I get that you want to promote the fact you have a blog. And I see you have a lot of great stuff in there. But for the love of decent results why would you use your blog as a landing page?
Yet this seems to be a trend. I just received one of my regular emails on marketing topics, this one a newsletter on marketing to IT. Front and center they’re offering a new report on media consumption, sounds great!
Uh-oh, I see the dreaded words “download from our blog site” and I can sense what’s coming. Sure enough, I click to the site and there’s already a bunch of new posts on top of the report they told me about. At least I think it’s the one. There are a bunch of articles on different media topics, but only one has a chart. None of the entries are labelled, “IT media consumption study.”
Well, here’s a tip for marketing to marketers: we’re pushing a lot of priority deadlines, so don’t make us dig for the thing you’re promoting. But that’s exactly what sending your prospects to your blog makes people do. It points out my biggest pet peeve of blogs, they’re not designed for finding stuff quickly unless it’s a link to an article that lands right in front of you.
“The blog”:http://www.myeducatedguess.com/index.php even has the navigation that many are lacking, including search and category breakdowns and feature box. Why didn’t the report get featured there?
*What’s the use of telling people about a great resource and !@#$@@ them off at the same time?*
Anyone have successful examples of blogs as landing pages or do I rest my case?
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Calm down June – it’s only marketing! 🙂
Isn’t the problem that they linked to their HOME PAGE rather than a specific post on their blog?
I think this is a great point as many people make this mistake (thinking their current blog home page will look like that when users get there hours, days, weeks later).
If they had linked to the specific entry on their blog rather than the home page, would you have the same frustration?
This is a great point but I don’t think it’s limited to blogs. Every now and then I’ll read something interesting, click on the link, and find myself dumped on the homepage of a site. Why must I figure out how to navigate a site when I’ve already indicated what I’m interested in reading? Usually I don’t, I just shut the browser, delete the email, and move on to the next task.
You’re right. So it’s not exactly rocket science: use an anchor link! But blogs should not generally be used for landing pages, there is too much going on. A landing page needs to focus the user on completing whatever transaction (purchase, registration, subscription) your message conveyed. But in this case it would have sufficed and I would have been a happy reader as well as seeing what a great new site they have.
I share your frustration. I hate being plunked down into a blog and then not being able to find the info I want. That’s why blogs have permalinks. Bloggers should always reference the permalink, which brings you to a precise post, not the blog’s home page.
I don’t think this is limited to blogs, per se. It’s like a targeted Google ad directing you to a company’s homepage – pointless. A focused landing page is much more appropriate or (as mentioned above) the single blog post that discusses the offer.
For lazy marketers, some blog software packages offer a kludge. For example Typepad now allows you to “feature” one post at the top of the blog. This kind of thing is a way to still help point people in the right direction if you don’t want to go to the trouble of creating a landing page.
Or they just don’t think.
Even Stephen King (the author) made a similar mistake, by putting an offer to review people’s writings in his book, not thinking that people will be reading his book in 50 years to come!
I think that Blogs as a marketing tactic need to be used inside out, if you have something of value posted on a blog within the right audience, it gets passed along organicly and that’s the key. Test what you have to offer somewhere else, if it’s interesting enough and your getting a great deal of interest, message it in blogs and send them back to the stand alone page where the marketing offer resides… not the other way around… TechTarget (above) and others have it wrong in my book… blogs are conversations, not sales pitches… I read blogs to uncover great sales pitches as advised but someone (or some blog) I can relate to.