You may already be familiar with the concept of character blogging, where the blog is actually a fictitious charcter, such as a cartoon character from a cereal box, or a doll perhaps.
I think an interesting twist to this concept would be to have an historical character blogging from the past, as if it were the present day. I think American Girl, with their dolls from various historical periods would make for excellent character bloggers.
As a step in that direction, American Girl has recently launched a Felicity Blog. Felicity is a doll set in the time of the American Revolution. I think it would be a great idea for Felicity and the other dolls to be speaking to girls from the past.
American Girl is done a little bit differently though than a character blog. One of their editors poses questions Felicity faces, and also deals with themes/issues that are relevant to girls today, and asks girls to say what they think Felicity should do.
This Felicity blog doesn’t really give the impression of a character blog, but it is certainly very successful in soliciting comments from readers, with over 250 comments for their first blog post. That is really impressive!
Maybe there are some lessons here to be learned for business bloggers in how to engage with their community of consumers as successfully as American Girl seems to do.
(DISCLOSURE: American Girl is a client of ours.)
Filed under: Blogs Business Blogging
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Shop.org Annual Summit — Las Vegas, NV
See the results of actual trials and implementations of alternative marketing techniques used to drive online sales. Learn how online retailers eHobbies.com, Ice.com, and Steve Spangler Science have utilized alternative marketing tactics such as blogs and RSS feeds to expand their marketing reach and build customer loyalty. Panelists will share tips on executing a successful campaign, implementation costs, and how to measure the impact of these new marketing tactics. A must-attend session for retailers looking for alternatives to increasingly expensive online marketing tactics such as SEM. Retailers looking for alternatives to increasingly expensive online marketing tactics such as SEM must attend this session.
Moderator:
Stephan Spencer, President, Netconcepts
Speakers:
Pinny Gniwisch, EVP Marketing, Ice.com
Seth Greenberg, CEO, eHobbies
Steve Spangler, SteveSpanglerScience.com
Filed under: Business Blogging Ecommerce RSS Marketing Seminars Web Marketing
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Our client Steve Spangler is quite the renaissance man. In addition to being the CEO of a catalog company, he is also a toy inventor, an Emmy award winning television personality, a magician, an educator and a certified professional speaker. Just the sort of person you’d want blogging and podcasting.
The audio podcasts featured on Steve’s blog are targeted towards science teachers and include interviews with leading educators and monologues from Steve with helpful teaching tips. The video podcasts, targeted towards both teachers and parents, are some of the most amazing experiments you have ever seen. From exploding pumpkins to flying potatoes and erupting soda bottles, each episode is a hoot!
Functionality on the blog includes email subscriptions to posts and comments, buttons for readers to submit the post to Digg or del.icio.us, tag clouds and tag pages, RSS feeds, a audio podcast player built right into the blog, and more. Read the case study to learn more about this project and some of the results, including the fact that over 13% of their online sales can be attributed to Steve’s blog. The company’s products, which include science toys and experiment kits, are worked into the blog in a very soft sell way, so the blog doesn’t seem like a shill for the ecommerce shop.
[ database | client admin cms | SEO ]
Visit The Site: Steve Spangler Science
For Further Reading: Testimonial, Case Study and Steve Spangler Portfolio
Filed under: Business Blogging Portfolio SEO
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Spam filters tend to be the bane of the email marketer’s existence. Getting past them is a serious challenge, and it is becoming increasingly harder. How can an email marketer consistently bypass those spam filters?
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« Read the whole series: 1,2 »
Left to its own devices, email marketing is unlikely to survive. However, if email marketers take responsibility for developing great strategy and execution, we are likely to bring on its evolution.
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« Read the whole series: 1,2 »
In this teleseminar, Netconcepts’ founder Stephan Spencer moderates a panel of email marketing experts, including Chris Baggot, Rok Hrastnik, Eric Kirby, Jim Sterne, and Shar VanBoskirk. The output of which is an insight into email marketing’s true power and potential. Produced by MarketingProfs.com.
Read the Executive Summary: part 1 and part 2
Download the Transcript: PDF (300 K)
Email Marketing Teleconference [106:42m]:
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Search Engine Strategies — San Jose, CA
This session explores how search engines are dealing with blog and webfeed (RSS/Atom) content and why providing such syndicated content can drive new search-related traffic.
Filed under: Business Blogging RSS Marketing Seminars SEO
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Any search engine optimization consultant will tell you that links are the currency of the Web. They’re also the currency of the blogosphere. Without any inbound links, you’re just blogging to yourself. In Mike Grehan’s seminal piece “Filthy Linking Rich“, he explains how those rich with links just keep getting richer.
So how can new business bloggers get a jump start in the search engines? Simple: just whip out your wallet. The business of text link ad buying has matured, and it’s on the up-and-up. We’re not talking about “buying PageRank”… what we’re talking about is a totally legitimate business practice of buying text ads where you choose your hyperlinked words carefully based on keyword research and your advertisement appears on a reputable, relevant website. And of course, it links directly to your website, sans click tracking, so the ’search engine juice’ flows unhindered. If the practice weren’t legit, would you see such well-respected link-building pundits as Eric Ward on the board of the link broker Text-Link-Ads.com?
Buying links is not quite as simple as I make it out. Yes, you can use a broker and they’ll happily take your money. Caveat emptor! In order to make an informed purchase, you’ll need to evaluate the quality of the links using a number of criteria. Here’s such a list of criteria, courtesy of the ABAKUS SEO Blog:
- Inbound site traffic and page traffic.
- Inbound dot gov and dot edu links.
- Click though traffic you get from the page.
- Site in DMOZ and Yahoo directory.
- Age of domain and time of domain being used (longer the better).
- Inbound links shown to that page on Yahoo (link:http:www.domain.ext/page/).
- Ranking of page for the keywords it is optimized for.
- Relevance of theme of site and page to your site and page.
- Alexa ranking (lower is better).
- Deep link compared to home page links.
- Location of link.
- Length of allowed description text.
- PR of page (still matters a bit).
Personally, I’d also add to the list:
- Appearance of any link advertisers on the page that would attract the attention (negatively) of the search engines (e.g.: casinos, Texas Hold’em, Viagra, pharmaceuticals, insurance, Rolex, etc.)
- Quality of the landing pages of the existing link advertisers (if you find any are spammy-looking, turn and run!)
- Placement of the link. (i.e.: being relegated to the bottom of the page as footer links is not ideal)
Filed under: Blogs Business Blogging Link Building
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The major search engines - Google, in particular - seem to love blogs, which are the personal or professional diaries that number in the millions online. Search engines favor blogs because …
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Frost and Sullivan: Sales and Marketing East — Boston
Blogs can be an immensely powerful marketing tool in the right hands, establishing the blogger as a widely-read, oft-quoted, trusted authority in their field of interest. Blogs can also wreck havoc on reputations (just ask Kryptonite) and careers (remember Dan Rather and “Rathergate”?). Welcome to the new, conversational Internet. It’s time to join the “blogosphere” - hopefully before your competitors do!”
- Successful applications of blog and webfeed (RSS) technology
- How blogs and RSS can and should fit into your marketing plan
- Best practices to emulate, pitfalls to avoid
- Case Studies and Examples: Lessons Learned
Filed under: Business Blogging RSS Marketing Seminars Web Marketing
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