Internet Librarian: Marketing the Weblog

Marketing the Weblog
Jill S. Stover, Virginia Commonwealth University

Jill tells us that marketing is not what we think it is: things like aggressive sales and spam are examples of bad marketing, not the kind of marketing she promotes.

Marketing has five parts: target market, product, price, place, and promotion.  What you know about your target market drives what you do in the other four (the 4 Ps). 

Questions to ask before you start: What do you have to offer?  Use SWOT (a way to assess planning, etc.).  Who are your readers and what do they need?  Who’s in the blogosphere?  Are they actually your audience? 

She also encourages breaking out your audience into even smaller audiences.  Manageable segments are distinct from others, homogenous within the group, “profitable,” measurable, and reachable.  You don’t have to just segment based on age, try segmenting based on interests (mystery lovers, gamers, photographers). 

Product: You need good content, in terms of subject matter, updates, uniqueness, and appropriate voice/tone.  Resources to help with the development of your product (your library’s blog): “Lose the Jargon, Voice Your Brand” in Business Week and Writing for the Web by Jakob Nielsen.  The design needs to reflect the content and audience.  Design resources: Webmonkey and ColorBlender.

Price: It’s free!  Whoo hah!

Place: Have an RSS feed.  Where do you place a link to your blog?  It depends on who your target audience is and what kind of other resources you’re providing online.  Explain the rules for syndicating your content to your readers.  For more ideas, see the RSS4Lib Blog. 

Promotion: Decisions depend on your target audience
Don’t reinvent the wheel
Involve your readers and your staff

She also encouraged us to think about what success for our blog means to us.  Lots of posts?  Lots of comments?  Lots of visits?  Lots of trackbacks?  She encourages us to review the other blogs that are already out there to see what our fellow-librarians are doing.  Finally, she tells us that we should be reading blogs by librarians and for librarians. 

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