Welcome to a special (and short) series of posts on online marketing. I’m broadening out from blogging alone because I want to paint you the bigger picture of how your business’s blog fits in with other marketing channels. Namely: social media marketing and email marketing. In fact these three are so interrelated that I’ve decided to call them the Golden Triangle of Online Marketing. And also because life is always better when you have cool names for stuff.
As you would expect from me, I’m going to say that blogging is the first major corner of the Golden Triangle. Your blog is your home base and it’s often the first part of the Golden Triangle people work on. That’s not always the best thing (building up your social media presence first can be an awesome tactic), but it’s the most common.
Without a blog, the other two channels are kinda pointless.
Why?
Taking Action
Because the goal of social media marketing and email marketings is not only to foster beneficial relationships, but to get your customers to take action. So… you need a place to send them. A blog is the best place for that. You can also send people directly to sales pages, e-commerce catalog pages, or old-school static website pages, but the magic of blogs is the deeper interaction that’s possible:
- Comments
- Tags
- Tweets and retweets
- Facebook likes
- Sharing & bookmarking
- Related posts
- In-depth topic exploration
- More personable than other media, which builds like & trust
That last point is particularly important, because until blogs started to become mainstream, you just didn’t see too much of that online. People were treating online marketing as though it were “print marketing on the screen.” And while it’s true that direct-response copy is “sales in print,” blogs are more like “personality in pixels.”
And They Shall Know You by Your Blog Posts
Social media and email give folks some sense of who you are as a person to deal with, but the blog is where they really get to know you. By the posts you publish, your customers will know:
- What you care about, and they’ll compare that to what they care about
- What you don’t care about (sometimes via omission)
- Where you draw lines and what you stand for
- How you treat people who disagree with you or who become antagonistic
- How you deal with problems that arise
- Your ability to communicate what you know and impart understanding
- Whether your communication style and personality is a good fit for them
- How consistent you are (oops, lol)
So you see that even if you never write a single “salesy” blog post (and you shouldn’t), you’re still marketing online in a profound way.
A Worthy Destination?
A blog is the worthiest destination I can think of to send customers. There some things we need to keep in mind about creating, designing, and publishing with blogs as relates to the other two points in the Golden Triangle of Online Marketing, which I’ll tie together more in the posts which follow this one in the series.
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Do you think blogs deserve status as one of the three points in something called “The Golden Triangle of Online Marketing?” Having a hard time elevating your blog to “primary point” status? Let’s hear it in the comments!
that’s a really great explanation of the importance of blogging for business. using your blog as a landing page for taking action is really important, but not as important as getting to know you.
A blog is a great choice for a home base too, as Chris Brogan explains it http://chrisbrogan.com/a-simple-presence-framework/
“Golden Triangle” great phrase –coin it. Get it? “coin” “gold”
Seeing the Golden Triangle of Internet Marketing makes me want to drink a Golden Ice-Cold Harvest Wheat Bud Light. I enjoyed reading Part 1 and Part 2, can't wait for Part 3.
I agree that blogging should be the first side of the golden triangle. It is indeed very important to maintain a personal and unique style of writing, especially when you're in a relatively crowded niche.
Well social circle has always been a good source for creating an online profile.
Now social sharing plugins are available and make our job easier
[...] golden triangle of online marketing has 3 sides: blogging, social media, and email marketing. You can’t do email marketing without an email list [...]
i like to learn great thing about marketing. Marketing is most essantial part of business success.
Marketing is the most important activity you can be successful in, since
there are plenty of others doing what you do. Doing something unique becomes
marketing in and of itself, however, so that is very much worth considering.
[...] But the star is nothing without the rest of the supporting cast. Enter, stage right, social media and email marketing (there’s that damned email stuff again—maybe it really is kinda important). All three of these work together synergistically. I call them the Golden Triangle of online marketing. [...]
I’m still leaning about all this and trying to follow all your blogs Michael
Welcome aboard, Steve! Thanks.