“Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.”
Theodore Roosevelt

In internet terms, high frequency with a credible, editorial message is “speaking often.” To paraphrase the great Teddy Roosevelt, “Speak often and carry a big stick.”

“The big stick” is consistent use of factual, organic content, carrying citations and references for credibility. In other words, editorial, newsy content that goes beyond the commercial messages of your core brands, and explores all of the interests of your audiences.

Blogs and their more sophisticated online counterpart, zines, are the number one tactic proven to acquire new leads and build and maintain ongoing relationships with potential and existing buyers. An eMarketer researc project, titled B2B Lead Generation: Using Content to Acquire Consumers, show the dominance of credible blogs and zines over all other content. All the identified contributing factors to B2B and B2C success are credible, knowledge-based content: blogs and zines, webinars and events, white papers, videos, research reports, user-peer created content and podcasts. Blog Posts and zines are ranked number one by 39% of respondents, versus white papers at 31%, video at 23% and Podcasts at 6%.

Why Regular and Frequent Content is Important
“Softly” means, through our zines, we speak often–normally every single day throughout the year—to build authority, credibility and relationships with audiences. “Why daily?” is the first question we are often asked.

Audiences expect it. If they are to be encouraged to return to your brand, they need to be exposed to it in a credible, “soft” way as often as possible. This doesn’t mean content should blatantly promote your brand. It means we write content of interest to audiences to build the relationship, and “softly” convert them to loyal followers of brand. Every media outlet has an agenda, from the New York Times to CNN to Blogertize Zines. Ultimately, our agenda is to build your brand in a positive way, and increase opportunities for your business. To do this, we deliver news of interest to your audiences.

Authority is Critical
Nearly everyone respects an authority on a subject. Publishing a Zine platform, and distributing or syndicating content widely, builds your authority. Ultimately, a simple Google search will carry your ranks to the top on many of your keywords, simply because you’ve been speaking, as an expert, every day, on those keyword topics.

Zines are the ultimate form of credible blog, carrying the authority persona of news magazines with the dynamism of a blog. They are less personal, and more topical and newsy than personal or corporate blogs. Blogertize’s core anchor is a client-published zine format, supported by syndicated content to social media, other blogs and mainstream media. By choosing a topic of interest to your audiences, rather than a zine focused exclusively on your product, you reach out to and capture more engaged audiences ready to buy your product or service. It’s a matter of authority. However, in Zine tactics, daily content is mandatory for success.

The Problem with Frequency
Two issues often arise from the proposition of daily content. Many clients ask “But what if there’s no news that day?” Our answer is, regardless of niche, “there is always news every day, hour, minute.”

Audiences also want expert features, how-tos, relevant interesting content, opinions — not just news. This is why daily content is not a struggle when you have a professional and large team of trained journalists, writers and editors working on your “speak often” campaign.

Search Engines Look for Frequency
The more often you post content, both on your own sites/ zines and in syndicated wide-distribution, the more often Google, Yahoo and other search engines will index your site, not only for relevancy, but for up-to-the-minute news. Search Engines value current information, and internet news tends to be more “up to date” than, for example, a Newspaper.

Daily content also increases quality and quantity of content on your site. This is what search engines look for. It takes time to earn status as a “trusted site” with Google and the others, but it’s an investment in time and content that is critical to online success.

This qualified traffic is earned at two anchoring Blogertize Zine formats: the web zine and the eZine (and optionally, the social zine)—published on your behalf. Original, quality content is the secret to Blogertizing. Distributing it widely in targeted, meaningful sites and locations is also important to building a credibility strategy.

Blogertize is a convergence point, gathering the beneficial targeted traffic from multiple sources, from social media to search engines to portals to media outlets to blogs to zines to newswires. Blogertize’s convergence channels qualified traffic credibly and loyally to your brand.

“The truth must dazzle gradually.”

Emily Dickinson

Citations Earn Credibility

Citations on scholarly articles, research papers and news stories create instant credibility. Our content is always well-accepted because we practice this high standard of content creation: research, citations and references with meaningful links to additional information.

Breaking the News Creates Authority

Also important to a reputation-build as expert in your niche is an ability to “break the news”, a key plank in authority reputation. We’re not referring to Watergate-scope or big news breaks, but being the first to bring up or speak about a topic in your niche gives you the authority of firsts.

Blogertize, through qualified, credible, journalist-quality content, draws qualified traffic from other platforms and channels them to your proposition.

In brand terms, the market leader is often the inventor, or “first” in their industry. Brands earn respect as the inventor. Apple earns respect for iTunes and iPods and iPads — either firsts or perceived to be firsts.

The same is emphatically true of “breaking news.”

Featuring Personalities

One way to “break news” with authority on a regular basis is the interview format. Interviews of high profile people in your niche or aligned industries, or just personalities of interest to your target audience, give you a sense of “breaking” new ground, even if it’s not hard news. Breaking news may not happen daily, but there’s no reason we can’t feature an important person of interest regularly. People love people. This is an important Blogertize tactic.

The Importance of Your Own Publication to Credibility

Pushing out alone is not enough for success. You will push out content with the goal of pulling back active, engaged, qualified audiences. To achieve this, however, content must also be based on the values of your target audiences first, the brand second.

To achieve credibility “Your persona must be believable and based on values with which your target audience can empathize.”

The Persona Principle, Simon & Schuster, Derek Armstrong and Kam Wai Yu

The zine earns its own social members, content subscribers and unique visitors, referring the appropriate qualified traffic to your brand.

The eZine pushes out this content weekly to an opt-in subscriber base (see illustration), highly qualified for your brand proposition. Content is automatically pushed out to the key social media, to custom pages for the zine on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and others. Human distribution ensures content is also syndicated to high quality news sites, editorial magazines, broadcasters, and important blogs.

Feature stories are pushed out to newswire services for syndicated pickup and broader exposure on news sites, media outlets and blogs. The net effect is very wide total reach, which pulls back the most qualified audiences to your brand as subscribers to our Zines.See the pull back effect here on our “Blogertize Pull Model”>>

“Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality.”

G.K. Chesterton

Earned reads, as we call content-driven tactics, are vastly more valuable than paid advertising exposures.

In data from eMarketer, research showed that earned media helps companies “build longer-term effects and increased brand awarenesss, purchase consideration and brand favorability.” The study found that when consumers were exposed to earned reads such as Social Media, revenue per order increased to $280.71 from $206.66 for paid exposures alone.

Exposures Versus “Engaged Reach”

There are two ways to look at reach. First, is the advertising model, which is the paid-for model. In advertising and marketing terms, reach is defined by Nielsen Media as “the unduplicated number of individuals or households exposed to an advertising medium at least once during the average week for a reported time period. It is interchangeable with Cumulative Audience and Net Reach.” Typically, you budget this reach in cost per thousand (CPM) reached in your audience. Reach in non-targets should be excluded.

The second way to view reach is in the dynamic of the web and social tapestry. Although reach can still be thought of in terms of exposures, web is a more interactive. At Blogertize, we focus on what we call “Engaged Reach.” The goal of Blogertize campaigns is to increasingly engage audiences in activity: actual purchases, inquiries from audiences, return visits, commenting, bookmarking, forwarding content, social interaction, “Likes” on Facebook, tweets of our content. This requires the content-based model of generating exposures.

Like “Earned Reads” versus “Paid Exposures”, Engaged Reach adds more value to your investment, and contains the self-sprouting seed of brand-controled viral activity online.

Earned Reads Versus Exposures and Going Viral

Exposures do not amount to reads. Major media, ad agencies and marketers simply don’t know if an exposure adds up to an actual read of the content.

Organically generated (also called Natural) inbound traffic to your content, driven by search engine results, assure the read. At least a part of your content was read, proven by the search, link click and time on the page. This is a valuable exposure that can lead to three outcomes:

Audience is fully engaged and inquires further or acts as desired by your brand.
Audience is not engaged, in which case they’re likely unqualified, but at least they read your material, and — potentially — passed on the information to associates. This is why relevant content is vital.
Audience participation goes viral due to a tight alignment of strong, relevant content, and a trending interest in key audiences. This is the sweet spot, where brands go positive and viral online.

Analyzing Value

Clearly, the value of an Earned Read is substantially higher than a paid exposure. Generally, earned reads are qualified, since they came off of keyword searches driven by that need. The potential for a full read, activity, inquiry or sale are vastly higher.

In content-driven models, you generally source your own content (hire writers, use internal and external writers, freelance talent) and organize and distribute it strategically — in a way that will meaningfully drive qualified and engaged traffic to your proposition.

The problem is you need daily content, and that makes the cost somewhat prohibitive. If you hire writers (typical average 30 cents per word for professional copywriters), or a team salaried writers, your costs might limit you to an insignificant volume of quality content to make a difference. Even with the content, you’d need the distribution model, and editors to manage the campaign.

Blogertize Makes it Cost Effective

We have access to hundreds of quailty writers in all fields, and many editors, distribution experts, SEO teams who practice White Hat or non-spam SEO — generally content-driven methods and natural links — and our unique anchor platforms as Social Zines. We bundle these into flat rate packages based on daily content.

You Are What You Publish
The Blogertize method helped make hundreds of brands visible and credible online. The secret? You become the publisher.

For this compelling reason, an increasingly popular option in your marketing mix should include becoming a publisher. This method, pioneered by Blogertize and Persona Corp in 1997, is the gold standard of branded online publishing, not only for visibility, but also for credibility.

By filtering through quality content, and other techniques, Blogertize pulls qualified audiences to your proposition, brand or company.

Blogertize becomes your outsourced publishing arm, engaged to present niched and featured topical information: news, consumer reviews, industry news and general stories of interest to your audiences. We publish an arms-length branded online social zine, combining daily Webzine with weekly ezine, social media and tie-ins to dedicated branded sites on Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, YouTube and all the major sources of active audiences.

By reporting on topics your audiences care about — without directly selling your product or service — we are able to filter your audiences, connecting them subtly and surely to your brand and offering.

All Blogertize Zines (which include social zines, webzines, and ezines) start as a core news or special interest blog-platform zine, which we call a star site (a metaphor with the main site as a star, at the center of an orbiting system of supportive “planetary” media). The star site, here shown in the inset as bottom image, is invested with brand and original content on a theme of interest to target audiences, related to your niche target audience. In this example, Condo.ca’s home star site — targeted at condominium prospects who value a downtown lifestyle — is surrounded by various custom Condo.ca pages on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and press wire services, analogous to planets. Each of the planetary sites enjoy their own views and subscribers, and feed in a network back to the main solar site. The net result is a wide footprint in specific target audiences, wide exposure in high qualified visibility, and considerable benefits in terms of SEO and “easy searchability” on the world wide web.

What Exactly is a Blogertize Zine?
Blogertize publications are genuine online content news or niche sites with arms-length editorial teams and journalists — normally combined with a strong participatory social component. You, the client, are the publisher, you assign a mission — for example a focus on a broad niche, such as autos and condos, or a narrow niche, such as engineering designers who spec parts in equipment.

Mainstream media sources, for example, will never give advertisers their subscriber lists, but they do allow access to them on a paid-per-exposure basis (advertising, direct marketing, etc.) With Blogertize, we have “full-time” access to subscribers.

The secondary mission of a Blogertize campaign is to control the message. Editors of all arms-length publications, including major news sources, filter your message — if they even run the story at all. In most cases, this is to the disadvantage of you. With a Blogertize Zine, we maintain the respectability of credible news source, but focus on a mission that is friendly and supportive of your proposition, to ensure we control the message.