BLOGGING - PAY PER CLIP?

BLOGGING - PAY PER CLIP? by Rhoda Israelov

Herbert Spencer, who died in 1903, was the engineer, philosopher, and psychologist who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”. (I’ll bet you thought Darwin made up that term – I know I thought so until I read the truth in The Book of General Ignorance.) An even more interesting detail I learned from the book is that Spencer was the inventor of paper clips, which were originally named Spencer’s Binding Pins.

Most of us spend almost no time thinking about paper clips, but more than 11 billion of them are sold annually. But since, as a professional writer, I do spend a lot of time thinking about marketing, and particularly blog marketing, I was struck by this amazing paper clip statistic: Of every 100,000 paper clips sold, only five are actually used to hold papers together! (Most paper clips end up like poker chips, pipe cleaners, safety pins, toothpicks, or just getting dropped, lost, or bent out of shape during awkward phone calls!)

Keep that 5/100,000 paper clip ratio in mind when it comes to prospects finding you through online search. There are basically two ways for your business to use the online search for customer acquisition: Pay-Per-Click advertising and blogs.

Blogging is part of an “organic” search. In other words, the unpaid references that come up when a person types a keyword into a search engine, like Google or BING. (The paidfor search results are part of the pay-per-click way to be found.

Pay-per-click is okay, but here is something that is nothing short of profound…

A study by Marketing Sherpa found that as many as 99% of click-throughs on a search engine are on organic results, not on ads! Just as only a very small percentage of paper clips end up doing the job for which they were designed, Pay-Per-Click ads, designed to attract all the online searchers, end up winning only a very small percentage of search.

Are you ready for business blogging?

The first step is to make sure your website is up to date, accessible, and refreshed. Then add in your blog. One thing I often find myself pointing out to business owners is that the navigation from the blog to the main website will be smoother and more direct if new "landing pages" are added to the website to match the different search term categories that attract searchers to the blog. As a blogger, I become part of the company's marketing team, which, hopefully, includes a web designer and SEO expert.

How much of your marketing time and budget should you invest?

Make your decision a deliberate, well-informed, strategic one. Research what your competitors are doing. Weigh all of the costs, both dollar costs for content writing, incremental SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and branding work related to the blog, and the time and opportunity costs. You need to set in place quality controls because your presence online represents your brand. What Barbara Weaver Smith of Whale Hunters says about social media is oh-so-true about business blogging. "Whether you participate, and how and when, are important strategic questions for your business."

As a professional writer focused solely on business blogging and composing website copy, all I can say is, "Amen!" 99,995 paper clips and 99 out of 100 clicks on blogs versus Pay-Per-Click ads. As Businessweek predicted all the way back in May, 2005, "Blogs will change your business!”

Rhoda Israelov