Over the past year, one of the ways we've been able to build our marketing is through blog reviews. We've encouraged bloggers to stop by our booth at tradeshows and we'll run an engraving for them, give them a quick machine tour, and they can ask any questions they'd like. It's turned into great press opportunities for us because they get to see our product in person, play with it a bit, and really get an idea of what the machinery can do. By targeting the best blogs this way, other blogs link back to the original posts, and we get some great word of mouth advertising going.
All of a sudden I'm receiving more Google blog alerts for our competitor's site. I assume maybe they've seen all the great press about our company and are trying to build their own brand the same way, right? Wrong. I noticed a pattern in the blog posts:
- It had a generic description of the product.
- All of the links used the same keyword phrase.
- Every link went to the same applications page on their site.
It's paid inclusion, and it just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. We've seen a huge marketing benefit from talking with bloggers that have the right audiences for our product and giving them a chance to write about our product, good or bad. But a paid inclusion just to get your company listed doesn't feel like clean marketing. The disclaimers tend to be at the end of all posts on the page and the blogs are just regurgitating the company line.
Find ways to get your product mentioned in the top blogs and your leads can skyrocket, but paid inclusion blogs mostly have few visitors and aren't accomplishing anything but building some weak links to your web site. There's a right way and a wrong way to use blogs for marketing, and paid inclusion just feels like the wrong way.
