The use of blogs as a marketing tool is increasing in popularity. The funny thing about blogs though is that whether you are using it to simply promote a product, service or company or are promoting the blog itself it is still very important to market the blog properly to get lots of traffic. In short, the marketing tool needs to be marketed!
There are so many ways to market a blog. However, to simplify things let us go back to the basics of marketing and tackle the 4 Ps one at a time. If you do not know the 4 Ps I am referring to the 4 Ps that Jerome McCarthy used to divide the four sets of activities associated with marketing, which are the:
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Product;
Pricing;
Promotion; and
Placement or Distribution
Product – Since we are discussing about marketing your blog the product is obviously the blog itself. If you want your blog to be marketable, meaning that you want it to sell like hot donuts, then it should be a good product. For a blog to be a good product you should look at all the design elements including the layout, content, and the most importantly, the concept. Concept is important since there are millions of blogs and you need a good concept to stand out. For example, personal blogs though great just isn’t something that would sell unless you are someone famous or are impersonating someone famous, like Fake Steve Jobs did. You have to make sure that your blog has a topic or theme that has a wide audience and that you are presenting the theme in a way that will attract people, which equates to good writing and a good overall feel and look. Of course some blogs, because of the very unique or catchy concept gets people’s attentions even with a really boring format and even more boring entries (check out The Dullest Blog in the World). The whole point of the blog as a product is that if you want your blog to get a wide readership you’d better treat it like a product and think and think until you come up with a way to make it interesting to your target audience. Until then, like many inventions in this world your blog will only be seen and read by your family and friends.
Coming up…the rest of the 4 Ps.
Originally posted on August 10, 2007 @ 1:03 pm
