Social Media Domination

Too much of the content out on the Internet regarding blogging and business blogging best practices are focused on publication blogging rather than blogs used for acquisition. Publication blogs have far different objectives than business blogs that are put into place for acquisition:

Advertising
Sponsorship
Speaking Opportunities
Consulting Gigs
Book Deals

Although these may also be viable objectives for your business blog, blogs built for acquisition are constructed and optimized to find and acquire leads. It's important for publication blogs to watch key metrics like bounce rates, number comments, number of RSS subscribers - but these aren't as important in acquistion strategies.

Chris Baggott compares it to a database marketing strategy. In database marketing, you identify and segment your prospects, and market to them specifically - the right message at the right place at the right time.

Acquisition blogging has all of the components of database marketing:

The right message - what are the keywords that a search engine user is seeking your company, products or services through? If you can match your verbiage to the keywords or phrases sought, then you have a great opportunity to be found via search.
The right place - Search engines are the primary (and growing) medium for consumers and b2b buyers to find your product and service.
The right time - Rather than trying to predict when to market to your audience, blogging allows you to write frequent, relevant content. When the search engine user is looking - you'll be found!

In acquisition blogging, the focus is on:

Search engine result page placement for known keywords
Keywords that lead to conversions
Content that leads to conversions
Total conversions
Total organic search visitors

Your blog will still lead you to building authority, possible speaking and writing gigs... but at the end of the day you're judging your program's overall success on the number of prospects that walk through the door and the number of prospects you convert to customers!
An acquisition blog is constructed and optimized to lead search engine users in and convert them to customers.

Comments for Publication versus Acquisition Blogging

Tuesday, January 27, 2009 by Colin Clark:: This post needs to be spread far and wide. Sometimes it seems like people are arguing about which strategy is better and which is worse. They're completely missing the point. Blogging for acquisition and publication are completely different! It's not that one is right and one is wrong. If your goal is publication, the that's a fantastic goal. Do your very best and I wish you all the luck in the world. If your goal is acquisition, then I hope you get lots of leads and customers. It doesn't always have to be a battle.