The Future of Blogs, Your Content and Your Business

September 28, 2006 | 1 Comment

Anybody who has seen my main website will know that I might have jumped the gun a bit when I pigeon holed myself as a professional business blogger. It’s been not so much a case of jumping on the blogging bandwagon as jumping too early with nowhere to land.

So whilst I wait for the pro-blogger gravy train to arrive, I thought I might look into my crystal ball and see what other predictions I can try and foresee in the mists of time.

We are still only really at the start of the ambiguous ‘Web 2.0’ with marketers and PR professionals all rushing to find the best ways of utilising the new tools at their disposal. The gold-rush is on to find the best way of gaining exposure and mining the rapidly growing online marketplace.

It has never been easier or cheaper to reach a global audience in a very short space of time.

Web 2.0 has also been synonymous with the growth of the bedroom publisher. Anybody with a PC and Internet connection can now run their own blog or website, and potentially reach millions around the world. This has created a torrent of content flooding onto the Internet on a daily basis.

So much content is being produced that it is virtually impossible to keep track of all the latest updates on all but the smallest of niches. Over 50 million blogs are now being tracked by Technorati with 1.6 million new posts hitting the web everyday! Google and Microsoft are also hell-bent on adding all the greatest literary works known to man by scanning whole libraries onto the Internet. I don’t, however, expect to see Shakespeare or Dickens topping Digg anytime soon.

There is going to have to be a rethink on how we find and distribute content and information. After all, we can’t go on fighting over the top few search engine spots forever!

Once RSS penetrates the mass market, and awareness spreads, people will start using RSS to bookmark their sites of interest. Why waste time trawling through all your browser bookmarks when you can have all the updates delivered straight to your homepage?

But relying on RSS website feeds and topic keyword feeds will only have a limited lifespan. With more and more blogs appearing on every topic under the sun your aggregator will eventually reach saturation point, overloaded with content.
 

 

I already spend most of the morning reading through all my RSS feeds – and I only started using RSS a few months ago! If I don’t want this to creep into my afternoons I’m going to have to sleep less, learn to read quicker or limit my daily intake. As I subscribe to more and more blogs this is going to mean missing potentially mission critical information simply due to the constraints of time.

My prediction is that aggregators are going to have to become a lot smarter in the future. Obediently following your instructions and delivering content from all your subscribed sites will simply lead to info overload. They are going to have to almost develop artificial intelligence and be able to predict what content you want, and the most relevant, on a daily basis.

Aggregators are going to have to behave like researchers and reporters. Assessing what sites and content you read and then going out and to find the latest, best and most relevant info available. Your homepage will be your own fully customised magazine with news, video and audio all handpicked to match your interests.

With the proliferation of laptops, smartphones and electronic paper people will have more devices than ever before for consuming content. Thus feeding the demand for yet more blogs and distributed news catering to the tastes of an increasingly widening cross-section of people.

Being able to get your content delivered to people’s homepage will be critical if you want to sell a product or service. At present a lot of people rely on sites such as dealtime and kelkoo to find the best products and prices. Once they start integrating this with reading blogs you will want to ensure that this starts them on a path to your site.

Once aggregators start analysing what web pages you read they will be able to predict and recommend relevant product sites. Knowing how to get your product and service content distributed around the web, linked to on other blogs and delivered to people’s homepages will be crucial in the future online world.

Posted by Matt Ambrose | Filed Under RSS, blogging 

What Does RSS Have To Do To Reach The Tipping Point?

September 20, 2006 | 3 Comments

Bloggers and online marketers are forever trumpeting the wonders of blogs as a business and marketing tool. But blogs will only be able to live up to the dreams of its disciples if they start being read by average Joe from the mass market. Some work still needs to be done if RSS and blogs are to be pushed over the tipping point and become the widely used marketing machine that everybody believes/hopes they will be.

RSS is going to need a charm offensive before people in the street even know what it is, let alone start using it. You only have to look at the makeup of the top 50 most popular blogs (mainly about gadgets, politics and marketing) to know that the mass market have yet to start reading blogs in their great numbers. Or maybe there is just a huge gap for blogs on paying your mortgage and cutting your credit card bills that nobody has spotted?

At a recent ‘Beers and Innovation’ event in London the future of RSS and blogging was discussed and it was universally declared, yet again, how fantastic they are. The speakers also all agreed that their growth amongst the non-web savvy would continue to stall until RSS becomes more accessible and easier to use. Hopefully, when Internet Explorer 7 launches later this year it will go some way to correcting this problem.

Even when the hurdle of accessibility is cleared there are still other problems preventing RSS from becoming a business tool that can be effectively managed.

As any marketer will tell you, “You can’t monetise what you can’t measure,” and this is an issue faced by RSS/web feeds. As outlined by Techcrunch’s recent post: it’s virtually impossible to know exactly how many people are subscribed to your feed, let alone how many are actually reading your posts.

There are so many different aggregators and methods of capturing RSS content that there is currently no way of compiling all your data into a central reporting function, as with email. This makes it tricky for marketers arguing their case for the extra funding needed for this radical new marketing tactic. There is simply currently no way of measuring the ROI of blogging in traditional quantifiable terms (other than organic SEO and increased traffic of course).

RSS will soon be far easier to use, which will help it to start reaching out to the non-web savvy. If you can bookmark a site then you will be able to click on a button to save its feed in your browser. But developing a universal standard of tracking your blog’s subscription and readership – with the level of reporting offered by email – might still hold back its tipping point amongst businesses for a while yet.

Posted by Matt Ambrose | Filed Under RSS 

MySpace Attacked for Keeping Kids Off the Streets

September 14, 2006 | Leave a Comment

As people trudge back to work, after the summer lull, there seems to be a dark cloud hanging over many people’s heads. First they decide that their lives were better twenty years ago, and now a national newspaper has launched a campaign to save their children from the perceived evils of modern life.

The Daily Telegraph’s ‘Hold onto Childhood’ campaign is striving to save our junior citizens from the ‘sinister cocktail’ of sitting on their computer, munching crisps, whilst worrying about their next exam.

Many parents might have fond memories of climbing trees and making mud pies, but the kids of today seem far too tech savvy for such simple pleasures. Even just hanging around with the kids in your neighbourhood seems a dated concept. More and more are fleeing the streets and spending their time making friends online.

The latest research figures show that the Internet is evolving and integrating into young people’s lives at an astronomical rate. Social networking sites, such as MySpace, Bebo and YouTube, have all seen their usage grow by over 300% in the last year:

“Many of the sites experiencing the fastest growth today are the ones that understand their audience’s need for expression, and have made it easy for them to share pictures, upload music and video, and provide their own commentary, thus stimulating others to do the same. It is the classic network effect at work.”

Few could have predicted (except Rupert Murdoch) that social networking sites would start occupying so much of people’s time so quickly.The Internet is being used by increasing numbers as a platform for developing relationships based on interest rather than geography.

Young people are far more web savvy than their parents and have grown up with the Internet as their primary information resource. There can be little doubt that, as they grow into the business world, they will find new and effective ways of using it to improve how they manage their professional lives.

A new study of business professionals found (in the US at least):

“more than 53 percent of respondents say the content they read in blogs has an impact on their work-related purchasing decisions. Some 80 percent of respondents say they read blogs, with 51 saying they read them at least once a week.”

I haven’t seen the previous year’s figures but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a marked rise in the usage of blogs (if not quite the 300% MySpace and co have experienced). Social networking sites are becoming the dominate domains on the Internet and appear to be developing the most influence.

Blogs have yet to penetrate the mass market and be utilised in huge numbers by regular consumers. This is largely, I believe, due to the inaccessibility of RSS to the non web savvy.

But once RSS penetrates the mass market, and you consider the growth of MySpace and usage of blogs by business professionals, isn’t it inevitable that regular consumers will follow in using blogs to assist their buying decisions?

It might not be long before kids are forced back into loitering around the streets because their parents are hogging the computer researching what HDTV to buy, or to track down that rare Elvis record they’ve been hunting all their lives.

Posted by Matt Ambrose | Filed Under blogging 

15 Copywriting Tips for Capturing Readers and Turning More Subscribers into Customers

September 7, 2006 | 2 Comments

Your blog can be a very effective sales tool, but will only be successful if it can capture readers and keep them subscribed. Your blog needs to sell your products and services without reading like a dull sales letter, and to achieve this you should use tactics perfected by generations of copywriters.

You want your copy to be engaging, concisely written as well as informative. Using copywriting techniques and the art of persuasion will empower your content to appeal to readers’ emotions and convince them why life would be better with your product or service.

1. Use attention grabbing headlines. Include your keywords to attract the search engines but also lure in readers by promising a benefit or to help solve a problem. Top ten tips lists of advice tips are starting to go out of fashion but can still be effective in attracting readers.

2. Your first paragraph should elaborate on your headline and provoke your reader’s interest. Pose a question or declare an interesting fact. Reel in those inquisitive readers.

3. The art of storytelling is a powerful copywriting tool. Providing a context in which your product or service has solved a real life problem will help build familiarity and trust. Maximise the desirability of your business by appealing to your reader’s emotions. Show them how you can improve their lives.

4. Study your niche and get inside your reader’s head. How can your business help them and what do they want from you?

5. Any well travelled salesman will tell you that selling is all about education and relationships. Provide information of value to your prospect to convince them that they need and can trust your service.

6. Keep your paragraphs short. Huge blocks of text can appear daunting on computer screens. Aim for 1 key point per paragraph of only 2 or 3 sentences.

7. Vary your sentence length. Mix up your longer sentences with shorter, punchier ones to improve its readability.

8. Use shorter words when possible. People scan computer screens rather than read every word so using simple, straight forward language will be more effective in getting your points across.

9. Break some grammar rules. Don’t be afraid to start sentences with ‘and’ or ‘but’ if it improves the flow and helps break up the sentence lengths.

10. Your blog posts should be as long as they need to be. Their length will depend on how familiar your audience is with your product or how complicated your points are. You shouldn’t worry about cramming 500 words if 1000 are needed to cover your points properly. You can always split it into separate posts if you start getting really carried away.

11. Writing concise, engaging content takes time. Hammer out a first draft with whatever comes to mind then spend time going back through moulding your words. Writing is like chiselling at a marble statue – it takes time for it to take shape.

12. The convention of blogs is conversational. Write the way that you speak (something I need to do more often) to give your blog personality and a sense of transparency. Ambiguous marketing messages will simply lose the interest and trust of your readers. Don’t turn your blog into just a contrived corporate sales vehicle.

13. Humour works but don’t try pushing any boundaries on taste – keep it clean. Sarcasm or irony can also backfire if you don’t make it obvious this is what you mean (trust me on this one).

14. Ask your reader a question at the end or make a point to provoke a response. That way you can start getting people to post comments and start interacting with your business.

15. Demonstrating your knowledge and expertise will enrich your brand image and encourage your prospects to want a relationship with you. Successfully position yourself as a knowledge leader and watch those stats grow.

More and more bloggers (Brian Clark being a notable example) are now discussing the importance of applying copywriting techniques to your content. This is recognition of the development of the blog as a business sales tool and their continued evolution from being just an ‘online diary’.

Posted by Matt Ambrose | Filed Under Copywriting 

Small Enterprises Competing with Multinationals and Winning Online

September 2, 2006 | 2 Comments

In the recent International Wine and Spirit Competition (IWSC) the first prize for the Top Pinotage was awarded to Stormhoek, a small independent winery in South Africa. Two years ago they were virtually unheard of in their own country – let alone the rest of the world. Now you will find their wine stocked in supermarkets all over the UK and they are rapidly expanding into the US.

So how did they manage to gain so much growth in so little time?

Yep, that’s right – you guessed it – because they started a blog.

The wine industry is renowned for alienating potential customers by marketing wine as pretentious and elitist. Stormhoek sought to popularise their product by demystifying claims such as corked wine tastes better than screw caps, and that grapes grown in South France always produce superior wine.

Their blog was launched two years ago by UK blog consultant Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void fame (a site featuring his cartoon impressions of modern marketing). The blog rapidly started setting benchmarks for other blog marketers and helped write the rulebook on viral marketing.

Everyone loves a freebie and Stormhoek used their product to create a ‘buzz’ by giving away 100 bottles of wine to bloggers in exchange for comments and also sponsored ‘100 Dinners in 100 Nights’ in cities throughout the US. These stories spread through the blogosphere like wildfire and even reached the national press. Stormhoek were the pioneering example of using a blog for customer feedback – and gaining the publicity and exposure as a result.

In this year’s Drinks Business Awards Stormhoek won first prize for their “trail-blazing” consumer campaign. They were competing with hundreds of thousands of other wineries and multinationals with multi-million pound marketing budgets. The cost of their campaign? $288.53.

Stormhoek’s site now receives 350,000 hits a month and there are 225,000 links (now 225,001!) dispersed throughout the web. Within twelve months of starting the blog their sales doubled – this equates to selling tens of thousands of more cases of wine. Their exposure and marketing has all been promoted purely over the Internet and has allowed them to reach a global marketplace in a very short space of time.

I’ve noticed from their most recent post that they are happy to continue watching the multinationals lumber along with their dated approach to marketing. Stormhoek are carrying the torch for all aspiring business bloggers out there, and proving how the speed and flexibility of David can beat Goliath in the online world.

Posted by Matt Ambrose | Filed Under blogging