This is a guest post by Sheryl Sisk.
Once upon a time in the golden days of yore, bloggers made money hand over fist (or so it seemed) simply by showing up and blogging. A handful of particularly lucky ones got lucrative book deals, and the rest raked in the dough with Google ads peppered all over basic templates.
Take a moment if you need to mourn but those days are well and truly over. These days, whether your blog is your business model (affiliate marketing, ads, info products, or a combo of all three) or whether you’re blogging to snag leads for your business (as my clients do), your blog is no longer enough to achieve the kind of business success most of us are seeking. In short, it’s no longer “all about” blogging.
And if you’re thinking, “Well, I’m on Facebook and Twitter, too. I’m golden!” — not so fast! You’re in for a surprise: it’s not even “all about” social media and social networking, either. Not anymore.
Today, it’s all about integration. Or, better yet: integrated online marketing.
What Is Integrated Online Marketing and Why Is It So Important?
Integration is the act of tying it all together:
- Blog
- Social media and social networking
- Press releases
- Referral marketing
- Outreach to journalists and other bloggers
Integration is crucial to anyone making a living from a blog because we’re scattered all over the place. Think about it: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Plurk, Plaxo … and now Google Buzz gets thrown into the mix. Sure, we blog — we put out all the great content that Michael’s been urging us to create for eons now and we might even tweet the blog post URL. Great start, but we need more.
We need to bring it all back to a single point of entry, and we need to tie it all together. That’s integration. That’s integrated online marketing.
How Integrated Online Marketing Works for Bloggers
An example might help illustrate the concept in practice.
Let’s take an imaginary Inspired Solo client (simply because that’s the model I’m most familiar with). We’ll make her a life coach who specializes in relationship coaching. Cathy Coach writes her three or four blog posts religiously every week. She minds her primary and long-tail keywords with precision, and she regularly checks her Analytics to see what keywords are performing well. She’s on Twitter and she’s got a personal Facebook page.
Cathy might see an opportunity in the recent Tiger Woods scandal. She knows she has to be careful with this one – it’s incendiary and it’s ethically fraught. If she approaches it unwisely, she could get blasted for trying to profit off others’ misfortune. But Cathy believes in what she does and she thinks she can help others who are trying to rebuild after the heartache of infidelity. She’s got an ebook on this very subject, actually, and she wants better sales for it.
Cathy could simply write a blog post tying Woods’ public apology to the act of apologizing to your spouse after infidelity and working in some advice from her ebook. She could even tweet that post. And she might see a small bump in sales as a result.
But what if she did this instead…?
- Wrote the post as a series of posts offering concrete and specific advice on dealing with infidelity in a marriage — never once mentioning her book.
- Tweeted each post, and then …
- … followed up on Twitter by engaging others on the subject — asking questions, engaging in real conversations about the subject in a thoughtful, substantive way.
- Created a business Facebook page for her coaching business, and sent out an email campaign to her list asking them to become fans.
- Crafted a press release based on her branding as “the No-Nonsense Relationship Crisis Coach” and distributed it via online press release sites, directing readers back to her website and blog for further information.
- Built up the “News and Announcements” portion of her website with links to interviews, other blog posts, and journalism in which she appeared as a cited expert.
- Integrated all this with her Google Buzz account, so that those following her there could easily share her links (both her own blog posts and the news articles citing her) with their groups.
Would Cathy Coach see a bigger uptick in book sales? With all the new traffic coming to her site, I don’t see how she could fail in this (as long as her sales page is easy to get to and halfway decent).
This is just one example of integrated online marketing. Instead of thinking in micro-sized chunks of your marketing puzzle — one or two pieces at a time — you’re marketing on the macro level, with the entire puzzle laid out before you as a cohesive whole, each piece linked to the next and all of it pulling your targets back to your primary channel: your blog.
How to Add Integrated Online Marketing to Your Blog Marketing Program
Getting started with integrated online marketing takes a little thought and planning. With practice, it becomes a self-perpetuating mechanism. The more you systemize and automate it, the easier it gets. Start with the following steps, and then explore the possibilities on your own:
- Take stock of your current channels and your activities on those channels. Twitter, Facebook, your blog, Tumblr — wherever you “are” in the virtual marketing sense, make note of it. Check out your profiles and your activity on those sites. Is it all presenting a cohesive brand? Does it all direct back to your blog? If not, fix these problems.
- Brainstorm ways you can integrate your blog marketing on future posts. With any upcoming content, ask yourself “How can I creatively distribute this content in ways beyond what I already do?”
- Explore the wide wonderful world of press releases. They’re no longer simple news announcements; there’s an art to writing PRs in a way that tells a story and presents your brand — the “you”-ness of your blog and/or business. Some excellent resources to learn about the new art of writing press releases are Publicity Hound Joan Stewart’s free course (which gives 89 solid tips on writing powerful press releases) and Publicity Insider.
- Create an online “news room” on your site for journalists if you don’t have one already. You can furnish it with announcements, a media kit, links to any press you’ve done … get creative. Your goal here is to create a valuable resource for journalists who might be interested in the topics related to your blog/business.
- Expand your community. Explore forums and message boards related to your blog topics. Reach out to other bloggers and to journalists, both on their sites and on Twitter, and form relationships with them. Offer your new contacts valuable information that isn’t totally self-serving. It’s OK if you link to your blog once in awhile, if the post truly answers the question, but also direct them elsewhere for their information. That builds trust and reliability, and means they’re more likely to call on you in the future when they need a source.
- Think about your story. Stories sell, because they touch our emotions. For proof of this, think about any big tragedy. The tragedy itself can be almost mind-numbingly hard to grasp because it doesn’t scale on a human level — it’s too big for us to wrap our minds and hearts around. But if a news article tells the story of the tragedy through the eyes of one particular victim, suddenly we get it in a deeply personal and moving way. So what’s your story? How does your brand tell that story? Figure these things out and then make each piece of your integrated marketing consistent with that story and that brand.
Integrated Online Marketing Pays Dividends
Integrated online marketing is time-consuming and requires a big-picture perspective. For that reason, you might think it’s “too much” and stick with the piecemeal approach. But if you do that, you’ll only get the same results you’ve already been getting. Are you happy with that, or did you want more? The savvy bloggers in 2010 will embrace integrated online marketing and be rewarded accordingly with greater and more precisely targeted traffic.
Sheryl Sisk is the marketing/blogging coach behind The Inspired Solo. She lives in Salisbury, North Carolina. You can follow her on Twitter (@theinspiredsolo) or on Google Buzz (s.schelin).