Promotion Tutorial - Part 6 - Blogging

29 October 2009

Because it requires little or no money, and minimal tech savvy, all of you who now send e-mails all over with little or no response; or don't have as much time anymore to update and promote your website can be involved in what is now a fast growing trend.

You probably realize that the e-mail marketing industry (which includes anyone who sends a newsletter or notices of any kind) is in the midst of a crisis from which it may never recover. Sp@mmers, sp@m filters, and nanny software, are just a few of the problems for anyone legitimately trying to communicate with a group of people. There's got to be a better way to get the word out; and right now there is.

I'm talking about blogs.

About 2 years ago, I encountered someone who said that blogs were on the verge of dying out entirely due to boredom and lack of interest. At that point I hadn't had much contact with blogs. All I'd seen were a few daily diaries of negligible value to anyone beyond the author's immediate circle of acquaintances, and so took him at his word. Sometime over the intervening months, sp@m problems in e-mail started giving e-mail marketers major headaches, and professional journalists started using blogs to report, sometimes minute-by-minute, on the most recent War. This changed everything.

Both businesses and traditional journalists alike had begun looking at blogs in a different way. After all, blogs are really just a content delivery method. The identical technology can be used to deliver anything to readers. There's nothing in that technology that requires a blog to have any specific kind of content. Sure, it can be your lunch menus or a detailed reportage of housebreaking a new puppy, but it can also be an effective way for groups to communicate with their members. It can also be a source of news for subject matter that's not covered by traditional media, for whatever reason.

The major difference between a blog and a conventional website is that a website just sits there. Once you've got a website up, you then have to promote it. Website promotion is getting tougher all the time, because there are billions of them out there now, and they're not any big deal anymore. A blog, on the other hand, has the capacity to announce itself, and can keep doing that every time you update. Right now there are millions of people out there actively looking for blogs.

I find myself answering questions a lot lately, which is why I think it's important that people be aware of this opportunity to address a far bigger audience than ever before.

Another thing that makes a blog such a good idea is that it doesn't require any specialized knowledge. If you can run word processing software like MSWord, then you know enough to start and maintain a blog. Once you've got it up and running, then daily updates take about the same time as writing and sending an e-mail. So rather than sending out a bit of commentary to a few people you regularly e-mail, with no assurance they even get to their destination, you can make that same content available to the world in general. Included in that audience are thousands of traditional journalists and media types, who are watching their aggregators closely for changes in the blogosphere.

The aggregators, and the RSS feed that notifies them of updates to blogs are the things that make the whole system work, and sets a blog apart from a static website. Some people are subscribed to hundreds of blogs, with either a desktop or web-based aggregator keeping them advised all the time. So far, blogs are mostly sp@m-free, and some business writers are predicting they may even replace e-mail for a lot of applications.

With free blogs available, there isn't any reason we couldn't establish hundreds, or even thousands of blogs related to "our" issues. There shouldn't be any concern about competition, because related blogs linking back and forth help each other to draw readers, and show up well on the search engines. It's a situation of the more, the merrier, and I've always felt there was room for a lot of different groups, individuals, and opinions. It wouldn't be too long before the traditional media took notice, and our combined readership became a serious force to be reckoned with.

I'm hearing from a lot of people now who are simply interested individuals with a desire to learn about promoting their website in new ways. That's because blogging is a relatively new, different and very effective way to communicate with those that wish to know about your service, product, business or interests.