Guerrilla Blogging: Recounting The Virtues

By Allen Taylor
Operations Manager, BCP

Blogging. It’s caught on. That means I have a great opportunity to go against conventional wisdom.

Most blogging professionals are telling people to not be self-centered. The mantra is not to be too persistent in selling one’s services, and you’ll hear such prognostications as “be authentic” or “be transparent.” What these professionals really mean is bear your soul and all its delicacies to the whole world and they’ll beat a path to your door. But will they?

I’m not so sure. The fact is, most bloggers today don’t make a dime from their blogs. If they make anything at all it certainly isn’t enough to afford them a full-time income. On the other hand, blogging isn’t necessarily a medium for acquiring great wealth – it’s a marketing tool, not a program.

The Multi-Colored Reasons For Blogging

There are different reasons to blog and different focuses for every company blog. Not all blogs are created equal and not all blogging needs to be “transparent,” whatever that is supposed to mean. Depending on the focus of your blog, you may very well want to be focused on your product or brand.

You’ve likely read a fewpolitical or social blogs. They’re written to encourage comment and debate. Until now, that’s been the focus of business blogs as well. Well, I don’t have a crystal ball, but the future of blogging is yet to be determined. But I think it may have something to do with search engine positioning and making the impression with good content that sells.

Here’s some authenticity for you: Not all blogs are aimed at customers. Some may be internal company blogs or simply instructional blogs. Others may be geared toward encouraging professional discussion within one’s industry. Let’s run through some of the different types of business blogs:

1) Customer service blog
2) Instructional, or how-to, blog
3) Dialog between professionals within the same industry
4) Sales and marketing blog
5) Personal musings about professional topics
6) AdSense blog
7) Review blog

These are just a few of the potential blogging focuses. Obviously, customer service blogs, instructional blogs and dialogs between professionals are blogs where you would want to encourage feedback and discussion. They should be interactive, sparking debate and encouraging criticisms. Other-centered and human-focused.

Search Engine Blogging – Necessary and Effective?

But what about sales and marketing blogs or AdSense blogs? With an AdSense blog, the most important things should be keywords. You want search engines to recognize your keywords, rank your blog post accordingly, drive traffic to the blog and, you hope, get the click through on the ad.

With sales and marketing blogs, you could style it any number of ways – with interaction encouraged, or you can approach it from the “hard sell” angle, making each blog post about a specific product or service in an attempt to get your web site pushed up in the search engines. This approach would require using search engine optimization tactics to build links, drive up PageRank, and increase one’s search engine positioning. The focus here is on five things:

1) Link popularity
2) Search engine saturation
3) Fresh content
4) Driving traffic to your website
5) Closing the sale

If your blog is on your web site that you want to promote, search engine saturation and fresh content will be more important with link popularity more important at Yahoo! than at Google. If you have an off site blog, link popularity will be your primary focus with search engine saturation a close second and fresh content not so much so.

Guerrilla Blogging For Search Positioning Essentials

Suppose you have several web sites you want to promote from one single blog? You can do that through an aggressive link popularity strategy by linking profusely to your sites from your blog in an attempt to drive them up in the search engine rankings. Here’s how you do it:

1) Focus on one web site at a time
2) Link no more than three times to that web site in the body of your blog message – you don’t want to look like a spammer
3) Include a signature at the bottom of each blog entry that is a link to the site you want to promote (you can promote more than one but I’d recommend not more than three)
4) Keywords may or may not be important; if they are, don’t use more than two instances of your keyword for every 50-100 words in your blog entry – again, you don’t want to look like a spammer

Remember, every blog entry is counted as a single web page at the search engines. Use the same search engine optimization techniques for each blog entry that you would for a web page. I call it guerrilla blogging in deference to Jay Conrad Levinson (you know, of guerrilla marketing fame). No need to feel guilty, you aren’t doing anything immoral. Just marketing your business.

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