| « The Devil Is in the Strategy Known for One Thing » |
An article in The New York Times recently provided some statistics on the state of blogs on the Internet. The stats originate from Technorati, an Internet search engine that tracks blogs:
•There are roughly 133 million blogs;
•Only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs had been updated in the past 120 days; and
• Between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs generate most of the page views.
Millions and millions of poppies: Which poppy is prettier?
The stats on blogs confirm how cluttered the marketing landscape has become. The herculean challenge is to position your organization accurately and to communicate your message to your prospects with clarity and power.
I say, “Good riddance to the blog fever,” if in fact fewer folks are paying attention to their blogs. Most were lousy writers. Maybe the slow death (or at least slower growth) of blogs will free up some attention for those organizations whose message is worth hearing.
June 17th, 2009 at 9:40 am
Well, we’ll always have magazines … er, where’d they go? They were just here a minute ago.
Seriously, there’s so much “It’s blogs! It’s not blogs! It’s social media! No, social media don’t work!” marketing advice out there. Old media, supposedly, are dead. Word of mouth is great but has to come from somewhere. What’s next? Skywriting? A guy with a sandwich-board sign? Ads on Kindle? Seems to me we all get so enamored of the delivery method we lose sight of who we’re trying to get to — our particular audience, which speaks to the idea of really knowing who your product or service is “for” and what they pay attention to.
Dave, I enjoy your commentaries. Keep pursuing this one.
June 20th, 2009 at 10:14 am
Hi Dave,
Ben Vos said I should get to know you because we have similar passions and principles. I agree with what Betsey is saying how we can’t keep chasing the “latest” mode of communication, and how the advice keeps changing daily. It’s similar to EGGS. Eggs are evil one year, perfect the next, dangerous the next, healthy the next.
I had to enter the extremely competitive, crowded world of wedding planning WITH A NEW NICHE. Holy difficult! But I’ve managed to generate good traffic (awesome traffic if you consider it’s people searching on what I’m writing about, showing I know the pressures my audience is facing.) And beyond learning the concepts of SEO, I ignore the daily hyperness that exists in that world. I just keep plugging along, taking the best of branding, sales, marketing, SEO, my life story, my instincts, to grow.
So I’m now hot to trot getting other do-gooder marriage folks to learn the skills to grow their websites, but more importantly, to grow their knowledge out to the web. There is too much wisdom inside people’s heads that needs to get out there. Large corporations with journalists should not be educating the world on complex issues like marriage.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth