Seihaku’s Blogmarketing Bible

The most powerful weapon of a customer, in a modern age where all kinds of media and information that surrounds us are spreading fast, is the resource of “interest”. An interest is a limited resource and is influenced by stamina, time, concentration environments of individuals. Eventually, due to this scarcity, an interest is regarded as an important asset, and is dealt with as a keyword in many industries of Internet.

In the book, “The Attention Economy“, published 2001 by HBS Press; the lead researchers at Accenture, Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, states on the importance of “interests”. What fuels economy yet does not grow or expand? What element limits the business expansion in areas of web pages; business plan/strategy; books and articles; marketing projects; partnerships and alliances? - The answer is people’s “interests”.

Interests makes it easy to start a business and approach customers and market. People’s interests are essential in building a web site, designing advertisements, and in establishing strategies. The biggest problem for corporates is not in the communication bandwidth, but in the bandwidth of the people. The described term band denotes the existence of limitation, essential in corporate management.

Interests emerge in various ways according to differences in generation, gender, locations which brings about the introduction of segment strategy in securing the customer keywords. Segment strategy itemizes customers, sorts them accordingly by properties and responds to various types of customer. It is applied in many fields as the media develops to enter the age of overflowing information.

Segmented customers or not; the important factor in the survival of blog marketing is the customer interest. Creating endless Internet troll contents can be seen as a gruesome struggle to collect customer interests. The easiest way to collect customer interests, a limited resource, is to stand on the sidewalk of a high traffic street. In order words, advertising on a high traffic location such as Naver. The problem is the related cost which may not be formidable and a continued clicks cannot be guaranteed unless you can keep the exposed contents interesting enough. Many corporates homepages are as such and for this reason, are likely to advertise for a limited time such as through events and promotions.

What’s important is that the customer interest has become a scarce resource. The writers of “Attention Economy” stresses: “Understanding and managing human interests is the critical key to business success.” Let those bloggers who plan and work on blog marketing remember that.

What would be guideline to creating the source of an important blog contents in blog marketing? First example would be the photos, used to create product contents, which is most often used. Photography has popularized due to the introduction of digital cameras and a picture is very significant in a sense that it can be more effective given a shorter period of time. As of current, many books on digital cameras and photography has been published.

Please refer to published books on the technical approach of cameras. Instead, we will discuss on the development of photo contents and the direction it’s heading towards. Generally, a customer shows interest in a photo of blog when he has found informatin other than these provided by corporates.

In other words, the photos that are distinctive in contents, angle, use and taken in comparison with other competing products, unlike those in which the product photo has been severely retouched to look most beautiful and sensual, has been shown to collect great interest.

The best way to draw attention to contents, taking a photo shoot under such circumstances, is to use a concept called “Comparison”. From now on, such comparison will take great part in movies, not just photos.

Photo-shoot should ideally finish as just a plain shoot because of the loss of realism in using retouching or computer graphics to increase its level of perfection. Try to shoot a photo contents just using the camera but make use of various lenses to make most of the wide angle distortion or techniques that utilize the out-focusing mechanism of the zoom feature.

Also, I recommend and urge you to use the raw format, instead of the jpeg format. This use of raw format enables the provision of versatile usage, along with maximum resolution, which makes it very productive when required by corporates. Take care not to exceed the maximum horizontal resolution supported by the blog and create a jpeg file for the purpose of web posting, as the blog horizontal pixel limit as a reference. Then, post it.

In the case of Naver blogs, it has the advantage of showing a thumbnail of the inserted photo, instead of just linking on blog. So it would be a good approach to post texts together with photos.

Use double or mono tones to accentuate documentary-like feel. Primary color tones are used to stress bright, lively mood. Photoshop, ‘the global standard tool’, is recommended for photo image retouching. And utilities such as ‘Alsee‘ is recommended to managing and viewing graphic files.

DSLRs are recommended for digital cameras, and the addition of wide lens, standard lens and zoom lens should make it a sensible composition. Inserting specific logos or brands is risky because search engines or portal sites delete them immediately, even at the slightest hint of commercial advertising.

As for the photo qualities, always remind yourselves of staying in between the level of general consumers and the professionals. Photo is an essential composition element of blog contents so you should be concerned about obtaining information and communicating development a part of your life.

I mentioned earlier that blog contents are the essence of blog marketing. If so, it must be interesting to see what the essence of blog contents is. It quite essential to note and compare the two in how the customer gets exposed to the product information: Advertising which starts from marketing and blog contents which starts from blog marketing.

Looking first at the identity of advertising, you can see that advertising is a content that represents corporate profit. Its essential property is to create value in the corporate’s standpoint in analyzing its pros and cons, statistics and trends to fortify its strength. It should be noted that advertising is limited in its exposure time, especially according to the medium used in advertising, so it must emphasize a simple, strong concept. Consequently, advertising is a group of experts who troll with sophistication and there is no real value to a specific information or fact, which makes it volatile after a certain point. These advertising expression methods are quite ideal, perfect and well tuned but very expensive.

Most importantly, so far the customers have been brainwashed by advertising and due to its effects, advertising lost most of its morality to a point where is can stir up a debate in every Internet contents: Is this advertising or not? Eventually these aspects of advertising is causing enormous corporate or advertiser budget to be paid and it provided forced stimulus to targeted customers by medium, not accurately aimed marketing, showing its weakness in many ways. But through blog marketing, these weaknesses can be complemented in an exceptional way.

Doing blog marketing means the positions as a third individual brand in between the corporate who got the order and the customer. The point to blog marketing is in the blog contents and this blog contents must ideally be created through personal, subjective interpretation. All responsibilities due goes to the individual blogger and must be secured of its separate independence.

Blog contents can utilize all multimedia and has an advantage in incurring no other than production related costs. And once the contents are created, it is always search-able on the Internet, becoming an intangible corporate asset which can be used in various press data. From the customer’s standpoint, blog contents is a very useful media that can provide positive feedback to the corporate product and its brands and is flexible and advantageous in making a comparison with other competing products or benchmarks. Even more, it is easy to maintain moral values, can approach customers fast, and share an issue with the customer in real time. This takes the role of a reliable advance guard point in the variable of corporate management which can prove to be a good system that can shine in the midst of emergencies.

Blog contents can draw continuous customer attention to specific product or brand by creating new stories every week or even every day for customers. Also it can be exposed as a top search result when a specific keyword is used in searches which can lead to a greater role of being effective beyond the overture ads. Eventually, advertising will stop at a level of trolling and blog should take the role of conversation with customers or providing information.

The status of blog contents in blog marketing is lot bigger and more valuable than what we think it to be and we need to regard it as an intangible asset.

Deceptive ads will now face their doom because of Emelianenko Fedor’s blog.