Effectively Using Outrageous Acts of FUD to Promote Your Blog
In the online world, Amazon is to retail book sales as Google is to search. Sure, Barnes and Nobles has a significant “off line” presence… but when it comes to selling books online… no one does it better than Amazon. While Google is the 900 lb gorrilla of search, Amazon is truly the 900 lb gorrilla when it comes to online book sales.
Several years ago, Amazon quietly bought a small POD publisher called Booksurge. Recently, Amazon has decided to throw their massive weight behind this acquistion. The WSJ reports:
Amazon.com Inc., flexing its muscles as a major book retailer, notified publishers who print books on demand that they will have to use its on-demand printing facilities if they want their books directly sold on Amazon’s Web site.
The move signals that Amazon is intent on using its position as the premier online bookseller to strengthen its presence in other phases of book selling and manufacturing. Amazon is one of the biggest booksellers in the U.S., with a market share publishing experts estimate to be about 15%.
While Amazon appears to be doing all it can to keep this “off the record”…. they have been “caught” using the tried and true method exploiting FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) to boost their POD sales. Despite the fact that the “threats” have been made over the phone, small POD publishers are standing up and crying “Foul!” As a result, the blogosphere is responding in force.
I posted a list less than 24 hours ago that contained the first 62 responses to this story on my Beyond Niche Marketing blog in the post Amazon’s Blatant Disrespect of Their Best Customers. In 24 hours, that list has increased 100%. Here’s a link to the new list on Easy Author Web Sites.
Now, as an FYI for my readers of this blog…. the reason I’m not posting the 105 blogs reporting on this story is because most of the “uproar” over this situation is happening in the author/publisher arena. (I also didn’t “trackback” the link above so this post won’t appear in the comments section there.)
That’s one of thing most blogger’s don’t understand about link building. Google wants to see your site “referenced” by other SIMILAR sites. Since the main “topic” of this blog is marketing (thus the domain name… EZ Marketing Tool)… incoming links from other marketing blogs and web sites will “help” this blog. However, incoming links from author and publishing blogs might actually hurt… seeing as though this blog is relatively “young” and hasn’t established its “character” with the search engines.
Now, I did post this story on my Beyond Niche Marketing blog and my Virtual Impax blogs as a way to take the message outside the author arena. However, incoming links from author and publisher web sites will give little if any boost to those blog’s Page Rank. The link storm makes for a nice Monday morning greeting in the “incoming links” message delivered by Wordpress… but in the long run, in the search engine’s eyes… the incoming links to that post will have little affect on either blog’s stature.
Jumping on the bandwagon against acts of FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) committed by corporate giants every now and again is GREAT exercise for your blog. It builds incoming links and helps to establish relationships with other bloggers. By taking a little time and compiling a comprehensive list which other bloggers can easily copy and paste into their own blogs, I’ve taken a major step towards establishing the credibility of a blog that is less than 6 weeks old. Admittedly, it took an investment of time to compile the list but so far, the results have been WELL worth that investment.
Oh, I should also point out that I don’t expect to “net” a single product sale from the visitors who come to the blog via this “activism” post. Those people already HAVE blogs which they are using. Definitely not my audience. This is solely a “link building” exercise which is necessary to develop respect from the search engines. These incoming links will help in the long run… as my blog matures and gains a Page Rank.
Is a Blog the Right Option for Your Business Marketing?
There is an adage in advertising that says, “I know that half my advertising dollars are wasted - I just don’t know which half!”
Several authors claim credit for this quote, but no matter what the origin, I can assure you the saying is wishful thinking. Not only is it possible that more half of your advertising dollars are wasted, on the flip side, it’s also possible that your marketing efforts are working very hard – against your business!
So if you’re turning to a blog to promote your business… you must first evaluate whether a blog is the RIGHT TOOL to promote your business.
QUESTION 1: How much risk is there in your product or service to your customers?
In other words, how much trust do they need to have to become your client or customer? How “high” is the risk if your customers make a wrong choice?
For example, if you’re selling office supplies the consequences of making a mistake when you purchase the wrong kind of copy paper is low. On the other hand, the choice of a financial planner is a VERY high risk decision for most consumers.
Several years ago, a financial planning firm in my home town made BIG news when it was discovered that the “investments” offered by the “financial planners” were not investments at all but actually a complex Ponzi scheme. As a result, several thousand of the firm’s clients in the area lost their retirement savings.
If you need to establish TRUST with your potential clients… then a blog is a GREAT marketing tool.
If you’re selling baseball gloves to Little Leaguers… well, then trust isn’t quite as important. If you’re selling copy paper, it’s downright irrelevant!
QUESTION 2:How much TIME will they invest researching their purchasing options?
Again, the higher the “risk” the more time a consumer will spend researching providers and searching for alternatives.
It’s important to note that devoting a lot of TIME to making a decision doesn’t necessarily mean that the decision will be made ENTIRELY upon who has the lowest price. If your customers are spending a lot of time researching options, then a blog is a great marketing tool because, via regular posts, you can illustrate time and time again why the lowest PRICE provider may not be the BEST provider.
If your potential clients spend a lot of time researching their options… then a blog is a GREAT marketing tool.
Blogs are MAGNIFICENT COMMUNICATION TOOLS!! If you’ve got a good “handle” on the information you want to communicate to potential customers and your customers are SEEKING more information to make an informed choice… then a self hosted blog is a dynamite marketing tool.
If you don’t know what message you need to be communicating, then start with the basics before you launch a blog. Pick up a copy of Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results
Digging for Gold in Old Content
Once you’ve been blogging for a while, you may find you’ve got lots of GREAT content that is “hidden” in the archives. Blogtrepreneur offers some helpful tips including linking internally to your old blog content.
Internally linking to blog content means simply creating a link inside your post to another post. For example, I have an older post called “5 Easy Ways to Create Content for your Blog.” It was written back in June 2007… and I think it’s a helpful post. Since my blog has a lot more readers now than it did then, I can draw attention to my old blog post by creating this internal link.
However, internal linking will also help your Search Engine visibility… a fact that is NOT lost on tech blog owners. This technique is so powerful, there’s even been a Wordpress plug in developed to make it easier for Wordpress blog owners to do this.
Of course, Daily Blog Tips offers the BEST reason for linking to internal content: It keeps readers on your blog for longer!
My favorite tactic for resurrecting old content is when I leave comments on other blogs (whether they’re do-follow enabled or not) is instead of linking to my blog’s opening page, I’ll link to a post with similar content. That way, when someone follows the breadcrumb trail I leave via commenting on other blogs… they’ll come directly to a post of great interest.
What’s your tip for reusing old blog content?
Less Can Be More When It Comes To Your Blog
One of the GREAT things about Wordpress blogs are the ease with which you can add widgets. Widgets are bits of code which can add interesting content to your blog.
Mashable offers a list of 50 Great Widgets for your Blog. One of those widgets is My Blog Log. My Blog Log is a valuable addition to your blog.
Unfortunately, this is the internet… where Porn sites are outnumbered by Phishing sites…. and for every good and valuable action there is an opposite and violent reaction.
Some sites will pretend to be a valuable resource for your blog but they aren’t. They’re deadly blog killers which if installed can destroy your blog’s online reputation overnight. Click here to read about one that took a blog from a PR 3 to PR 0 overnight.
Cashing Out and Selling Your Blog
Over at the Performancing blog, there is a post offering 3 blogs for sale… and the lister obviously arrived at his “valuation” of the three blogs by using this tool: How Much Is My Blog Worth. No bids and the only comment is a recommendation on how to get SOME buyer interest in the blog.
Meanwhile, Small Potato is offering his blog WPDesigner.com for sale on the same site. WPDesigner.com not only has a high PR (7), it also has a membership site as well. According to the tool above, the value of Tung Do’s site is 762,693.54.
He also reports the following “stats” for his blog:
- 2900 RSS subscribers (best month yet)
- Over 400 paying themes club members
- Over 1300 club members overall
- PR7 front page with multiple PR6 sub-pages
- #1 on WpThemesGallery’s Top 40 WordPress Blogs
- #1 on Google for “wordpress theme tutorial”
- #3 on Technorati
- 2 of Wpdesigner.com’s free themes are being used on WordPress.com, which is a community of hundreds of thousands of bloggers.
The current bid for his blog… comes in at less than 10% of the fantasy figure at $65,000.
The truth of the matter is, there are several ways to value a blog. The first is Monthly Income X 12 = Sales Price. The second is to try to use the first figure but then try to assign a “blue sky” value to the audience the blog has built.
However, Business Review Online has come up with a formula to determine your blog’s value:
BVIa =
adh (aay/1,000)
—————
abt x ehwIf you look at the equation, you’ll see that you need to know how many hits the blog gets per day (average daily hits or adh); and the average advertising yield for web adverts alongside the blog (aay). To work out the cost of the blog you need abt, which is the average number of hours spent per day blogging, and ehw, which is the employee hourly wage of the blogger.
NICE!!!
Unfortunately, Sam the gentleman who is trying to sell his long neglected blogs for $2700 is probably going to be disappointed. Trying to sell a neglected blog is like trying to sell a condemned house… in order to get any money out of it, you’re going to have to invest a lot of time and effort into bringing the house or blog “back up to code”. However, unlike a real estate investor, anyone interested in Sam’s 3 blogs just needs to wait until Sam misses his domain renewal and then snap up those domain names and launch a new blog there.
On the other hand, the years of work Small Potato has invested in his blog has resulted in many bidders on his blog.
In the end… your blog is worth what people will pay for it… and in the case of a neglected site… you may need to actually PAY someone to take it off your hands!
Creating Blazing Hot Headlines that Attract Readers
There’s no doubt about it… creating a blazing hot headline that attract readers for your blog is tough! However, it’s where you should invest MOST of your efforts when it comes to your blog. Writing Headlines that Work is one skill that will pay HUGE dividends if you can master it.
Creating blazing hot headlines that attract readers is as much art as it is a science.
Blogging without a blog says in the post: Your First Line Can Sink You
“If your first line doesn’t capture your readers attention, they are apt to move on to a post that does.”
Many offline lessons in headline writing apply to blog headlines as well. Pithy always trumps wordy. Grab attention and remember, it’s probably the only content the majority of people will see. You must also remember that your blog title most probably will be seen out of context!
Do not try to make the title “smart”, by using irony, word play or other “journalistic” approach.
The title to be built must be thought as of a label to your article in the unlimited virtual library that the Internet is.On the Internet, headlines are often displayed out of context. The reader is searching for your content and will only get to it, if a most appropriate, serious and well thought out label is attached to it. On the web, readers often don’t get the chance of applying background understanding to the interpretation of the titles they are presented with.
Another key to a great blog title is to think in terms of an inverted pyramid. Google Blogoscoped writes in Good Blog Writing Style
“..first get to the point and mention the core ideas, then fill in the details in later paragraphs. The first and second sentence should allow people to decide if they want to continue reading this. “
However, Lorelle points out the dual challenge of your quest to write a pithy, punch headline or blog title.
“There are two goals to writing an effective title.
- Catch a reader’s eye and encourage them to read.
- Help search engines help searchers find your article.”
Wait!!! I have to write pithy, punchy headlines AND INCLUDE RELEVANT KEYWORDS TOO!!!
Yes, it’s true. That title plays a HUGE role in your quest for Google dominance. Sure, you can get away with writing a few posts and using catchy titles that search engine ignore (because they’re so cute and clever, they don’t contain any essential keywords), but if you make a habit of it… then you’ll find your blog struggling to find an audience.
The original title of this post was going to be “Writing Pithy, Punchy Headlines” The problem? No one and I mean NO ONE is searching the internet for tips on how to write pithy, punchy headlines.
However, there are a few tortured souls searching for how to create hot headlines to attract readers to their blogs. Thus the change in the title above.
Leo Babauta has written a great article called “The Sexy Art of Writing Headlines that Kill“ Leo should know. He’s been able to quit his day job and now blogs full time PLUS his blog has snagged him a book deal.
Page Rank…. why it’s important…how you can fix it
You may think that PR stands for Public Relations…. but if you’ve got a blog or web site, there’s another type of PR which affects your site more than you may know. It’s called Page Rank (PR for short).
In a nutshell, Page Rank is assigned by Google to determine the “authority” of your web presence. It’s determined by a complex (and closely guarded) formula which measures the “quality” of inbound links to your web presence. Lots of links from sites with little or no “authority” will do little to elevate your Page Rank, while a relatively small number of incoming links from an .edu web site can do wonders at elevating your PR.
Lately, a lot of big time bloggers have been slapped HARD by Google. One of them is John Chow. Despite his increasing revenues his site has dropped from a PR 6 to a PR 3. This is thought to be a result of him “passing Google PR juice” through his paid links. Google HATES it when someone “games” their system and many bloggers who “sell links” either through ads or reviews have taken to blocking paid reviews with robots.txt. (Thanks Andy for that explanation.)
Courtney Tuttle offers a nice tutorial on how to ask Google to reconsider their valuation of your web presence. Courtney also reviews the practices that got John Chow penalized by Google.
The higher your Page Rank, the more “respect” you’ll get from Google. If you’re putting all of your marketing eggs in the Google basket… then you’d better learn all you can about playing by the rules set forth by Google.
Getting the most out your Wordpress blog
Wordpress is by far the most popular blogging platform. It’s so powerful and robust, it’s the blog software that can function like a CMS (Content Management System).
There are two ways to “Wordpress”… the free account a wordpress.com or you can install the software on your own hosting account with your own domain name.
If you choose the latter, and you just install the basic Wordpress software (which is free and very, very easy to install) you may be disappointed in the results. After all, you’ve heard how POWERFUL and GREAT Wordpress blogs are, yet… yours doesn’t seem to have the “juice”.
Rather than reinvent the wheel here… here are a essential Wordpress how to posts… including the essential plug ins and tweaks to make your self hosted Wordpress blog soar!
First, the posts which share essential plug ins:
- Gray Wolf offers far and above the “best of” list available in his comprehensive post : SEO plugins for Wordpress
- Design Meme offers 11 Essential Wordpress Plug ins
Plug ins are easy. You upload and activate. Anyone who can install Wordpress can install a plugin. (If you can’t do that… then let me introduce you to Acumen Web Services.) Do this one at a time because sometimes the plug ins don’t play well with each other.
Next we’ll cover the application of a THEME to your blog.
There are TONS of “free” themes floating around out there. Some are well coded, clean and “safe” to use. Others contain hidden spammy links and spyware. Considering that a Wordpress Theme can cost as little as $50… it seems pound wise and penny foolish to opt for a “free” theme that may prove to be VERY expensive in the long run.
- Template Monster offers an ever growing selection of Wordpress Themes.
- Brian Gardner offers the versatile and functional Revolution theme
- Solo Stream offers a truly inspired Magazine Theme
- I Themes offers the versatile Blank Essence Theme
Once you’ve got the proper plug ins installed and your blog is looking good, now it’s time for the final “geeky” finishes.
- Search This: From Install to Pimped Out
Great post for those who want to dig in and really tweak Wordpress for all it’s worth! Even if you’re not technically oriented, this post provides some great ideas for getting the most from Wordpress. The list of of pings alone (the last tweak) is worth the visit!!! - Pierson Field: How to Protect CSS Mods for ANY WordPress Theme
- Moonlight Blog: Offers WordPress Plugin: SimpleTags Modification
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