Just two months after the launch of our OP Marketing & Social Media Blog (an earlier ideaLab project that I apparently failed to blog about...), we're celebrating some small successes.
To backtrack a bit, the blog was designed as an SEO experiment and indirect sales tool for advertising reps. Using Search Engine Optimized keywords, the posts are built to both offer free marketing advice from the sales reps and indirectly promote relevant OP products. For example, the post that discusses using geography to target the most relevant customers is immediately followed by a post featuring Yahoo! Geo-targeted advertising.
And then to drive traffic to the site, we compiled an e-mail list of current and prospective advertisers to send out a monthly Marketing Tips e-blast. Our first e-blast (which was officially sent out to advertisers yesterday), featured some clips from current posts and will redirect users to the site to read the full article. The e-blasts themselves won't actually contain any form of advertising or promotions; it's simply to offer marketing tips to our advertisers and to drive traffic back to the blog (and thus, the indirect sales tool).
And now onto our successes...
On Sunday, January 30th (happy birthday to me...), a user entered our blog from Google on the organic search term "Marketing Workshop Oakland", landing on a post from January 18th featuring an invitation to our free SEO seminar to promote Matchbin products, just in time to sign up for the workshop!
Then just this week I noticed that another user entered the site on the search term "geo targeted advertising". Out of curiousity, I then Googled "geo targeted advertising" to find our blog nestled comfortably on the first page of search results! According to Google's free keyword tool, that particular term is searched approximately 170 times per month on average. So what does that mean for us? Potentially 170 new Yahoo! customers!
