Compendium Blogware

A business week story this week told us that there is grim news in the display ad world. Increasing competition among Ad Networks is driving down prices while marketers are struggling with a model that is showing declining results.

This is bad news for the for both big properties like Yahoo or NYT as well as small bloggers who are focused on a publishing model.

Like so much of the web, it's broken by people and organizations that have tried to take a business model from the terrestrial world (wrap content in interruption advertising) and apply it in the online world. Granted, 100 years of experience in the Publishing/Advertising complex create very hard habits to break, but as the Demise of the Rocky Mountain News this past week shows us, the world is changing and changing quickly.

The reality is that marketers should be more focused on driving organic search traffic from prospects who are telling you their INTENT instead of attempting to interrupt with offers simply because someone happens to be on a site and has certain data attributes.

The great news is, this is actually relativly easy to do by applying SEO Techniques to a Business Blog Strategy. The key to successful Corporate Blogging for SEO lies in specificity. Make blogs like you would make an email or direct mail piece...meaning targeted specifically to the narrow terms that your prospects are telling you they are interested in. Title your blog with the keyword phrase and make sure to use your keyword phrase in every post (the appropriate ratio is usually considerd 7 to 10% of your post content should be keywords) You don't want to be spammy. The more competitive the phrases, the more content you need to write in your corporate blog. Leverage your co-workers and constituents. Search is a volume driven activity.

On the subject of volume, the more keywords you are targeting, the more appropriatly titled blogs you need. Don't shy away from the idea of hundreds of corporate blogs. That's a blogging best practice when trying to get out of the ad game and into the search acquisition business.