Category: Blogs

How to Pitch to a Top Blogger

A down-trodden economy is no time to pull your marketing muscle. If anything, it’s a time to keep flexing it.

Though some cost-effective (read: cheap) marketing methods surely wouldn’t hurt. Million-dollar Super Bowl ads are nice and all, but cheap marketing tactics are totally the way to go.

With that said, I found a few blog entries around pitching your web start-up to influential bloggers like Michael Arrington, Pete Cashmore, Robert Scoble, and the ilk. There are already tons of tips on pitching to VCs. So it’s refreshing to see so many posts on pitching to bloggers. (There are actually way more than I’ve listed here, wow!)

There are a ton of great tips here. A few notable ones are:

  • Build a great product
  • Start a buzz on smaller blogs first
  • Perfect your elevator pitch (helps with VCs and bloggers, apparently)
  • Make your pitch relevant & timely to the blogger

I hope this helps. Good luck pitching your business!

The Advertiser/Customer Break Up

Now for some Friday fun. What happens when advertisers and customers start getting intimate? Miscommunication. Trouble. And eventually, a break up.

Here’s an oldie, but a goodie:

This video was created by Geert Desager, a Trade Marketing Manager South East Asia for Microsoft (wow, that title is a mouthful), and the Belgium-based ad agency Openhere. They also created a companion blog called Bring the love back. This was all part of a marketing campaign from Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions to promote their search engine advertising products.

It has since been followed up by a second movie, which stars the Advertiser, CEO, and Creative Director (with the last “R” turned backwards for extra irreverence), and a companion blog called Get Inspired Here. Unfortunately, I didn’t find the second movie as, uh, inspiring. The first one was hilarious. A great play on a couple’s break up. The second one, eh. What was it a play on? A corporate meeting with executives and marketing personnel? That’s just not as funny.

I think they’re working on a third one right now. Hopefully it’ll be better. Good luck guys!

How to Name a Business

Naming a business can be as hard as naming a baby. Well, maybe not AS hard. But it’s still pretty damn hard.

I’ve been reading Seth Godin’s Small is the New Big and came across his collection of riffs on business naming. Fortunately, he blogged about these as well, from as far back as 2003. (Hey, did he just grab blog posts to make his book??)

Here’s what Godin recommends:

  1. A name that is too descriptive could be too limiting. The less it has to do with your industry, the better. International Postal Consultants is too limiting. Starbucks, Nike, & Apple are good.
  2. Use real English words. Axelon & Altus are bad. Jet Blue, Ambient & Amazon are good.
  3. Make sure it’s easy to spell and pronounce. Prius is a bad name because it can be tricky for some people to spell and pronounce.
  4. Don’t obsess over getting a short name just so you can have a short domain name.
  5. Add a descriptive tagline. Like “Lemonpie, the easy way to learn scuba”.
  6. A name should be unique enough to appear in a web search without a lot of competitors and flexible enough to gain a secondary meaning if you wish to expand your brand.
  7. If you’re creating a whole new product or service, give it a whole new name, not an incremental one. Sneakers is better than athletic shoe.
  8. If you have lots of products and services, come up with a clear naming hierarchy, so customers can understand your offerings. Honda, Honda Civic, and Honda Accord are good. Apple, Apple iPod, and Apple Powerbook are bad, because the “i” prefix isn’t consistent or defensible.
  9. Names with generic words like Central, Land, or World are meaningless. They add no value and are difficult to defend.

Godin’s blog posts:

Biz Idea: Men’s Blog Network

Jimmy Feeling Male There’s PopSugar. And FabSugar. And BellaSugar. But where in the Sugar Inc. blog network is MaximSugar? Or GQSugar? (Sure, they have GeekSugar, but that doesn’t really count.)

Sugar Inc. was created by Lisa Sugar, who originally started PopSugar in March 2005 “as a hobby to satisfy her obsession with celebrities and fashion,” according to its entry on Wikipedia. This happened years after Nick Denton started the infamous Gawker blog in January 2003, and the subsequent Gawker Media blog network. Other than Gawker, he’s got Defamer, Gizmodo, and Consumerist. Nothing there quite aims for the Maxim or GQ audience either, though Gizmodo and Deadspin are sure closer than PopSugar.

Following along Denton’s heels is Jason Calacanis’ Weblogs, Inc. blog network in September 2003. He’s got quite a stable as well: Engadget, Autoblog, and Joystiq.

But still, neither one of these networks has blogs focused on male topics like Maxim and GQ do.

So how about a men’s blogging network? It could contain blogs on:

  • Men’s fashion
  • Home ownership and repair
  • Cars, auto repair, and car modifications
  • Motorcycles
  • Boats and fishing
  • Fitness and health
  • Outdoors and hunting
  • Self and home defense
  • Beer, hard liquor, and alcohol
  • Dating, relationships, and sex
  • Personal and family finances
  • Child rearing and family issues (especially for single dads)
  • Jokes, funny stories, and toilet humor (to help kill time at work)
  • Marriage, relationships, and divorce
  • Electronics (of course)
  • Sports (of course)
  • Video games (of course)
  • And more!

There clearly are brands that want to advertise to these consumer segments. The business model would be the same as any other blogging network – CPM, CPC, and CPA advertising. Perhaps some affiliate programs as well. And maybe even sponsorships with magazines such as Maxim and GQ.

What do you think?

P.S. I know what you’re thinking: what the hell does that photo have to do with this article? Well, it’s a photo of a buddy who’s standing next to a line that says “Cross line to feel male”. And what did he do? He crossed the line. And he said it felt marvelous.

P.P.S. ‘Twas a very good idea, Chris! And still is. You should totally do it!

What is Social Media Marketing?

My skin is tingly. It gets this way whenever something new is on the horizon, something big.

I remember feeling this way back in college. Something called the World Wide Web was creeping onto the scene. It was still in the domain of universities and geeks. Then a roommate told me the Web was going to be commercialized. When I heard that, I looked at the web site I had just built, imagined making a career out of this, and felt my skin go tingly.

The new thing making me tingly is Social Media Marketing (SMM). Okay, maybe it’s not such a new thing. Cutting-edge bloggers have been talking about it for a while now. There was even a conference on it back in April.

But I’m starting to see traditional companies peek into SMM. They’re lifting the curtain, poking their heads in, and wondering if they should join all the fun. In high-tech marketing speak, the Early Adopters are starting to buy into SMM. Maybe even some of the Early Majority too.

So what is Social Media Marketing?

I define it as: a specialization of marketing that involves using online social media channels to promote a business’s products, services, or brand.

So what is Social Media?

Good question. Chris Garrett describes it as the “tools, websites and software that allows people to connect and share.” Scott Monty points to a very amusing video called “Social Media in Plain English” that explains it in, well, plain english:

Can you give me some examples of Social Media Marketing?

Sure. Since this field is still so young, there are a very wide range of tactics, some more effective than others. Here are some examples of SMM tactics:

Create an online video

That video above is a sweet example. It was created by the husband and wife team at CommonCraft Productions. They created a few free videos like that and “Podcasting in Plain English” and “Twitter in Plain English“. These funny videos became viral and spread onto blogs like Scott Monty’s.

The intent? To promote the services of CommonCraft, who’ve created explanation videos for clients such as Google (GOOG), Salesforce.com (CRM), H&R Block (HRB), and others.

Offer a free product/service to a blogger

The book publisher Kogan Page hired a marketing firm to send out free books to various bloggers (including me!) in the hopes that some of the bloggers would write favorable mentions or reviews. This can be tricky as some bloggers may write scathing reviews. I tried to be balanced in mine.

The intent? To generate more sales for Kogan Page’s books.

Get your website listed on a link aggregation site

The link aggregation site Digg.com can be a massive traffic generator. If your website is featured on Digg.com, you can get an onslaught of users visiting your site. A couple of years ago, Richard MacManus found a way to game Digg.com and almost guarantee being featured.

The intent? To get a lot of visitors and new customers. However, the effectiveness of this tactic is debatable, as incoming visitors don’t always convert into customers. It can still give you SEO benefits, though. But be careful about gaming Digg.com, as that can start a community backlash against you.

Create a common-interest group on a social network

Facebook allows you to create common-interest groups, such as the “Louis Vuitton” group or the “Chocolate = Love!” group. You could create one of your own, based around your brand, product, or service, and speak to your customers directly. It’s like an informal, ad hoc focus group, but much cheaper.

The intent? To speak and listen to your customers directly. “It’s like free market research” says one entrepreneur who’s tried this tactic.

Write catchy content

Some call this linkbait, others call this just plain catchy content. Last year, Johnny Virgil wrote a hilarious blog entry about the 1977 JC Penny Catalog he found in his wife’s grandfather’s attic. His entry was so catchy and viral that it spread like a really bad showtune that gets stuck in your head for hours.

The intent? Well, Virgil wasn’t trying to sell anything, though he’s placed Google ads and a PayPal donation button on his site since then. But as a marketer, such a tactic could generate significant pageviews on your site, and hopefully some sales too.

SEO for Newspapers and Magazines

Long Bet Remember the long bet between Dave Winer and Martin Martin Nisenholtz of the New York Times?

In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times’ Web site.

Rogers Cadenhead of Workbench tallied the results and discovered that he was sorta right. For 2007’s top stories, some blogs did rank higher than newspapers in a Google search.

Read/WriteWeb took a look at this and correctly hinted that the test isn’t an accurate conclusion of the popularity of blogs vs newspapers—it’s really a test on the SEO effectiveness of the two groups of sites. And the blogs in these results are more search engine-friendly than the newspaper websites. (Also, this test doesn’t measure how many people read the actual printed newspapers.)

This made me wonder. What would the newspaper (and magazine) websites have to do to increase their SEO?

  • Use proper heading tags (H1, H2…) for article headlines and subtitles
  • Improve the URLs by replacing those cryptic numbers they oftentimes use the article headline
  • Don’t require user authentication, or create a non-signed-in blurb of the article, though that’s not as SEO-friendly
  • Archive all previous articles publically, perhaps with a disclaimer that it’s an old article (some news sites delete old stories)
  • Update the Google sitemap regularly (some do this already)
  • Encourage links to the article by adding related content or features to important articles that add value
  • Include a link back to the web article in the emailed version
  • Use web standards markup so search engines have less code to crawl and index
  • Create an RSS feed for all articles & articles by category (most do this already, though I’ve seen a few who don’t)

Guy Kawasaki on the Blogosphere

Guy Kawasaki Last month, Entrepreneur magazine did an article about Guy Kawasaki and Truemors. Entitled, “Truthfully Speaking“, it was a case study on Truemors, short for “true rumors.”

With only $12,000, the managing director of the VC fund Garage Technology Ventures launched Truemors with a partner in a true boot-strapping experience. So far, they’re reportedly breaking even by revenue earned from advertising and sponsorships.

But that’s not why I’m writing about this. I’m writing about this because of Kawasaki’s awesome & hilarious answer to the question, “What lessons did you learn from the launch?” (which is related to how some called his site “the worst website ever“):

The blogosphere is full of angry nay-sayers who are good at tearing things down but not at innovating. They should move out of their mothers’ houses and start dating.

Hahaha! That almost made milk shoot out of my nose.

The 1977 JC Penny Catalog

1997 JC Penny catalog Were you born in the 60s or 70s? Then perhaps you are guilty of wearing clothes like these.

Ha Ha! (That’s me laughing at you.)

Johnny Virgil is the insane mastermind behind this hilarity. Started back in January 2005 on a dare from coworkers, Virgil’s funny blog 15 Minute Lunch sadly isn’t all that profitable. In an interview with BlogInterviewer.com, he said, “I actually got a check for a hundred bucks after about 2 years.”

However, his entry on the 1977 JC Penny’s catalog turned out to be quite a delicious piece of linkbait.

Linkbait is a controversial method of marketing; some think it’s okay, others, not so much. Basically, linkbait is any method (blog post, blog comment, etc) done to generate a link back to one’s own site. Some social media marketers do this intentionally by tailoring their blog entries to be interesting/catchy/sensational/controversial enough to inspire other bloggers to link to them. Others, like Virgil, did so unintentionally.

He even provides a quick summary on the traffic impact the 1977 JC Penny post had. Most of his traffic came from webmail servers, meaning his entry is now one of those emails that get forwarded around. That’s how I found out about it too.

Most social media marketers aim at writing serious and insightful pieces for linkbait. Virgil’s piece is a great case study on using humor to attract traffic. So what’s that mean for businesses?

  • Write hilarious content; people love funny stuff and will enthusiastically send it to all their friends.
  • Consider an “email this entry” feature to help readers send the entry around; this will help you control the email’s content too.
  • Be prepared for other bloggers who may steal and appropriate your content as their own; include links back to your site.
  • Make sure the content is related to your business in some way; a funny story about rabbits isn’t going to help you sell toner cartridges, for example.