back-channel talk going on. This can work to your advantage or disadvantage, depending on how you approach the bloggers in the first place. Now for the guidelines, let's start with the "Don'ts".
Marketing to Bloggers Don'ts
- Do not send obvious form letters. Did you know that we bloggers share the form letters we receive from marketers with each other? We do. This is a great way to get nowhere with the very people you are trying to influence. It also demonstrates that you have done practically no research whatsoever on your audience. Form letters result in promoting pork sausages to vegans or pitches for ready-to-eat cheesecake filling to gourmet scratch cooks, people who would sooner shoot themselves than use your product.
- Do not ask for links, unless you are willing to pay for them, at which point the conversation turns to advertising policy and rates. This whole reciprocal link thing might be barely tolerable on a blogger-to-blogger level, but is considered annoying spam when it comes from a company pushing products.
- Do not leave blog comments plugging your products. Talk about generating ill will! It's called blog spam. As a blogger I don't really care that you think my readers would be interested in your ready-made lemon syrup. I'm not interested in allowing a company to promote its products on my blog without my permission. If you abuse comments, eventually you'll generate such bad feelings that people will start writing in their blogs about how your company is spamming the blogosphere. Then the next time someone looks your company up in Google all they'll see is a litany of complaints. Not exactly the intended result, eh?
- Do not come on too strong. If you send out product, you can follow up with a "did you receive it?" but not a "when are you going to write about it?" Do not insist on anything. And if someone doesn't want to promote your product, please don't argue with them. Thank them for their time and move on.
- Do not put the blogger on your mailing list (unless they have requested it.) This should be obvious, shouldn't it? But clearly it isn't as getting put on some random marketer's email newsletter or mailing list happens all the time. Bloggers hate it.
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Posted by elise on February 20, 2007 to Blogging, Web Marketing | Permalink
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December 22, 2005
Location, Location, Location - Findability on the Web
In a retail environment, we are taught that location is everything. Foot traffic, accessibility from major roads, proximity to anchor stores all greatly contribute to in-store sales. What does a good location imply? 1) Convenience for customers to physically get to where you are, 2) the ability to be known in the first place – the fact that your name or brand becomes associated with a product or service, and 3) the ease with which a potential customer can find you, when she is looking for something you are selling.
On the web, these three parameters also matter, but the overriding web marketing “location” equivalent is the ability to be found. At any one instant, there are many times more people looking for what you are providing online than you could possibly economically reach if you tried to find these potential customers through advertising. Over the last five years, search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN have completely changed the dynamics of web marketing. A few years ago Overture (now part of Yahoo) sponsored a study that determined that far and away the most common way to find a product online was to use a search engine. (Source: http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srch/keystats.php)
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Posted by elise on December 22, 2005 to Web Marketing | Permalink
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December 6, 2005
Blogging for Business
Ten years ago, business leaders were forced to scramble to define their "Internet strategy". These days the question making the rounds is, "Should we get a blog?" To help you answer that question, let's review what a blog is, and look at the different ways that a blog could help your business.
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Posted by elise on December 6, 2005 to Blogging | Permalink
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March 16, 2005
Customer Loyalty - A Case Study
There's a lot that gets said about customer loyalty or brand loyalty these days. On this subject I would like to offer one thought.
A company has true customer loyalty when, rather than get enraged, their customers will make excuses for the company when the company or its products screw up.
Case in point. I love Apple. I love the company. I love the products. I love the ads. I'm one of those people who says "you can have my Mac, when you pull it away from my cold, dead hands." I've been using a Mac since 1987 when I started working for Apple during business school. When I bought my G5 last summer at the local Apple store, more things could not have gone wrong. The first thing that went wrong is that when I went to pick up my new computer after I had left my old Mac with them to transfer the data to the new Mac, they sent me home with someone else's computer. This I discovered when I carefully unwrapped that huge box and set up the Mac in its new home, only to find out that someone else's files where on the desktop. Oops! The Apple store had also forgotten to give me my old computer back, and in my delirious excitement over the new one, I had forgotten too.
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Posted by elise on March 16, 2005 to General Marketing | Permalink
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February 15, 2005
Weblog Tools Market - Update February 2005
By Elise Bauer
February 15, 2005
Updated February 18, 2005. Scroll to end to see update.
This article is a continuation of the analysis presented six months ago in An Overview of the Weblog Tools Market.
Last August in An Overview of the Weblog Tools Market the concept of a Weblog Tools Use Index was introduced - the degree to which Google spidered pages associated with certain weblog tools, with the proposal that this number could be used as a proxy for the extent to which the tools are being used, and therefore give some indication of "share" of use. To reduce the confusion that that terminology caused, in this article the sum of the number of websites linking to a weblog tool URL and the number of websites containing the URL will simply be the factor used to determine comparative percentages, or "Google Share".
I believe that Google Share is a fair proxy of the extent to which these tools are actually used, with some caveats. Blogs that are used in a corporate setting often sit behind corporate firewalls, or may have any reference to the blog tool stripped out. This would affect the numbers for tools such as Movable Type, Wordpress, and other stand-alone (non-hosted) blog applications. Among hosted services, Typepad offers password-protected, non-indexed blogs which account for 30% of the total Typepad use, according to Typepad maker Six Apart. Typepad would therefore be underrepresented in Google by this amount.
Market share analysis is an educated guessing game, especially when you are trying to determine share with only publicly available data. Private companies rarely release usage stats to the public. The public companies that own blog tools - Microsoft and Google - are not required to publicly report data for products that represent such a tiny fraction of their overall revenue. And even though the hosted services know how many active accounts they have, many of the software makers do not. Those offering shareware or GPL tools can only count the number of downloads, not the number of people who use their free software, or the number of blog entries created with their tools. Google can give us some indication of the degree of use or influence of these tools in the public World Wide Web.
Please note that the analysis presented here is limited to tools and services used in the United States. Clearly, a broader market analysis would be preferred, one that included local services in Europe and Asia. But, as this author is lacking the language skills which would be necessary to conduct such analysis, this report, like the one that preceded it, is focused on the US.
What has happened in the last six months?
One piece of public data we have is from Technorati, a service that tracks weblogs. In August 2004, Technorati had tracked a little over 3 million weblogs. At the time of this analysis, early February, 2005, Technorati had tracked 6.9 million weblogs, an increase of approximately 120% in six months.
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Posted by elise on February 15, 2005 to Blogging | Permalink
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August 6, 2004
An Overview of the Weblog Tools Market
By Elise Bauer
August 6, 2004
Weblogs, although often described as online diaries, are a much more interesting trend than that label would imply. Yes, weblogs are personal journals on the web, and as such they represent the breadth and depth of human interest and knowledge. Not only do blogs allow millions of people to easily and instantaneously publish ideas to websites, most weblogs incorporate interactive features that let others easily comment to those sites, thus transforming the static web into millions of dynamic conversations. Weblogs are increasingly making their way into the professional communications arena as evidenced by FCC Chairman Michael Powell’s blog which he recently started to help generate public discussions around often-controversial FCC policy. Companies are beginning to use weblogs as an internal tool for knowledge sharing. Intuit has created a weblog to open lines of communications with its QuickBooks customers. Technorati tracks over 3 million weblogs, a number that appears to be doubling every 6 months, giving weblogs growth rates that we saw in the early days of the web. Weblogs cannot be dismissed as a fad; they will change the very nature of how we connect and communicate.
Weblog Tools
What does the blog tool market look like today? Weblog tools can be distinguished along two dimensions: fee vs. free and hosted services vs. standalone software (although this distinction is blurring as standalone application companies are beginning to offer hosted versions). The vast majority of blogs are hosted on services that offer weblog building tools and server space for free, for a small fee, or as a feature of a more comprehensive service. Blogger.com, an early-to-market free ad-supported service bought by Google in 2002, is the big guerilla in the market with most likely the largest market share. Live Journal is a hosted blog community with over a million active accounts, 90% of whose users are 25 years old and younger, and two thirds of whom are female. Live Journal weblogs often look more like forums or chat sessions than web pages with structured content. DiaryLand has a large base of teen webloggers and the look of its website suggests a female skew as well. AOL launched its AOL Journals in 2003 as a feature of the AOL service. Typepad, a fee-only service offered by Six Apart, is the most professionally oriented of the hosted consumer services and attracts a broader demographic than the other services.
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Posted by elise on August 6, 2004 to Blogging | Permalink
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January 30, 2004
Market Research with Alexa.com
Attention marketers and market researchers! Amazon.com's Alexa has teamed up with Google technology to deliver amazing free traffic and ranking statistics for all websites at www.alexa.com. By monitoring the site viewing activities of a million or so web surfers who have installed Alexa's free toolbar in their browser, Alexa tracks traffic, page views and visitors, ranked and over time for every site on the web. Alexa can tell which other sites are linking to a particular site. It also can tell you other similar sites that a particular website's visitors have viewed. This data is a treasure trove for anyone researching markets, companies, or industries. The traffic data is relative, not absolute, but still quite useful for evaluating a company vis-a-vis its competitors. One thing to note is that the Alexa toolbar only works with Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer. So given that Mac users are left out of those whose web movements are being tracked, the Alexa data may not be as representative for Mac product companies.
Relationship of Inbound Links to Site Traffic
One of the outcomes of Google's rise to dominance as a search engine is that sites that have more inbound links — other sites linking to it — get ranked higher in search results and therefore get more traffic. (You can read more about this at: Search Engine Optimization). But what exactly is the relationship of inbound links to site traffic? I did some quick analysis on a random group of consumer-focused art sites and found the following results.
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Posted by elise on January 30, 2004 to General Marketing, Market Research | Permalink
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