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Blogs
Blogs can be a major source of PR and a major source of revenue. They can draw in major audiences, help you reach people whom you might not otherwise find, and can be much more effective than other forms of advertising such as on-line Ad Words.
But for all this to happen you need to ensure that your blog is read by the right people, which means that the content has to be interesting to these potential customers and it has to reach them.
You can reach the right people by linking the blog to a well known and popular website, or by being listed on a site that collects together all the latest news and stories on a topic. It is also possible to advertise the blog – although it can be difficult to carry the information of what the blog is about and why it should be read.
The key point here is to consider what you will say not just on one blog entry but day after day, week after week. A good story might be not too hard to find once or twice, but you need to keep your audience enthralled with each new item.
This gives us a clue as to why many firms don’t use blogs - or don’t use blogs successfully. Successful blogs keep going, reach the right audience and continue to attract more and more readers.
And then of course the blog turns the articles into advertisements.
However this “turning” is an important element which can be readily overlooked. The blog itself rarely works as an advert. It works as information or entertainment, not as full-scale advertising. Through the interest that the blog generates the readers come to an interest in the blogger and so feel positive about his comments.
STARTING THE BLOG
To be a good blogger you need to be a competent writer, full of ideas on your chosen topic. If you are not, then you may want to get someone else to help you.
Before you tell anyone that you are running the blog, start writing it, and continue writing it at the interval that you expect to continue. Stay with this dry run for at least six blogs, just to prove that you can keep up the flow of work. Then start to promote the blog, either through a blog listing service, or through advertising the blog on a website that already has a good readership.
CONTINUING THE BLOG
The worst thing to do is to let a blog die out if it has a good readership – people will feel let down by the reduction in the number of articles posted. But it is also pointless continuing a blog that has few readers. Writing the blog takes time, and there’s no point spending your time writing if no one is reading.
COMMENTING ON OTHER PEOPLE’S BLOGS
Once we had got our blogs going we then started to look at other people’s blogs and we started to comment on them where such an option existed. This was done in an open and positive way – what we did not indulge in was comment on behalf of Hamilton House using aliases or in any way hiding our identity. Mostly these comments consisted of pieces in which we acknowledged the validity of the original blogger’s comment, but then argued that another perspective was also valid. We then linked to one of our sites or our blog.
RESULTS
Hamilton House Mailings plc decided to enter blogging by running a blog that had nothing to do with the work of Hamilton House. In this way, we argued, if we did get the blogging wrong, we would not risk alienating our own clients. This is an important point – blogging is not like presenting an advert, it is much more intense than that. Blogging needs to contain insight and opinion – if it does not, most people won’t read. And we needed to be assured we could do this right.
(This careful approach to a new idea is one that we have often used. We spent a year testing different ways of writing adverts aimed at teachers before we started releasing any data on how different approaches might get different results).
In this case we developed a blog aimed at supporters of the football club Arsenal FC. I chose this topic because I support the club, and thus had a fair amount of information at my fingertips. But also I knew the huge number of Arsenal blogs that already existed, and I wanted to see if I could gain a readership, and more importantly understand why I had gained that readership.
In fact after three weeks the blog picked up 2000 unique readers in one day – and a first full month’s unique readership of over 20,000 readers – many of whom found us through a listing on an Arsenal news service.
With this success we then moved on to launching separate blogs attached to our various websites, each blog itself reflecting the unique perspective of the blog. These blogs have had difference levels of success – reflecting the different readership of each site. But we have continued to experiment, including the running of news blogs, opinion blogs and also a couple of humorous blogs. In each case the idea is to promote a positive view of our company, and ensure that when the reader wants information it is to us that he or she will turn.
As we have shown elsewhere, running blogs is expensive, but the results one can get from a blog can be much more effective than the results one gets from the nearest equivalent – Ad Words. In the research reported, a company used one employee full time to generate blogs and ended up producing a far greater response rate for less money.
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