BIRTH OF A BLOG: GUERILLA MARKETING, EFFECTIVE USE OF TECHNOLOGY & GOOD CONTENT WIN THE DAY

Birth of a Blog: Guerilla Marketing, Effective Use of Technology and Good Content Win the Day by pam ashlund

A funny thing happened when I started using Technorati. All I wanted was a quick way to see who (if ANYONE) was linking to my blog. First, I had to sign up with one of these services and I picked Technorati because it was the first one I came across. Second, I then found out that I was right from the beginning, no one was linking to my site. Third, I decided to try my hand at a bit of self-marketing, which went as follows:

1. Get my brother-in-law to link to my site
2. Set up another dummy blog and link to myself
3. Arm wrestle another friend to link to my site

None of that had much of an impact (of course) so I moved on to some actual strategy:

1. Add tags to my blog configuration on Technorati
2. Add tags to my posts (this was painful and manual although I later found a script for it)
3. Test the results - found I showed up in search engines a LITTLE bit more frequently

Still no links (tap, tap, tap)

1. This next step took significantly more time and effort: narrow my focus to one topic per blog
2. After I honed in on a focus I spun off four blogs:

• Midnight Musings -(Bridezilla thoughts that keep me up at midnight)
• Boxster Heaven (posts related to Porsche Boxster)
• Lofty Thoughts (posts related to living in a loft)
• Weird Signs (humor posts, especially real weird signs found in nature)

BrainTangents – cleaned up the "mother" site; removed all posts that did not relate to brain chemistry

I think that’s when I got my first hit, ONE link (sigh).

1. Moved to Guerilla (e.g. Free) Marketing - One short post about a real event at a Porsche dealership (and yes I had to attend that event to write about it) – that post got the whole group on Pete’s Boxster Board chatting about me. That spun into my FIRST mention on someone elses web magazine (and a very small prize). When the buzz was over, Boxster Board had six links and appeared at the TOP of the search page when you used googles beta blog search (and it’s still showing up there five months later)
2. For BrainTangents and Lofty Thoughts I had to work harder for attention (with no exciting events to kick off with). I carefully read thru all related blogs, read the posts, found some of interest and posted my own comments. Score! BrainTangents settled at 23 links, and Lofty Thoughts at 1.
3. Started pondering what someone would actually want to read (that also had a pretty wide open niche in the blogosphere) and….wrote about something I know, non-profits! Thus the “NonProfit Eye” was born.

Voila, I had my first genuinely read blog. All it took was:

a) an actual topic of interest (bloggers take note!); and
b) actually writing it

There was one further strategy: I had continued to write comments on blogs of related interest (for all of the blogs), but two really paid off for the Non-Profit Eye:

1. a post on NetSquared got me more press than I could have hoped for. Ironically, that was because the topic list was pretty limited and I couldn’t find a good fit, so I picked “Innovation” and it turned out there wasn’t much action in that topic, so mine stood out by default;
2. a post on another serious blogger’s site, and guess what? She marketed me for me! I was so flattered and…more buzz.

That’s all folks.

Technorati Tags: Buzz, Guerilla Marketing, NPTech, Non-Profit, Technology, Web 2.0, Nonprofit