Recently, David Lustig of Electronic Retailer Magazine interviewed three bloggers Des Walsh - writer of 7 step Business Blog book, Scott Allen of The Virtual Handshake fame and yours truly, owner of Ideologic L.L.C and a blogger at Businessworks Inc. - A Dotcom in Making. The interview was mainly about how Direct Marketers are using blogs to promote their products and covered following questions:

1. What exactly is blogging [or blogs] and how does it apply to direct marketing?
2. Discuss the technology.
3. How are direct marketers utilizing blogs?
4. Provide examples of brand name companies that have effectively used blogs to enhance their marketing efforts?
5. What are some of the misconceptions that marketers have about blogging?
6. How will blogging redefine the industry? Or will it?
7. Why should direct marketers pay attention to blogs?
8. What are some important tips to remember when utilizing this type of marketing?
9. How do you see blogging utilized over the next five years?

Read online version of the interview titled “Do you Blog?” or if you are in Retailing business, you may subscribe to the Electronic Retailer Magazine.

Here are my answers to the questions asked for the interview.

1. What exactly is blogging [or blogs] and how does it apply to direct marketing?
A “Weblog” or “Blog” is defined as an online journal of day-to-day events. The writer of a blog is called a “Blogger” and the daily activity of writing a blog is called “Blogging“. This online journal is available in form of a web page for anyone to view. An individual entry in a blog is called a blog “post“. Each blog post may have comments from readers. Sometimes, these comments become a discussion between the blogger and readers of his/her blog. The blogger may or may not allow readers to post comments.
In early days, teens used blogs to write about their rants and raves, but the blogs have evolved a lot. Today blogs are being used to promote a business, run a political campaign, establish an opinion or even release features of an upcoming product.

To explain how blogging applies to direct marketing, let me first explain the power of search engines. Google, Yahoo and MSN are three most used search engines. Over 80% of the people start their search for a product or service on a Search Engine. With such a large number of potential clients, can a small or medium sized company miss out on a great opportunity like this, to be found on the net by the potential customers? The way these search engines work has a lot to do with Blogs working as a successful direct marketing medium. As blogs are written almost daily, “content” or “blog post” is fresh on the sites where blogs are written. The search engines indexes this fresh content more often than a business website which remains static most of time. The result is a higher ranking for this fresh content compared to a business website. In layman terms it means, if you have a product to promote and you write enough about this product on your business blog, but in small installments, chances are your product will be found by millions of people who may be seeking information about the product.

Direct marketing is defined as “Sales and promotion technique in which the promotional materials are delivered individually to potential customers via direct mail, telemarketing, door-to-door selling or other direct means.” However with blogs, the bloggers spread the breadcrumbs in form of keywords for search engines to pickup. Search engines deliver this blog content in form of useful information to prospective customers. Thus company can hope that after reading the blog post, the potential customers will come and visit the “online” or “Brick and Mortar” store.

2. Discuss the technology.
Blogs are very easy to create if you need them for personal use, but if you need blogs for the business, they must have a look-and-feel of your business website and must be embedded within your business website. It is worthwhile to spend few hundred dollars to get a business blog embedded within your business website. Another important piece of equation is RSS or Rich Site Summary. RSS is an effective way of syndicating news, blog posts and advertisements to potential customers. This tool provides your readers with an ability to receive your blog posts in an easy to read format, once they have subscribed to your RSS Feed.

3. How are direct marketers utilizing blogs?
Direct Marketers who have already realized the potential of blogs are using it daily and building an advertising campaign that will have a lasting positive impact on the sales of the product. They are thinking about ROI, but this ROI is not based on conventional direct marketing campaign. It is based on how many potential customers will convert to confirmed customers after searching and finding the information they want about a product or service from the blog contents of the company.

4. Provide examples of brand name companies that have effectively used blogs to enhance their marketing efforts?
One of the best examples of brand name company effectively using blogs to enhance their marketing efforts is Stonyfield Farm Blog (Stonyfield is a maker of fine dairy products). They have not one but four blogs. Each blog is devoted to a product line and a community-like environment greets the visitors when they visit the blog.

Another good example is Ford Motor Company’s Mustang Blog. Basically, Ford Mustang team writes this blog about finer and/or little known features of Mustang car. People who are considering to buy Mustang, they get in-depth information about the product from technical team of Ford. This is a great selling point.

Some enterprising EBay Sellers use blog for direct marketing their products to thousands of potential buyers who are searching for a product on Google or Craigslist.

5. What are some of the misconceptions that marketers have about blogging?
Direct Marketers are used to an “almost instant ROI”, whereas blogs have some waiting period before there is any ROI. The most common misconception is to expect ROI too early in the game. When product information, tips and tricks, little known features of a product are posted daily in a blog over a period of time, one can expect a steady inflow of traffic to the website, thus increasing the chances of a better ROI.

6. How will blogging redefine the industry? Or will it?
Direct Marketing in its current form and in the form of blog will co-exist. Blogs will have a special place in the world of Direct Marketing. E-mails and RSS feeds will continue to dominate the influence on direct marketing. Blogging will be another source of marketing and will be a good fit especially due to longevity of the campaign this type of marketing has with the search engine advantage.

7. Why should direct marketers pay attention to blogs?
Conventional Direct marketing has a ROI per advertising campaign whereas Blog continues to receive steady stream of traffic from search engines long after a blog post is published. This is significant as the impact of blog is everlasting because the “written word” is always there on the blog and is indexed by the search engines to be presented to potential clients who are searching for a product or service. Direct marketers, while continuing to use conventional methods, must explore blogs to reap the benefits and gradually reduce the conventional marketing methods.

8. What are some important tips to remember when utilizing this type of marketing?
While advertising, key is to provide something of value to the readers. Ford Motors in their Mustang blog, provide tips, technical details, and little known features of their product which is valuable to the readers.

The biggest fear that companies have about starting a blog is about adverse comments they might get about their products from irate customers. However if companies are proactive and solve customer issues, it paints a positive features in the minds of potential customers about the level of customer service provided by the company.

Use both conventional direct marketing and Blog marketing for a certain period of time. Once Blog marketing starts giving substantial returns, conventional direct marketing may be phased out.

9. How do you see blogging utilized over the next five years?
Next five years will see blogs being utilized in creative ways.
* The blog will be used to build pre-release publicity for a product.
* Press releases of a company will be released through business blogs.
* Online Contests will be conducted through a blog.
* Companies will put Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) on blogs itself.
* Product usage tips will be presented via blogs
Some of these are already in use but others are yet to happen.

Welcome to the newest edition of The Carnival of Capitalists at Ideologic LLC. I am glad to be able to host it for the second time within a year. Reading a carnival post on someone else’s blog and writing a carnival post for your blog are two very different experiences. I want to thank past hosts of the carnival for their efforts in bringing us some of the best, well written and pertinent posts. This week is no different. We received many gems, then there were few posts that had nothing to do with the capitalism. Nevertheless it was quite an experience to read and learn from these wonderful posts. I also enhanced my “Cut-and-Paste” skills during this process. This complete post will also be available at my other blog for the advantage of my readers on that blog.

Those of you, who are visiting this Carnival for the first time, The Carnival of the Capitalists(COTC) is a brainchild of Jay Solo. This Carnival is hosted every week on the blogs of the Bloggers and Companies who volunteer and register at the COTC website. Next week, the carnival will be hosted at Free Money Finance Blog.

A little about us: Ideologic L.L.C. is a web design, blog consulting and search-engine optimization company in Omaha, Nebraska run by Harish Keshwani (yours truly), who is an entrepreneur by heart, software developer by profession and a Blogger by choice. My two blogs - this one and the BusinessWorks Blog, which was featured on Forbes-Best of Web 2005 under Small Business Category.

Now onto the Carnival…

For your reading pleasure, the posts are categorized and each post opens in a new browser window.

Business Advice
All organizations, who are wondering about how to get started with Six Sigma, look no further, just head towards Six Sigma Blog and get a pilot project started.

Hockey teaches a Business Leadership lesson! David Daniels of Business and Technology Reinvention draws a parallel between Olympic Hockey Team management and Business management strategies and comes up with interesting similarities.

Wayne Hurlbert of Blog Business World advises, when your business is at crossroads, don’t panic. There are many creative solutions that will solve your problems.

The Boring Made Dull thinks that Social Responsibility is just one of the 8 criteria for which any company is admired. Social Responsibility just helps in avoiding negative PR for the company.

Business Communications
In this spam infested world, will e-mail newsletters remain an effective marketing tool? Find out in Business Communications Blog.

Business Ethics
The socially responsible companies also show strong financial performance and profitability. How so? Find out at Business Ethics Blog.

“Last month the Maryland General Assembly enacted a law that requires large employers to spend a certain percentage of their payroll on health care. The bill was designed to apply solely to our company, Wal-Mart”. Read more at Eidelblog, where Perry Eidelbus speaks in defense of Capitalism.

Business Events
After the bust of the dotcom bubble, comes a boom of Web 2.0. TechCrunch is a blog that profiles and reviews new web 2.0 products and companies. TechCrunch had recently organized a networking event. Elisa Camahort of Browster Blog cover this exciting event in this post.

Business Issues
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act on one hand provides ample job opportunites to the Accounting and IT professionals but on other hand is a headache for the companies that are required to comply with the Act. Steven Silver of Scatterbox sorts through the SOX drawer to provide his insight on Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Roth & Company P.C. writes about 1990 tax-shelters and the pretensions attached to them.

Business of Blogging
My 4 P’s are Plan, Persuade, Participate and Play Hard. What are your 4 P’s of Blog Marketing? Read more at MarketMonger.

Do dull Business blogs have a place in the Glamorous Fashion world? Read more about business blogs and shameless plugs of yours truly at the Ideologic Blog.

Economics
Can development of Democratic institutions affect a nation’s economic growth? Find out at Ironman’s Political Calculations.

We have heard - investing in stocks is compared to gambling, but now it is compared to falling knives! “Go ahead - catch a Falling Knife” is the headline in the Capital Chronicle blog.

In Open Source Business, Clair Ching talks about how businesses are taking wrong advantage of the open source community.

Josh Cohen of Multiple Mentality Blog says Luxury is being sacrificed for Economy, in the interest of a cost-effective model in the Airline Industry.

Oil at $15-30 a barrel !! Sure, I will take two barrels (and one for the road!). EconBrowser investigates whether there may be a rational basis for oil companies’ fears that oil might return to $15 - $30 a barrel.

I have been hearing a lot about curling lately. First a Canadian wins a gold medal in curling at Turin Olympics and the whole country celebrates. Now Dave Tufte at VoluntaryXchange compares Economics and Curling in his post.

There is no business like movie business. Professor Bainbridge writes about The Economics of Summer Blockbusters. With movies like MI-3, Poseidon, Superman Returns, X-Men 3, The DaVinci Code and many more, box-office returns are expected to soar along with the temperature this summer.

New technologies always come with a promise of changing this world. Photon Courier has one such technology to discuss-UltraCapacitors. He also talks about the economics associated with this technology.

“Credit derivatives are the fastest growing part of the $270 trillion market for derivatives” and we will need cash to settle these trades! Read more about this on Mover Mike’s Blog.

Entrepreneurship
Learn at interim thoughts how microentrepreneurs, equipped with two M’s - a mobile phone and a moped, conduct their microbusiness.

Jeff Cornwall at The Entrepreneurial Mind says “Growth puts strains on all aspects of entrepreneurial businesses. But, growth also creates personal challenges for the entrepreneur.”

Management
This week, Random Thoughts from a CTO wander to the management guru W. Edwards Deming and his 14 points. Excellent reading if you are in a management position.

Management of other people’s time is the title of Jack Yoest’s well illustrated post. He discusses traits of a successful manager

Investing
Get The Big Picture on the stocks and find out if you, the individual investor, is once again late to the Party.

Steven Towns of The Japan Stock Blog believes stronger yen is good news for American investors in Japanese equities. Read his post to see if you agree.

George at Fat Pitch Financials shares some tips he found, to become a better trend watcher.

Michael Weinstein of The Consumer Electronics Stock blog provides his reasoning why Apple Computers will reign supreme in the business of digital download service in spite of an announcement from Amazon.com about their new digital download service.

Outsourcing
Does Outsourcing have something to do with rising wages? Brian Gongol thinks so. (Brian’s post reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon on outsourcing where a US company outsources work to a company in Country X, which in turn outsources same work to another company in Country Y and this company in turn outsources same work back to the same US company who had outsourced the work in first place, thus completing a full circle)

Personal Finance
Nina Smith of Sitting Pretty Financially paints a dismal picture of irrational exuberance with housing, which is a bubble waiting to burst.

Is debt consolidation good for you? Of course it is! But do you need a debt consolidation service to do it for you? Read what Jim at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity has to say.

An excellent eye-opener post about mortgage loans comes from Searchlight Crusade. I thought, I knew quite a few things about mortgages, but this article gave me an insider look in mortgage financing world!

Doug Mataconis of Below the Beltway Blog writes about a new study related to recently implemented Bankruptcy laws.

A little known Bankruptcy Risk Score is used by creditors to determine whether you get a loan and at what rate. Jeffrey Strain of Personal Finance Advice, advises to keep your eyes open for this score.

Miscellaneous
At least 75 million people use RSS and XML feeds on everyday basis but 65% of these people have no clue about what is RSS. I would call them RSS consumers. Read what Anita Campbell at Small Business Trends says about this trend of RSS Consumerism.

Failed implementations have destroyed many good concepts. Find out the reasons why it happens at Spooky Action.

Got a job interview lined up over the phone? Check out phone interview tips at Find-New-Job blog.

Which do You Prefer: Making More Money or Making Less but Being Paid More than Others? Unlike vacations, groceries and real estate, happiness is bought with relative dollars, for everything else, there is MasterCard and Free Money Finance.

Visit InsureBlog to find out the Cost of Care and a possible cure for Healthcare.

Does Technology make you less productive? E-mails, Instant messengers and other distractions are causing interruptions thus bringing down productivity, says Jim of BizInformer.

Kicking over my Traces discusses the advantage of grouping related products together on an e-biz website.

Fashion world is a glamour industry. Do dull and boring Business Blogs have a place in Fashion world? The answer is an emphatic YES.

Fashion industry has various segments like designer garments and shoes, fashion accessories and fashion magazines to name a few. Then there are fashion “makers” like designers, models, event organizers and others. In today’s “even-my-dog-has-a-website” world, fashion related companies and people have their own websites, but how effective are these websites in bringing potential clients to your business?

As per the research done by Forrester Group, in today’s “Googlized” environment, more than 80% of the people searching for the product or service turn to internet. Are these potential product and/or service buyers reaching your website?

Here is a simple test: Think of a keyword or keywords that best describe your fashion product or service, then go to www.google.com and enter those keywords and press enter. Do the results show your website in top 10 results? If yes, try the search with other relevant keywords. If your website is still in top 10 results, then you do not need a Business blog. However if your website is not on first page of Google search results, you may need a Business Blog.

What magic does a Business Blog do to elevate your website in search results? The blogs, due to richness and freshness in content compared to static websites, are placed higher in Search Engine results.

Now that you know what a business blog can do to your fashion website ranking on a search engine, let me give an example using NirvanaWoman Magazine. They have a great website www.nirvanawomanmagazine.com. They have taken first step by establishing a blog http://nirvanawoman.blogspot.com . There are few things that they need to do to make the business blog work harder for their business.

1. Business Blog must be part of the main website.
2. Articles must be carefully planned to direct traffic to the website with proper selection of Keywords
3. Articles must be written at regular intervals, at least thrice a week.

You must be wondering where do I fit in this picture? So here is your answer:
I provide strategic Blog Consulting services. I focus on consulting and guiding small and medium businesses in setting up their blogs and managing it for them as an outsourced process. Entrepreneurs running the small businesses are generally supermen and women, who try to do everything from being the manager to marketing the products within 24 hours available in a day. I help them by designing the Blog content for them. With appropriate content, I help companies to keep their existing customers satisfied and attract prospective customers. I promote blogging as a marketing and customer response tool to the companies.

Welcome to the Carnival of Marketing VI Edition, here at Ideologic L.L.C.. I am Harish Keshwani, your host for the period of stay here at carnival. I have previously hosted Carnival of Capitalists on my website and consider these Carnivals to be a great opportunity to get introduced to some of the very best viewpoints, utmost crazy or outright brilliant ideas, occasional rants and raves written by my fellow bloggers (or Thinktanks). These Carnivals also give me an opportunity to talk about what I am contributing to the Blogosphere.

In past one year and three months, I have written a must read blog for an aspiring entrepreneur, named BusinessWorks Inc - A Dotcom in making… that has already featured on Forbes - Best of Web under Small Business Category. My other blog is about Business Blog Consulting and Outsourcing. Here I advocate Small and Medium Businesses to have a business blog of their own and if they lack time and resources to write the blog, outsource it to a professional content creator. Here is an example of an outsourced blog. Now onto today’s edition of the Carnival of Marketing …

Jack Yoest thinks Toyota’s Ad Campaign for Hybrid Cars is a triple loser but at the same time he provides us with couple of different perspectives from Marketing Playbook and Being Reasonable.

Built-In marketing works better than promoting the average. Read all about this interesting concept in Michael Chaffin’s blog. I certainly agree with Michael about being unique, extraordinary and meaningful is more powerful (and leads to more success) than “spinning” an average experience and trying to sell it to the masses.

Unbundling of media is slowly and surely happening. Audience wants their news bundled (or unbundled) in their own way. Noah Brier provides subtle hints to the media to free up the content. Are media marketing guys listening?

RSS is touted as one of the best online marketing weapon in future. How do we increase awareness about RSS so that more and more people use it? Jens Berget of MLM Forums introduces us to a new way of making RSS popular.

Starling Hunter discusses an innovative marketing strategy adapted by the cattle ranchers in his post, the other red meat.

Martin Neumann of HomeOfficeVoice discusses the business of understanding branding for your small business.

Christopher Baer at Secrets of Extraordinary Student Leaders is on a noble mission of building Student Leaders. In his post on motivation, he says, “it’s important to know why people are motivated to be with a club and then convey that through marketing.”

Lastly, yours truly writes about marketing your products to introverts with the help of Business Blogs.

I hope you have enjoyed this week’s carnival. Next week’s carnival will be held at Solotees. To learn more about Carnival of Marketing, visit Okdork.com.

Other day I was reading an article by Nancy R. Fenn titled The Top 10 Ways to Market to introverts (you know, the ones with the high income). After reading this article, I researched further and found 49% of the population is introverts. With such statistics, it is hard to market a product or service with a spoken word to introverts. One can say, Internet is a heaven on earth for introverts. Out of habit, I tried to correlate the article with business blogs and came up with many ideas that may be applied to target introverts, using blogs as a marketing strategy. Let me discuss few of the characteristics that Nancy has listed in her article.

Introverts are territorial. This includes their personal space.
The business blog is a non-intrusive medium of disseminating information about a product or service, expand and focus on salient features of product or service and present it to an introvert without invading their personal space.

Introverts love to read.
Exploit this characteristic of an Introvert by providing them with a detailed writeup in your business blog about your product or service and its features, uses, alternate uses and hidden features. Be sure not to use the hype, just state the facts.

Introverts, despite appearances, are not shy and they are frequently not braindead just because they don’t say anything while you are talking to them.
Use your business blog effectively to present a product or service information in a “fact sheet” format. This will help them to learn about your product or service much better.

Introverts are not impressed by personality.
Bloggers tend to have personalities in their blogs. However when a business blog is written, intended audience is very specific. You may have both, extroverts and introverts in this very specific audience. Hence it is wise to keep personality out of a business blog.

Introverts hate being rushed.
An introvert does his research before buying a product or service. Hence they must be provided with enough research material via a Business Blog before they actually purchase a product or service. The business blog should be written in such a way that it is an exhaustive resource for an introvert to learn all the aspects of a product or service, before he or she actually decides to buy that product or service.

I invite all introverts to feel free to post their viewpoints about business blogs as an exhaustive resource of research of a product or service and you can do this anonymously by posting a comment.