aStore / Amazon

Thursday, July 19, 2012

What Are You Selling?

There is a tendency to think of a blog or a Facebook page as "always selling". This was true as a first impression for many company blogs. But in reality, not many companies and individuals simply just sell. Individual bloggers for the most part sell ideas, some would say opinions or even subversive ones. Most individual bloggers focus on a narrow audience segments. It makes sense, most writers are knowledgeable in one specific topic. Unlike reporters and researchers which can quickly develop a story in an area they are not knowledgeable. So they write about their area of expertise. A very large majority of blogging and writing is not meant to sell. This is the nice part of blogging and reading blogs. Yet, in the commercial world of selling, there is plenty of companies using blogs simply as a sales tool with a blog format. To me this is a sign of blog "format" maturity. While the spirit of the blog for individuals remains a non-selling proposition, the sellers will use it's popularity to do their work as always.

Actually, my observation, is that many businesses with technical blogs are not selling enough. There is a counter culture element in how we view blogs for personal use, not to be cluttered with the business side. Companies like Microsoft, Google and Ford motor are not really selling anything on their blogs. Just as the personal counter culture idea, the companies are giving individuals (yes some of them are doing it for money as a real job) the ability to say all kind of things related to the product. But it is not directly to sell the product. If you want to really sell, you need to do more than just write about a product. It takes a few elements like offers (don't we all love 50% off), packaging (if you like book "A" you should like service "B"). There are also other things like incentives (buy 3 get 1 free). Sellers also do things like sign you up for a newsletter. Here you can bug people with offers, news and all kind of things without them even reading the blog. So are we really selling, well... it depends. Soft selling I would call it. After all, there are plenty of companies that will call you at home, dinner time, to bug you about insurance, or it it weight loss (it is for me the last few months) -- obviously, these people don't know me.

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