Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [213]
One of my favorite destination travel blogs is from the Black Hills of South Dakota (www.blackhillstravelblog.com). By visiting the blog, I can be reminded of earlier experiences but also learn about new experiences and destinations that only the locals seem to know. The blog offers multiple options to interface with the writers, the content, the area, and the tourism industry—a call to action to book a vacation. The website has a specific purpose and does not vary from that, but it also is an amazing source of new visitors to the websites in the region and in the travel industry as well (see Figure 17-16).
Figure 17-16: The Black Hills Travel Blog engages visitors on many levels but keeps the primary goal in front of the visitor—booking vacations.
Friday: Manage and Increase Subscribers
One would think that if blogs are so powerful at building traffic and business, marketers would go to great lengths to use whatever means they could to develop the visitors into a strong marketing force. Unfortunately, I see many missed opportunities by blogs because they neglect to add one simple conversion point. Because of the growth of social media, the primary means of interacting with the blog is to vote for the stories through clicking the social-media icons. The next available means of subscribing to the content of the blog is usually though a strange little icon that is usually confused with a volume button (see Figure 17-17).
©iStockphoto.com/[angelhell]
Figure 17-17: The RSS symbol
This is called RSS. Unfortunately, as discussed in Chapter 11, relying on RSS as a primary marketing tool could lose you viable customers who simply don’t know what RSS is. In the past, RSS has been used by news junkies, journalists, and anyone who processes large amounts of information and news on a daily basis. Sites set up RSS feeds, and they can see which sites have new articles, browse through the articles, and read the ones they want without ever going directly to the sites. The program used to view all of the website “feeds” is called a reader. An RSS reader is almost like email, but each folder is the website you’ve subscribed to with the latest posts and articles from that website. Currently, two well-known (sort of) readers are Google Reader and the now-shuttered Bloglines, operated by Ask.com. As of late 2010, ComScore shows that accessing web content from RSS feeds has been dropping significantly. Google Reader’s visits are down 27 percent, and Bloglines’ dropped 71 percent over the past few years.
This is why so many Internet marketing pundits have declared RSS dead. It requires a significant knowledge of Internet familiarity and therefore creates a barrier to the average Internet user. However, when looking at the majority of blogs the primary, sometimes the only call to action is a subscription to RSS, so one would think that the technology is universal. It’s not.
On blogs where I have recommended adding a Subscribe by Email call to action, the number of email subscribers has grown to at least double and sometimes triple the number of RSS subscribers. The proportion of visitors that will subscribe when given a choice of email rises substantially. This is why I am amazed so many well known marketing blogs do not offer an email subscription.
Ask any direct marketer what holds the greatest value, and they will tell you it’s the list. For years, direct marketers focused on getting names and addresses; once they have them, you are on the list, and they can send test mailings, catalogs, targeted mailings, associated offers, and everything else to you, because you are on the list. Email is the same way. When building a blog, emails are valuable, much more valuable than RSS subscribers, for many reasons. When a reader subscribes via RSS, you do not know who they are. You really only know how many RSS subscribers there are,