Donât Forget a Blog Strategy – âfree Peopleâ Didnât!
Blogs.
As an Internet strategist – my life daily is consumed with social media feeds, blog alerts, feedburner stats, google alert updates, monitoring, strategizing, execution – all of these overused terms and time consuming tactics certainly take a toll on you.
But one thing I do often, as I do for all my clients, is research – taking notice of the growing digital space around me – thinking of ideas to implement innovative strategies among the community and with my clients.
One of those key strategies that are a must in today’s Internet spectrum is a blog. A blog is key in driving not only traffic, but interest to your brand, product, or company. Blogs help you appear authoritative in your industry – allowing you to give views on the latest events in your trade, offer reviews, insights, and so on.
This expands into relationship building tools, as you are able to speak more freely and in a more informal and personable style, as compared to how you direct the voice on your main website. Through the blog channel, they are more likely to trust you, and then all the more likely to visit your main website and then click your links and possibly purchase your product.
It also offers insight for your customers, and allows them to leave comments and ’speak’ to you on a key level. In addition, blogs are extremely search engine friendly – through thousands of possible keywords and fresh, updated content on a regular basis – blogs are simply great facets to have on your website today. Your simply misguided if you think otherwise.
*Read More for a detailed blog breakdown of the popular clothing line Free People.
Now, another aspect of blogs I enjoy are creating them, not only content strategy, but programming and designing them on a unique level. One aspect of ‘branding’ a blog is considering the number of possibilities you have when actually build the blog.
These are all important questions you MUST think about before diving into the blog space – thinking you know what to do, when you might need a refresher.
And always remember that blogs vary, depending if you are in the business-to-consumer or business-to-business parallel – but your Plan of Action (POA) should always remain the same.
Case Study.
Free People. A blog that does it Right.
Free People is a ’boutique’ style of women’s and young girl’s clothing – offered both online and in brick and mortar stores around the world. It is a sister-brand to another well-known bohemian-type clothing, accessories and furniture store – Anthropologie.
Now, the Free People store design is a very creative, bohemian look that stylizes the brand well, and does many good things as far as marketing the brand on the main website – but their blog page does an even better job in terms of look, strategy and content.
First, when you come upon the page – you have a nice flash banner on the top portion of the blog that draws instant attention. It’s 3-D style and moving parts, keeps the user engaged enough to move the mouse over the falling curtain rod and press it – which then drags the screen over, as if you were in puppet show – making note of their blog’s name “Caravan of Curiosities” – to keep the user engaged enough to follow through the blog to discover its true meaning.
Another side point here – naming your blog something different and marketing that along side your main brand is a nice change of pace on occasion. But it won’t work for everyone – so carefully think about that before you go off and name your blog something completely different. The nice touch here is that ‘Caravan of Curiosities’ still has an engaging tone to it, and how they display it in the blog is effective as well.
Working your way down the page – you recognize the 3-D style curtain outline the navigation header, which is simple – and elegant. And then just three blog pages dress the navigation header:
And from a design aspect – you have to appreciate the look with drawn curtains going down the sides of the pages – very instinctual and effective.
Now, the opening page here is the blog homepage – which after the navigation has your standard blog format and layout with a search box, archives, categories, and a blog roll entitled ‘favorites’. They also added a store locator and 6 products that are simple photos and text that link back to the main store. The column layout is a three-column layout morphed into two columns, and in that side right column they squeeze in the blog widgets. All of this is complimented by a great ‘notebook’ style background. As complex and rich as this design is overall – remember, it is their content that gets the job done…not the design. Even though I truly applaud them on such a layout – very engaging for a user to traverse through.
Finally, at the bottom of the page — a nice connection with the footer, in relation to the header — similar to how you tie any story together — you must connect the beginning with the end of a story…as you do a website — design and content including.
Content of Free People.
Now, with any website, content is king, always will be king, and on the Free People blog – it is King. Content on blogs are crucial for search engines because you can create thousands of keywords, all of it search engine friendly, and all the content you create is new and updated – so search engines will love you for it.
Free People does a fantastic job with approaching the all around marketing term – “On Target, Off Topic”. Free People have a target audience, girls, young women ages tween to 45; easily, and for the more trendy women who may breach beyond that age – even an older woman can wear their clothing. With that target audience in thought – as a marketer – go ‘off topic’ for a bit, and consider talking about content that is not directly related to you, but still, in a way, is connected.
Free People’s breaks up its blog into 26 different categories; topics such as art, books, decor, crafts, food, home office, magazines, polls, music, and so on. At the same time, they intermix direct categories related to some of their external social media tools, such as their flickr, myspace, facebook, and download pages.
The point is, their content is intellectually placed, and interesting…which is even more important! They do occasionally drop in content that will push a new outfit, piece of clothing and so on…but not as often as you think. And they are blogging everyday – with NEW content, and using this to their advantage.
Video.
Another aspect of their content they included was a blog page devoted exclusively to video. This custom designed video player they added features behind the scene videos of their monthly catalog shoots, as well as a video featuring their 2007 holiday party. These simple videos are barely 1:30 minutes long, edited with appropriate music, mostly indie stuff, and cut to look a bit grainy and eclectic, as their brand appropriately exhibits now.
This simple idea of placing video on the blog is a great marketing tool. First, the video takes an editor, all of about an hour to edit and post. From there…he can take this video – submit it to any external video channels, i.e. YouTube, Viddler, and so on. They can then upload them to their Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr pages – only enhancing their exposure – through something as simple as video.
For those who don’t know what this is or means; essentially this creates secondary brand exposure that allows you to initially reach out to possible consumers who might not have seen your brand before, allowing them to now find you. It also allows you to create ‘backlinks’ to your website – this all counts in that SEO puzzle so many clients and people I speak to are always trying to solve.
Final.
Here is the point about all this – what this blog does right is pretty much EVERYTHING. What they do wrong, next to NOTHING, nearly. And let’s be clear on this, they have people who are supposed to be blogging and acting as community managers to maintain this blog, and update their external social networking profiles, and so on. This all takes time, and we all know what time ends up being — $$$. But, the effect of what they have created has allowed them to ‘connect’ with their consumers, and harness new customers, and so on. Their blog has been around since November 2006, and has amassed a huge amount of traffic daily to the blog. Agreed – they are a major brand and can spark that type of traffic, but honestly, the simplicity behind their blog strategy only enhances those numbers.
Any company or brand that is thinking of starting a blog strategy need to follow a similar model in structuring their content and direction when beginning or ‘changing up’ a blog for your brand or product.
If you need help in developing a blog strategy for your business, feel free to contact me @ anytime. nicholas.cifuentes@gmail.com
How to Get Your Blog Noticed Quickly and Widely
1. Submit your blog to all of the directories listed on http://pingomatic.com/. Pingomatic will ping 15 services all at once.
2. Ping your blog after every post at http://pingomatic.com/
3. Here’s a real gem: Submit your blog to http://www.pingoat.com/ Pingoat will ping over fifty blog ping services all at once. So you don’t have to hunt for ping services and manually ping them. Pingoat pings over fifty blog ping servers (growing) with just one click.
4. Ping your blog after every post at Pingoat at http://www.pingoat.com/
5. Sign up for a free account at BlogExplosion.com and register your blog there: http://www.blogexplosion.com/
6. Submit your blog to all of the directores listed at http://www.rss-feeds-directory.com/blog_lists.html
7. Sign up for a “My Yahoo” at http://my.yahoo.com/ and attach your blog to your own “My Yahoo” account. This will get your blog included in Yahoo very quickly. This is worth the effort to stop what you’re doing right and do it, since Yahoo has a PR 9.
8. Use this code: “http://add.my.yahoo.com/content?url=http://www.yourblog.com/urblog.xml” in your blog to allow others to put your feed on their own “My Yahoo” account.
9. Sign up for a “My MSN” at http://www.my.msn.com/, and attach your blog to your own “My MSN” account. This will get your blog included in MSN very quickly. This is also invaluable because MSN has a PR 8.
10. Use this code: “http://my.msn.com/addtomymsn.armx?id=rss&ut=http://www.urblogfeedaddress.com/urblog.xml” in your blog to allow others to put your feed on their own “My MSN” account.
11. Place the link and description of your blog in your signature, so that any posts to Forums, Outgoing Emails, Autoresponder Courses, etc, will promote your blog.
12. Post a link and description of your blog on each of your sites.
13. Place your blog on all the major search engines. AddMe.com will submit your blog free to the top 14 Search engines here:
http://www.addme.com/submission.htm
SubmitExpress.com will submit your blog free to the top 20 Search engines here:
http://www.submitexpress.com/
14. Use Article Directories as a resource for articles to post on your blog. Here are a few:
http://ezinearticles.com/
http://goarticles.com/
http://www.knowledge-finder.com/
http://www.informit.com/articles/
Also check out Article Marketer at http://www.articlemarketer.com for a quick and easy way to reach article directories and ezines.
15. Locate blogs with a lot of traffic and place useful comments in their comment box. Be sure the blog and your comments are relavent to both your blog and theirs. Senseless posts won’t help you, they’ll hurt you.
16. Once you get around 5 to 10 posts on your blog, start a PR campaign and announce it to all relevant channels.
17. Make a blog post as often as possible. More than once a day is not really necessary. Remember, if you can’t write that much, go to step # 14.
Blogging News â Submit your Articles and get information
Blogs are online journals where people express themselves through writing. Writing is the process by which one puts the words of a language on a format that others can read. Writing has only been a day in the year that humanity has existed. Talking and thinking are much easier than writing. These processes just out naturally like a river of consciousness, just sometimes, we have to do.
Bloggingnews.net is owned and operated by GPRICESHOP LLC., a US corporation, as a free informational site. They accept only articles which are blog oriented news, provided are reprinted with the permission of the original authors as a promotional tool for their own websites.
Blogging is the wave of the future. They Would Always Like You To Come Back For Up To Date News On Blogging As Well As Always Having The Most Up To Date Blogging News Available.
Anyone submitting an article (blogging oriented) to this site agrees to allow it to be published in electronic form on this website. Publishing of articles by bloggingnews.net is wholly at their discretion. You will be notified via email if your article is published on their site. This site will not publish any article they find to contain profanity, are abusive, rude, illegal, or is not relevant to the topics covered in the site. Some articles have been slightly altered from their original form. These alterations are in html formatting only and are applied to authorâs code to make them compatible with W3C specifications.
For more details, please visit – http://www.bloggingnews.net
Blogging News â get information
Blogs are online journals where people express themselves through writing. Writing is the process by which one puts the words of a language on a format that others can read. Writing has only been a day in the year that humanity has existed. Talking and thinking are much easier than writing. These processes just out naturally like a river of consciousness, just sometimes, we have to do.
Bloggingnews.net is owned and operated by GPRICESHOP LLC., a US corporation, as a free informational site. They accept only articles which are blog oriented news, provided are reprinted with the permission of the original authors as a promotional tool for their own websites.
Blogging is the wave of the future. They Would Always Like You To Come Back For Up To Date News On Blogging As Well As Always Having The Most Up To Date Blogging News Available.
Anyone submitting an article (blogging oriented) to this site agrees to allow it to be published in electronic form on this website. Publishing of articles by bloggingnews.net is wholly at their discretion. You will be notified via email if your article is published on their site. This site will not publish any article they find to contain profanity, are abusive, rude, illegal, or is not relevant to the topics covered in the site. Some articles have been slightly altered from their original form. These alterations are in html formatting only and are applied to authorâs code to make them compatible with W3C specifications.
For more details, please visit – http://www.bloggingnews.net
