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 longterm
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.
