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Can Blogs be effective marketing tools?

by Rick Hendershot,  Traffic-Advisor.com

Blogs (web-logs) have become very popular. If you are not up to speed on what "blogs" are, just think of them as online journals. The owner of the blog makes regular posts on whatever topics he/she chooses, and readers are free (or not) to make comments.

If you think blogging is symptomatic of a youth culture enamoured of brainless activites like "reality" TV shows, text messaging and endless cell phone chatting, you are only partially right.

Like your typical teeanage cell phone conversation ("Hi. Where are you now? I'm at the mall. We're gonna hang out for a while. Got to go...") blog content can be nothing more than navel gazing:

"Well, I'm back after a couple of days. Don't really have much to say, because not much has happened. Think I'll go for a drive to the mall and wander around for a while. Need some underwear and might pick up a pizza. G2G..."

It is probably true that the immediacy and regularity of blogging lends itself to this kind of empty content...

Ooops. Time to make my blog entry. What's that? Can't think of anything to say? Well then, I guess I'll just talk about that... OK... "Here I am again. It's time to make another entry in my blog, but I can't think of anything to say. I hate that. Life can be so boring. Don't you agree? Well, G2G..."

Writing about nothing

That reminds me of the time back in Grade 12 English when I couldn't think of a topic for an essay due the next day. Out of desperation, that became my topic. The title was something like "An Essay About Nothing", and it started out more or less like this "I'm suppose to hand in an esssay tomorrow, but I can't think of anything to write about, so that is what I am writing about." I thought I was being pretty clever, and it was probably as good as most of my essays. But the teacher, expecting the usual earnest effort handed in by Grade 12 students, wasn't amused.

On the other hand, Jerry Seinfeld, turned this concept into the best sitcom ever produced (quite a few years later, I might add). Which only goes to prove that writing about nothing isn't always what it's cracked up to be. Sometimes it can be much more.

So it is with blogs. Blog content can be empty and pointless, or it can be interesting and thoughtful.

Just like ezines and those things we internet marketers pass off as "articles". Some of my content for this site comes from submissions made to article newsgroups. Everybody who joins the group can send out their "articles" to the entire group. So I receive a hundred or so articles every day. Some of them are interesting, original, informative, and very well written.

But, alas, most of them harp on the same old boring marketing themes: "10 Ways to Super Charge Your Response Rate", "5 Tips for Writing Dynamic Sales Copy", "How to Find the Perfect Work at Home Business", on and on it goes, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This stuff would be right at home in most mind-numbing blogs.

The fact is "nothing" is what most of us like to read about, and it turns out that the Search Engines like it too. See the next installment for the reasons why.

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