- Image by Crazy Ivory via Flickr
Blogging Basics
There are three main types of blog focus: personal, corporate, and product. The first two are essentially obvious; the focus would be either a single person’s perspective or from the perspective of a company. The last type is a little bit more complex; you could have a blog about a product or a series of products that are all related.
The standard blog is one that you would use either a laptop or a desktop to post text; outside that scope, you would have blogs labeled by their media type (i.e., vlogs for video logs) or the device used to post on them (moblogs or mobilogs for blogs that use PDAs or Smartphones for their main interface).
THE POWER OF A BLOG
Understanding what they are is just the beginning; you have to understand what they can do. There are many people who understand this simple concept and they’re raking in the cash as you’re reading this right now or taking their own opinions and showing people its apparent validity.
Blogs are more than just sites on the net; they can have actual power. And depending on what the blog focuses on will change the scope of that power.
THE PERSONAL SCOPE: POLITICS
If you have a personal site and established enough popularity, you could easily have a grassroots campaign that can sway public opinion.
There are plenty of examples of this around now and if you’re politically involved you have visited a lot of these. If you’re not, you can find links to them at CNN or another news site or do a search for political blogs on Google.
Without citing specific examples, the press had come to understand the power of bloggers during the last couple of United States presidential elections.
Bloggers would be paying attention at various political venues and would post opinions about issues raised by candidates. Sometimes they were just outright questions and if they went ignored by the candidate, the backlash would be overwhelming and they’d have to watch themselves drop in the polls.
In all fairness, it’s not just the blogs; it’s also all of the Web 2.0 sites out there that can make just about anything go viral in an instant. One candidate had to drop out of a senate race because he got angry at hecklers and expressed himself in a vulgar fashion at one of his rallies because a blogger saw it happen, blogged about it, and posted the video on YouTube.
THE CORPORATE SCOPE: EXTERNAL BUSINESS
A popular corporate site would allow you to have free advertising on a huge scale. Plenty of popular companies use this to advertise new services they have (such as Google) or products that are coming out (such as Adobe).
Imagine you are the official blogger for a company who is racing to put out the next revolutionary technology. If you are the first to announce that yours is ready, then you’ve already won the race provided your product’s quality and price is in a competitive range with the competitors.
THE CORPORATE SCOPE: INTERNAL BUSINESS
Having a blog about your company where only your company would be reading it may seem like it’s a little too focused with a narrow scope, but this is actually a very important tool.
Posting updates about progress or anything else can help your peers know where everyone with regards to their project so project managers can properly plan and coordinate.
This can also raise morale during economic slumps, or let everyone know that a special visitor will be arriving for inspection. Just about every major business has a newsletter they publish, and this makes it easier without having to worry about how and when to publish.
Instead of receiving information periodically, employees can now receive it “as it happens”. This can allow a company to be updated with events in a critical manner instead of having to draft a memo, copy it, and distribute it among the co-workers.
THE PRODUCT SCOPE: PROBLEM ORIENTED
This is easy to visualize if you think about it. If you have a problem with acne and you search for acne cures, you’re going to find sites that deal with acne as the problem and provide you solutions on how to fix that problem.
It would be multiple solutions for a singular problem, and the number of solutions for such a problem could number just as many sites that exist for that problem.
Our stores are set up this way - when you go to the first aid section, you have multiple solutions on how to treat wounds and the potentially resultant infections. A problem-oriented product blog is no different.
THE PRODUCT SCOPE: SOLUTION ORIENTED
You are also already familiar with this type of mechanism. If you know what product you want to solve your problem and do a search for it, you’ll come up with sites dedicated to that solution, such as “Açaí Berries”.
Our stores are ALSO set up this way. If you walk in there won’t be a chaos of products – you’ll see a section for “food” and a section for “non-food”. These are usually not mixed. Non-food sections are typically broken up into further sub-categories, such as cleaning supplies, clothes, shoes, and stationary.
Within these sections, you would find products that you may not even think about using because they wouldn’t pop into your head. But, when exposed with their presence, they can easily be an option for you. Likewise, a popular product oriented blog could provide enough sales leads for even the most obscure products.
If you needed antibiotic ointment, you wouldn’t go to the stationary section; so this is a real life example of a solution oriented scheme. Think in terms of a “mock review site” or a site about dealing with a particular medical condition where you provide multiple solutions.
If you have a review site and give good, reliable information, then you could gain a lot of followers who are waiting for you to review that new product. Most review sites do best when they’re not “all-encompassing”. That’s because people inherently believe in authority. The site has to establish itself in a particular niche – you wouldn’t go to a computer hardware review site to look up reviews on make-up or bicycles.
The most important thing in ecommerce is long term SEO. Getting high quality seo tools is the key to success. Tom Moris.
