Question

Topic: E-Marketing

How Should We Promote Our Affiliate Program?

Posted by Neil on 8/4/2008 at 9:05 PM ET 125 Points

I work for the StreamSend Email Marketing service and we have recently started a blog.

The StreamSemd Email Marketing blog will focus on product updates, email marketing best practices, and general thoughts on marketing and email marketing in particular.

I know this is a lot for one blog. It occurs to me, though, that you cannot just have a blog, you have to actually market your blog. I wonder if that is like marketing a product or service? I would love to hear from people who have experience in promoting their own blog.

Of course, it could be just if you build a good blog, they will come. We will focus, of course, on building the best marketing blog we possibly can and hope people will read it.

However, if there is more than just striving for the best blog possible, I am open to advice. Thanks!
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Mark on 8/5/2008 at 3:39 AM Accepted
    Hi Neil,

    A lot of the basic website promotion advice applies equally well to blogs. Three quick additional thoughts:

    1. The obvious one is to ensure your existing customers and website visitors can "find" the blog easily. There's nothing on your front page at the moment. When customers login, maybe have a little box with the latest post titles featured? Or promote the blog in the next email you send to customers, or in the transactional email they get from you.

    2. People will disagree with me, but good writing does shine through eventually though it can take time. Good quality posts get picked up by other bloggers etc. It helps to get involved in the conversation. Add useful comments to related blog posts elsewhere, or develop a post that includes links to alternative viewpoints or related material on other blogs.

    3. When I started, I submitted my blog and feed to dozens of directories. I think they sent me about 2 visitors in total. Perhaps others have more recent and better experience, otherwise the only justification for doing so is possible SEO benefits of a few directory links.

    As part of my work, I review blogs written by dozens of vendors. There are parallels to the informational newsletter. If the content isn't useful, nobody listens. You need to be very careful about the balance between promotion and value. Otherwise it just becomes a service announcement channel. Which is fine, but isn't capturing the potential value of a quality blog (on the other hand, quality blogs take work!)
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 8/5/2008 at 9:09 AM Accepted
    For a company, a blog isn't a product or service - it's a company's "voice". Who the voice talks to any why is the key. Currently it's a bit all-over-the-place: new features, affiliate program, and "we're best value" postings. Each of these postings appeal to a different segment: existing clients care about new features, resellers care about the affiliate program, and prospects about value. Get clear who you're trying to talk to (and why).

    Also, a "good" blog doesn't necessarily build traffic - a strong/novel position does. Being middle-of-the-road is safer, but doesn't truly get the viral traffic you're searching for.
  • Posted by Neil on 8/5/2008 at 10:21 AM Author
    Mark. We should put a link on the main page. We have a designer who I will probably have to bother for a month to do it but it will get done. :-)

    Jay, I agree, it should be a voice and not just flogging our products. We should talk about things that interest people and say things that people disagree with at times. We do not just boring product updates.

    It will take us a bit to find that voice but we are working on it and we have enough smart characters working here to make it interesting...

  • Posted by Mikee on 8/5/2008 at 10:46 AM Accepted
    You may want to add some links to your blog that allow readers to bookmark them or tag them. This helps get them out in the public domain a little more and perhaps drive more people to them. It definitely creates more inbound links and can help with Search Ranking. Some of the popular onese are:

    Digg, www.Digg.com
    Technocrati, technorati.com
    del.icio.us delicious.com

    Give these a shot. Depending on your software you are using for your blog, there may be a plugin to easily add these.

    Mike
  • Posted by Neil on 8/5/2008 at 3:47 PM Author
    Mike, agreed, we need to do that.

    I guess it comes down to writing stuff people want to read but even if you write like Hemingway, I always wonder why some blogs flourish and some flounder. It does not always seem to be correlated to quality.

    However, I think working on excellence. That is, being a great place to go for marketing and permission-based email marketing writing is the place to start and expand from there.

    Thanks for all the great advice so far. I think I will keep this question open a bit more, though, and see if another piece of advice or two comes in.
  • Posted by Neil on 8/6/2008 at 5:08 PM Author
    Thanks for for the input. This forum is great!
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