Some months ago, I was working on a blog marketing project for an old friend of mine. One of his strategies was to interact as much as possible with “quality” blogs in the same industry as a way to build notoriety among his colleagues. Considering the thousands of results tools like Google and Yahoo return when you search for specific keywords (many of the results being absolutely useless), this seemed like an interesting strategy.
Over the period of 2 months, though, posting and commenting daily on similar websites yielded a total of 3 additional regular readers. I felt bad charging him for the work, but the fact is word-of-mouth marketing on the Internet isn’t very effective. It’s a pull strategy in a universe of aggregators, feed readers, and rapid consumption services. It’s a great way to reinforce your position in the market, but not necessarily to break out from the crowd and make yourself known.
Later, I came across a website called Alltop. Alltop is “an ‘online magazine rack’ of popular topics,” containing many of the most prominent, popular, and pertinent blogs on the Internet today. I’ve found Alltop to be an incredibly useful tool – it’s a whole new spin on content indexing and aggregation, only featuring the best information that you’re looking for.
Here’s an illustration comparing the Alltop aggregation approach with Google (you can read it in context on Guy Kawasaki’s blog).
When most of us search for information with tools like Google, we’re forced to filter through the search results to find exactly what we’re looking for. Don’t get me wrong, Google is doing a great job of improving their system … but it still needs work. Alltop, on the other hand, filters the information for you. There’s no magic computer program, no fancy software – just a bunch of well-meaning individuals who take the time to screen content so you don’t have to.
I can’t speak for everyone, but my life is so busy that I value the service Alltop provides. Rather than going one-by-one to the marketing blogs, or searching Google for “marketing,” I can navigate to http://marketing.alltop.com and see the top marketing news from the top marketing websites. How could things get any easier?
