The Race to Embrace
By: Lisa Picarille
Online marketers adopting new technologies such as blogging find that being on the cutting edge is a distinct advantage.
Online marketers and merchants are quickly adopting new technologies such as blogging to help drive traffic and sell products.
Buzz Bruggeman, founder and CEO of ActiveWords, says his company has spent just $600 to advertise its ActiveWords software application. Yet thanks to his blog-centric marketing philosophy, ActiveWords was named the Third Best Software Product of the Year by Jupitermedia. The application has also been downloaded more than 100,000 times. Speaking in San Francisco at the Business Blog Summit in August, Bruggeman said more than 60 percent of those downloads come after people read the blog.
"It's been a blessing," Bruggeman says.
He's not the only one getting good results. D.L. Byron, principal of Textura Design, says that his blog gets more than 1.5 million page views per month and the company has sold more than 50,000 of its Clip-n-Seal gadget as a result of the company's blogging efforts. They have also expanded their markets to Ireland and the Caribbean, as well as into new industrial market spaces - such as getting orders from NASA - based on people finding them via the blog.
Blog On
New research is coming out rapidly, and figures are changing quickly. And while the exact numbers on the size of the market vary widely, most agree that the blogosphere is growing by leaps and bounds.
Perseus Development Corp. randomly surveyed 10,000 blogs on 20 blog-hosting services and found that as of June 2005 there were 31.6 million hosted blogs created on services like Blogger, LiveJournal, Xanga and MSN Spaces. Ten million were created in the first quarter of 2005. By the end of 2005, Perseus expects there will be 53.4 million blogs.
In August, some research reports put the number of blogs at more than 70 million worldwide.
According to a study conducted by Pew Internet & American Life Project in early 2005, 6 percent of the entire U.S. adult population has created a blog.
Technorati.com estimates there are approximately 900,000 blog posts every day, or 10.4 posts per second. The blogosphere continues to double about every five and a half months. A new blog is created about every second; there are over 80,000 created daily. About 55 percent of all blogs are active, and close to 13 percent of all blogs are updated at least weekly.
So there is no doubt that blogs are being created, but who is reading them?
According to two studies by Pew, 16 percent of U.S. adults, or 32 million, are blog readers.
A June report from market researcher comScore, sponsored by SixApart and Gawker Media, states that 50 million Americans, or 30 percent of all American Internet users, visited a blog in the first quarter of 2005. Traffic to blogs increased by 45 percent from the first quarter of 2004, according to the study.
The average blog reader viewed 77 percent more pages (16,000) than the average Internet user who doesn't read blogs (9,000 pages) for the first quarter of 2005. The report also found that blog readers average 23 hours online per week, compared with the average Web user's 13 hours.
The comScore study also found that blog readers are 11 percent more likely than the average Internet user to have incomes of or greater than $75,000 per year. Similarly blog readers are 11 percent more likely to visit the Web over broadband either at home or the office.
The good news for online marketers is that blog readers tend to make more online purchases. In the first quarter of 2005, less than 40 percent of the total Internet population made online purchases. By contrast 51 percent of blog readers shopped online. Blog readers also spent 6 percent more than the average Internet user, the comScore study reports.
Mind Your Business
So it's no surprise that businesses are trying to leverage this phenomenon. For merchants and online marketers, using the Internet journal format of blogs allows businesses to talk directly to customers, generate product buzz and encourage consumer loyalty, while bypassing traditional media outlets such as newspapers and magazines.
At press time there were no exact figures on how many companies, executives and employees were blogging. Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer for Intelliseek, estimates that there are more than 150 official corporate blogs, with hundreds more in the works.
Big companies are getting into the act. General Motors Corp. Vice Chairman Bob Lutz has a blog (FastLane.GMBlogs.com) that gets between 150,000 and 200,000 unique visits a month. So does Sun Microsystems President Jonathan Schwartz's (Blogs.sun.com/jonathan), who often uses his blog to take on Sun competitors and market analysts. His blog gets about 300,000 visits a month.
Both Lutz and Schwartz have written several blog entries that raised eyebrows, but corporate blogs don't have to be controversial to attract attention. Stonyfield Farm, a New Hampshire company that sells organic yogurt and ice cream, has five blogs (www.Stonyfield.com/weblog). Aircraft manufacturer Boeing also uses a blog to promote its brand. Randy Baseler, vice president of marketing for Boeing Commercial Airplanes, made his first entry in Randy's Journal (www.Boeing.com/ randy) the day before rival Airbus unveiled its A380 super jumbo jet.
Google has launched a blog explaining the ins and outs of its AdSense program (adsense.BlogSpot.com) to publishers. The effort to make AdSense's workings more transparent offers optimization tips and features descriptions to prospective and existing publishers in the AdSense network and is updated three times a week by a variety of "engineers, product managers, product marketing managers, and operations staff" on the AdSense team. Google's AdWords program has had its own blog since May.
For online marketers the idea is to be part of the conversation in your space and to get noticed, according to Dave Taylor, author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Growing Your Business with Google and well-known business blogger at www.Intuitive.com/blog.
Taylor suggests online marketers offer something of value to visitors. "Communicate with people to show them you are an expert in your area and give them a reason to buy from you," he says. "So if you are an affiliate that sell laptops, write laptop reviews and blog about that. Include how-to's or product guides. Blog about maintenance issues. You will give people a reason to trust you. It builds credibility."
One often-cited story of a blog propelling someone to success is Thomas Mahon, a Savile Row tailor with a blog at www.EnglishCut.com, in which he discusses in great detail the specifics of creating expensive, custom suits - everything from buttons to selecting the right wool. Continued on Page 2...
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new technologies, blogs, podcasting, adoption, customer relations, crm, control, comments, msn spaces, blog, leaps and bounds, blogosphere, blogs, perseus development, market spaces, blogging, livejournal, xanga, distinct advantage, blogger, textura design, marketers, nasa, exact numbers, drive traffic, help drive, accor,
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