Integrated Online and Offline Marketing for Money Making Blogs
Posted on November 20, 2007 - Filed Under Integrated Marketing
There are tons of material on how to promote your blog and make money online. From commenting at A-list blogs, to Social Network Strategies - we all have our online prospect list of which blogs we regularly send our press releases to, and which blogs we would like to make an impact in with our comments. And maybe, if our comments made enough sense, we might even get to do a guest post with a popular blog.
However, I have not seen much posts on what bloggers have done to promote their blog offline. There are a few reasons for this:
“My friends and family don’t even understand what a blog is, much less how I can make money from it”
“I can’t even find time to market myself online, much less offline!”
“I want to keep my online image separate from my real life.”
“My customers are the online audience. Why should I waste time and energy trying to get customers from other channels / mediums?”
You probably have your own set of reasons why you don’t actively promote your blog offline.
Why Offline Marketing is Important
The most successful bloggers are both online and offline marketers. Look at John Chow and Shoemoney. The reason why they are such great successes is because they live what they preach. John is constantly mentoring people on how to make money online, attends blog events and networks with other bloggers. Shoemoney takes it a little further and has even developed his own brand of paraphernalia that he sells promoting his blog. You cannot be successful online while failing offline. True success gained through hard work and diligence instills important character traits and skills in you whether you are an offline or online marketer. Success is also contagious because once you have learnt the formula to succeed, you will apply it over and over in other areas of growth opportunity, only modifying it for adaptation in different areas or aspects of your life or business.
If you want to be successful in marketing your blog online, you have to learn how to be successful in marketing it offline as well. There are reasons behind why I say this:
1. It sharpens your marketing skill. Marketing your blog offline gives you an advantage that online marketing will not be able to provide - acessible user feedback / reaction. When you publish an article on your blog, only a percentage of your audience will leave comments. No matter how engaging or informative your article is, there will always be a portion of your audience that will keep their thoughts to themselves. And comments tend to be skewed towards the positive. However, when you practice marketing your blog offline to friends, acquaintances and associates, you get a better feel of the objections / criticisms people have toward your blog or articles. They are your live “focus group” to test your marketing strategy and popularity of topics. Your face- to-face dialogue with them will give you valuable feedback as you can read their body language, and it is difficult for people to be insincere or hide their true opinion when you are talking to them eye to eye.
2. It creates a buzz that results in traffic. There is a higher tendency for a product or service to be adopted quickly by the mass / online media in the presence of a buzz. Buzz marketing is what causes posts to go viral and creates hype with long reaching effects. Let’s say you write a groundbreaking article every month, or regularly come up with good articles on how to make money online. That is no different from what a lot of bloggers are doing. However, if you consistently send out press releases of these groundbreaking articles to the local press and radio and get interviewed, it creates a buzz in your community and start people talking about your blog. On a smaller scale, just printing your popular articles into newsletters and distributing it among friends and associates will also create a buzz through word of mouth. This generates a consistent stream of traffic for your blog and can drive more traffic to your blog than online blog marketing alone.
3. It fuels your enthusiasm. Discouragement and complacency happens to the best of us. There will be times when you will question if you made the right choice to quit your job and become a pro blogger who is barely making enough money from Adsense or affiliate marketing to get by. Or after months of blogging and social networking, you hardly see a bump in your traffic, much less earnings from your blog. However, if you are constantly promoting your blog offline and telling your friends about the latest article you have written, it adds fire to your enthusiasm and reminds you of all the great reasons why you started your blog in the first place. And because you have announced to people that you are a blogger, it sets a standard for yourself to produce good articles in a timely manner because people you know in real life are reading your articles and giving you live feedback. Discussing or talking about your blog with your friends also keeps you involved with it, and some of the ideas for my articles actually came from discussions with friends about my blog and their thoughts about online marketing.
4. It creates opportunities for collaboration. One of the great bonuses of sharing your blogging passion among peers and associates is that it creates business collaboration opportunities for you. I have been sharing with friends, family and associates on how blogging can actually help people and businesses earn good money online and build relationship with their audience. This has generated much interest and a number of queries about how it all works. Being a blogger, you may think it is easy for anyone to start off a blog and attain a measure of success from it. That is because you are interacting with fellow bloggers who know your craft. What you don’t realize is that there are way more people who do not understand how blogging can help their businesses in a lucrative way, much less set it up and promote it to their customers. Through my interaction with friends who have their own businesses, they have come to realize that business blogs can reach audiences in a way that traditional sales and marketing tactics cannot. It can help build their corporate image and branding, educate customers, as well as help alleviate business challenges like high staff turnover rate or inexperienced new sales employees. And through my conversations with them, I have already received two very viable collaboration opportunities to work on helping these businesses improve corporate brand exposure and customer reach through blogging and online campaigns that include social networking.
5. It reinforces who you are. The greatest enemy to being a good marketer for your blog is the disconnect between who you are as a blogger, and as a person. You cannot hide behind a “blogging personality” and be successful because being a blogger requires you to be real, to be honest and frank in your opinions. Similarly, if you are truly passionate about your blog, it will become increasingly difficult for you to remain a “closet blogger” and you should look at the ways you can market your blog in real life before you start becoming schizophrenic. An added benefit of shedding your “closet blogger” personality is that it frees you to be truly entrepreneural in your approach to building and marketing your blog.
Are you an online / offline marketer? If so, what are some of the ways you market your blog offline? Or are you a closet blogger to geographical friends and peers? I would like to hear your comments.
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6 Responses to “Integrated Online and Offline Marketing for Money Making Blogs”
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I run a photoblog so things are a little different for me, as far as advertising offline. I took a bunch of my photos and made them into post cards. Instead of business cards I carry them in my camera bag and try to give away close to a 100 a month. Next year I’m thinking about getting a t-shirt made up with the address to
Thanks for sharing - That is certainly a great way to advertise offline! Are you selling photos on your photoblog? If it gets popular enough you might want to consider selling cups with your photos on them. Great for branding as well
[…] Integrated Online and Offline Marketing for Money Making Blogs was an article I wrote about the importance of marketing your blog offline as well as online, with a number of ways that you can do so. It earned me 1 stumble with 1 review. […]
[…] In an earlier post, I mentioned that a lot of bloggers do not realize how valuable what they know about blogging is, because they are mixing around with a community of bloggers who are experts in their craft. Today, a chat with a friend from the financial planning industry made me realize how lucrative selling knowledge about Internet Marketing is. He had recently attended a 2-day Internet Marketing course for which he paid $2,800 for. That is USD1,932 per pax for a class of 25 for a course that is run every month. He did some quick calculation and concluded that the person running the course would still earn $50,000 after deducting overheads for conference room booking, advertising, and staff employed to perform the logistics of the event. That is USD34,495 per month. Any blogger can quit their job and go pro with that kind of money coming in if they have no problem speaking in front of a roomful of people, teaching them stuff they are passionate about. […]
First need to what is a blog and teach your friends about that and go for chat rooms and make friends to gain blog posting from various location from world.See me doing that for such a long time.
In US 62% people doing the Online shopping, nowadays the terms Online Business , Internet marketing are very popular. To get a good knowledge we can have number of websites and also we can do the work from home to earn money.