Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Smaller Companies Use Blogging to Their Advantage

In today's Wall Street Journal an article explains how smaller companies use the blogging world in order to pitch their products. The primary goal is to reach out to particular influential blogs which could extremely benefit the sales of the company's product. There are certain websites and other free tools that allow a company to discover those bloggers within their industry and to also find out what those bloggers are actually writing. Overtime, bloggers have formed a credible sense of trust with their readers. If an important and influential blogger has something positive to say about a specific product, the readers of that blog will trust him. While the goal is to reach the most influential blogger, it is not always best to attack them first. By working your way up from the bottom, it will be easier to reach the more important bloggers.

There are three important steps to reaching such a level. First, each blog has a general topic of which they focus on. The more specific to your product a blog is, the more press your product will receive. Secondly, it is important to understand what, if anything, has been said about your product in the past. With previous, positive posts, your company has a good foundation to work from. If there are negative posts, the company knows to get their side of the story on paper in order to dissuade other readers from such posts. Most importantly, a company wants to become familiar with the blog comments about their company. If a blogger sees that you read and even post some blogs of your own, that blogger sees that you are truly interested and care about your product.

For smaller companies, getting involved in a blog can be a great benefit.

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