PitchPersuasion

Just a quick post regarding sucessful blogs, Danny @ SEOmoz posted a very interesting post covering his research into what makes blogs sucessful.   The results are very interesting and show some very interesting common factors.

Domain Names & Blog names

From a marketing perspective .coms are still leading the way domain names and 76% of the top 100 blogs according to Danny, their names/brands are either made up of one or two words.

Unsaturated Market

Of the top blogs, a very large proportion of them were technology orientated with a serious shortage in the areas of fashion & green topics.  This would suggest that there is still pleanty of scope to win over the marketplace.

Only 13% of the blogs focussed specifically on women which Danny felt was mainly due to demand but could also be interpreted as lack of supply..

How do we keep a blog running

People

It takes more than one man to run a ship and indeed of the most sucessful, only 20% are run by one person.  I would suggest finding some good journalists who work within your area, getting some aspiring journalist interns to help you or get some of your clients to do it for you.

Content

In the land of blogs content is king, agencies are lucky in that if they are able to convince the client that it’s a good idea (more on this anouther time) they will be able to get a stream of the hottest news, information and comment on everything that’s going on within that industry.  This effectively allows them to own a party of the conversation and direct some of the conversations.

How do we do it sucessfully

While I’m in no position to tell anyone how to do their job, I would advise that a good bit of planning, research  and ideas generation into the specific niche that you want to target and then do a test project over 2-3 months to demonstrate to the client that you are able to build a community and that it is not bad for them.

Any final words?

Don’t lie, as soon as you start the online community will sus you out very quickly.  There’s no point creating anonymous/semi-official blogs, be true to what you are doing and transparent and you will be able to build trust much faster than if you try to start hiding things.  If your client has skeletons in the closest then they should address them and move on, why just talk to the press when you can also tell your clients/customers/brand lovers directly.

This week my main post is slightly delayed so I’ve added a small ‘tapas’ feature to help out people who are launching new sites and campaigns online. If you are really sensible you might even build it into a pitch and bill the time you spend doing it!

Essential Hit List

1. To even vaguely give the world a chance at finding your site, bookmark your page (and every page/post your create) using Del.icio.us (1min) or even better using Social Marker (30min+ if you do all the social bookmarking sites).

2. Get a twitter account (30secs) and email all your clients & prospects with the details (30secs) and use it as a news ticker of what you do each day including links to your site (1min a day).

3. Add a listing on DMOZ, it’s regarded as one of the most important directories for sites to be listed. (2mins)

4. Post a constructive comment each day on a blog that you read regularly including a link back to your site. (30sec)

5. Create news, move from: ‘We started work on a new project today’ to ‘x agency/company started work for x company today’ and syndicate it using NowPublic and email it to the right people at places like Brand Republic & Mad.co.uk. (30sec)

In reality to get started it may take you a bit more than 5 minutes to start doing everything here but if you get into a rhythm it should really help build up your audience.

Historically when creating websites people have followed a very classic method of trying to create a carbon copy of what they believe their organisation looks like into a website.

While this approach does cover off the basic needs of an online presence it does not help educate the buyer, nor does it entice them back to the site in the future. Companies need to start to realise that they need to look at what the people visiting their site might need/want to know.

As most of us now make a decision to purchase before speaking to a sales rep it’s important that the essential information can be easily found and is laid out in a way which is digestible by the various audiences.

Key Points:
- Think about who needs information from your site, e.g. Buyers, Existing, Clients, Press, Investors..;
- Look at the ‘Personas’ of the people visiting your site and ensure that their needs are catered for;
- Work together as an organisation so that Marketing, Sales, Web developers & Agencies are a co-ordinated machine.

Good Example of a client centric site:
Webex - http://www.webex.com

Links/References:
The New Rules of Marketing & PR, David Meerman Scott

Welcome to Pitch Persuasion, our aim is to help educate companies on how they can better make use of the internet. We hope to do this by showing how companies are and are not embracing the internet as well as highlighting different strategies of doing so.

We hope that this will be an evolving resource and will be taking contributions from different individuals and companies to try to get the best and widest view of the online space.

This blog will be primarily aimed at people who have little or no understanding of everything online so if you don’t understand please leave us a comment or send an email and we will do our best to keep you enlightened.