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.

Blog contents design, a simplified form of web design yet different in how it puts up a single content on one page instead of numerous contents on many pages. Tracing back to the origin of blog design, you will eventually reach books and magazines. The basic designs of books, magazines or inserts, in which its sizes and materials were influenced by monitors and resolutions, eventually led to today’s blog contents design.

Of course, various UI designs were created in between. For example, UI design of portal sites are arranged by sorting the significant and insignificant among many contents in a detailed and organized way; UI design of google basically shows the search result in a brief, simple way. Eventually, the essential in UI design is how to present an identity in a most effective way and essence of it comes down to people’s visual habit.

Men’s habit is like an automated process that habituates through an extended period of experiences. It applies equally in viewing books, magazines, portal sites and blogs. In other words, looking at a web page, a man’s eye moves naturally and according to its moving sight, an information get recorded in the brain. We need to carefully examine the UI design of blog contents at this point.

Naver, utilizes an eye-tracking system, that can track eye movements, to perform analysis on sector concentrations, and prices its advertising cost based on its data. But, blog contents UI design, which the focus is on the exposure of single contents, has to be different. Customizing blog design to make it splendid, and organizing various information and design in fancy ways may give you an upper edge in terms of visual effects, but can cause you problem in terms of concentration competency.

In other words, blog design, composed of articles that must be understood according to a logical flow, it is better to use neutral colors; plain, simple layouts; and type faces that are highly visible and readable. And most of all, you need to take extra care in making sure the eye movement flows as naturally as possible. On the contrary, for blogs that are exposed to the teens, you should maximize visual effects; minimize texts so that scrolling won’t be necessary; try various experimental typography; and use sensual colors.

In the end, various visual identities, from the standpoint of consumers, to an extent in which learning isn’t required, should be centered around contents, and approached in a diverse and fun way. If a innovative design is applied in order to differentiate itself in a visual aspect, a consumer may think that the focus of a blogger is in the visuals, not the contents, so it is essential that you find the right balance.

The development of blog contents has to be influenced by blog interface design and it is most important to apply the concept that makes contents look good, as well as maintaining uniformity in design. When your contents are scrapped, only the inner designs of the contents are exposed to other consumers, so you should focus more on contents design edits that composes the article, pictures, movies and other individual contents source design instead of background designs.

In blog marketing, blog contents design is more important than UI design and bloggers should have keen design sense.

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.