Advertising on your Blog
Beefing up your Blog is a good idea and here’s why.
You’ve probably branded your Blog to suit your website and requirements. But have you thought this through properly. Think of your industry and what you’re trying to achieve. Are you still stuck in the corporate Branding game?
When’s the last time you visited a companies Blog? When’s the last time you visited a website for a service, BT, Vodaphone, BBC, Amazon – and thought – hey I wonder what their Blog says.
That is simply not how it works. The Blogs you visit are precisely that Blogs – full of information, articles and topics you recognise. Invariably these Blogs ‘appear’ not to favour any one company, they favour themselves more than anyone else and is there a reason for that.
Yes customers/clients/users want to hear about your latest and greatest offerings, but no they don’t want you to tell them… They’d much rather hear about it from a neutral source.
From a marketing perspective that brings us to an interesting question. What role should the Blog take for our organisation?
The answer is – Yes it’s fine to have a fully branded and company orientated Blog – putting out press releases and other boring stuff. But to get the best out of a Blog – decouple it from you company and make it Industry Leading. Make it truly useful to your clients and users.
And then whack on a load of Advertising, whether you make money out of it or not is not so important, because it’s the impression you’re giving that counts.
If you have a standard corporate branded blog, that says to people… hey – we’re advertising ourselves. Equally if you have an Industry Blog that just looks good, people will say – nice, good thank you very much.
But if you go the extra mile and pep things up with some adverts and other cringe making stuff. People will say… wow – these guys must be making money, others must be reading their articles for them to justify all this advertising.
Psychological – Yes – but then isn’t that what marketing is all about?