The B2B Blog has been live for around 18 months now. Although many blogs have been around a lot longer, it is the past 2 years that have seen the biggest increase in the number of blogs, as web 2.0 grows at a phenomenal rate. This article from Research World magazine, written by Poornima Vijayan, looks at different types of blogs that are out their.
Mining For A Living
Poornima Vijayan
Market Research World – May 2007-05-22The inundation of facts, data, figures, opinions and insights that blogs deliver daily are unsystematic and chaotic, yet immensely valuable in the right context. To monitor and capture information from this chaos, we can use a combination of text mining, data mining, linguistic and statistical analysis, and latent semantic indexing techniques. A computer program hunts out blogs and explores the relevant content such as content and social network information, product likes and dislikes, recent purchases, opinions and attitudes which we can structure for more systematic insights.
Blogs give us a source of real-time information, but this means that market research firms need to develop an internal structure that can react at the same speed.
Here are some examples of the most popular blog models:
Advertising: as a general revenue model it’s clearly the most popular. Adsense has made it possible for even the most low-traffic, un-commercial blog to make money, but professional bloggers have taken contextual advertising to new heights with seriously targeted blogs and well integrated ads.
Affiliate Marketing: almost a subset of advertising but when well implemented this is marketing not advertising! A typical affiliate-marketing-based blog will either be a niche product/product groups or specialised audience blog and can generate sales by sending traffic to selected merchants via in-post text links, banners and special offers.
Consultancy: gurus in fields relevant to market research and consultancy can extend their reach and generate leads for their consultancy offerings by blogging on their areas of expertise. Pr, market research and marketing agencies as well as web-based services providers offer business blog consulting.
PR vehicle: Usually compliments existing models. Spreading the name of your company or products on a blog can create a great way for customers, potential customers, other bloggers and the press to interact with your company, its products or services.
Subscription: Market researchers can publish an ‘expert blog’, luring in subscribers by publishing a teaser with more detailed blog posts/reports or sections of the site available by subscription only.
Traffic: Make sure your titles and headlines convey what you want to say, and make it search-engine-friendly. Ways to drive more traffic are to comment on other successful blogs in similar or related areas, or to use incentives to encourage people to participate.
