Promoting Products with Blogs, Part 3

In Part 2 of this series I outlined how I decided to create two blog sites using Google's own blogspot.com for the first one, and a new domain of my own called biz-blogs.com for a series of business oriented blogs.

Once I had things set up in this way, I began the process of entering posts for promoting specific products. This process may sound a bit contrived for those of you who think blogs should be spontaneous "top of mind" journals. What I was proposing was something much more carefully structured and planned — a series of posts highlighting a range of specific features for a number of specific products. If this sounds like an "advertising campaign", that's fine with me, because that is exactly the way I decided to approach it.

When I say "highlighting a range of specific features for a number of specific products" it is important to understand this in the context of my "power linking strategy". What I am talking about here is creating links to pages within my websites that highlight specific features of the products I want to promote.

So I decided I needed to create some lists. First I needed a list of products. Second I needed a list of features, benefits, and interesting information about each of the products. And third, I needed a list of web pages where these features, benefits and information about the products can be found. When I have these I should be able to quickly put together a series of posts with lots of embedded links pointing directly at the most relevant pages within my sites.

For example:

Product: PopUp Displays
Features: Low cost, easy to set up, portable, low maintenance, low cost delivery,etc.
Links: pages highlighting each of these features.

Making the list of products is not problem. Making the list of features, benefits, and interesting tips and tricks for each product is also no problem. But finding the pages within my websites where these features, benefits and othe things are dealt with is a problem, because in many cases the pages simply don't exist.

What I discovered is that I had not structured my website(s) this way. It seems perfectly obvious that when you put a website together you should say "OK, first, what product(s) do I want to feature? And second, what are the specific features of these products?" And then set about creating pages covering these things. So you would think your website would have a page for e.g., "PopUp Displays", and then two or three or four pages focusing on specific features of popup displays.

But as I discovered, I had not really done this. Either I simply hadn't had enough time — I've been working on a large number of brand new projects over the last six months — or I hadn't felt it was necessary.

In any event, this little blog promotion effort illustrated that it is necessary, and that I had not adequately "fleshed out" my websites. Sure, I had created basic sites with product descriptions, photos, ordering information, etc. But I hadn't gone the extra mile and created the supporting pages that do the backup selling of these products. There were pages missing that should have been created — all the ones carefully and pointedly describing the most important selling features and benefits of the products I was supposed to be promoting.

As a result, before I could finish my blog posts I had to create a bunch of new web pages that I could use my "Power Links" to point to. In the end this was a good thing. But of course it meant a simple little project had just become quite a bit more involved than I had hoped it would.

Here is an example of the kind of "blog post pages" I am creating. It is a slow process, but I think this is the best way to create keyword-rich posts with the best range of embedded "power links". And in the process I will be fleshing out my most important sites — the ones with the most important products.

-- Rick
SuperCharge Your Website with Power Linking