Blog Your Passion, Not Your Product

The data on blogging is finally starting to roll in. For some time now, the jury has been out on whether blogging and using social media sites is really worth the enormous amount of time and effort necessary to do it well. Hubpoint has done the research on the blogging question and the answer is resoundingly yes!

Hubpoint reports that:

Companies that blog have far better marketing results. Specifically, the average company that blogs has:

55% more visitors
97% more inbound links
434% more indexed pages1

These results are staggeringly impressive. Who would not want to have that kind of jump in their statistics?

So now that we know that blogging seems to work, do you really know how blogging should be done for the best results? Beware that Technorati did a study that showed that 95% of blogs failed to suggesting that while the opportunity for success is there, you need to know something about how to achieve it through this fairly new form of marketing.
Blog experts (Not sure how many years a phenomenon has to be in place before it generates bona fide experts but for the purposes of this discussion, we'll assume that those with the most experience, even if it has not been long lived, have some expertise to share.) say that a primary secret of successful blogging rests with embracing blogging as a way to pursue your passion as it relates to your products. Let's dissect the weighty thought.

We know that as online entrepreneurs, we want to sell our products or services. We have already engaged in many marketing techniques to do so such as organic page rankings, pay per click advertising, email campaigns, newsletters and so on. In general, we are using those methods to explain our products or services and to differentiate them from others in the marketplace. To be effective, blogging must take a different approach. Instead of selling your product directly, you need to sell your readers on your passion for the product or the sport it is used for or the setting in which it works, etcetera and in doing so, create a favorable environment for the reader to feel moved to make the purchase.

Huh? Let us take an example. Say you selling camping equipment. It is a great business that you got into because you are an avid camper and had already spent a lot of time looking for the best equipment so you understood the market. Once you found the stuff that made the most sense, you tried to find it cheaper or better and put together a website full of the highest quality products at the best value. Now you want to start a blog. Instead of talking about the new lantern you found that is lightweight and delivers more illumination than most, which is frankly an advertisement that most people are not going to want to read, talk about your passion. Blog about going on a trip for a number of days and how frustrating it was to never have enough light to do the reading that you wanted to do or to be able to examine the skeletal specimens you were picking up along the way. Mention that you finally found a light that actually met your luminosity needs. Create an anchored link to the product page. Finish your story about your camping trip.

Fellow campers will love to read your story because they love to think about and talk about camping. Plus, they will probably be interested to know about something new in the field that another avid camper has found to be suitable. Now, if you simply plugged your new lantern, people might have checked it out but they may have been much more likely to go check it out on other sites as well since they know you are trying to sell them something. On a blog, it becomes like advice from a friend rather than a pitch from a salesman.