Posted by: Adarsh – Search engine battler on June 12th, 2007

An online florist doesn’t mean that we exist in the virtual world. Each one of us at Arena is a social animal, with a desire to share our experiences with our customers and an eagerness to grab attention. That’s how we realised the importance of blogging as a new form of communication to share our thoughts on running the business with customers. You guessed it right…time for a new kid on the blo(g)ck!

I have been thinking over for the last couple of weeks on what I should write for my first post. As Will noted earlier, I am a recent recruit at Arena Flowers and haven’t had any interesting experiences of setting up Arena or initiating the marketing or operational activities. I walked into a completely well nourished organisation with everything perfectly in place. I am no wordsmith to stitch up wickedly witty stories about the world of flowers. As a final nail in the coffin, Will - Our priority juggler has already set my nickname for the blog as Search Engine Battler, leaving me with no option but to write about what I do at Arena – Search Engine Optimisation.

To begin with, we market Arena’s distinctive products through a variety of channels. However, ArenaFlowers.com accounts for all of our sales (even our customer services team uses our website to place orders, when you call our number), primarily because we are an online business. As such, search engine marketing provides many significant advantages to online florists like us. We rely on the power of internet to help draw visitors to our website. Both search engine optimisation and paid search advertising strategies play an integral role in Arena’s marketing mix. Of course, going into detail about how we manage our marketing mix may be giving away too many business secrets and raising unnecessary competition in an already crowded industry.

Nevertheless, one of the newest forms of SEO strategy we have adapted is blogging. Ever since we entered the blogosphere to offer an alternative information channel about our business to customers, we have been mulling over how we could make the blog unique and mindb(l)ogglingly vigorous and vibrant, so that we have hundreds of hits and lots of comments. A little research on this indicated that one of the many ways to increase blog traffic is by creating/joining a community of bloggers with genuine related interests. This initiated a search for bloggers with ‘genuine related interests’.

Blogs, like human beings, are unique. Each one has its own perspective. There are millions of blogs with thousands being created and nearly half of them not worth the visit. But some are truly incredible offering great insights into a variety of issues including everyday living to managing a business. Over the last couple of weeks, we read through many blogs and carefully identified a few which we thought would be of relevance to our business and we sent out a request to editors to either review our services or to enrich information on our blog pages.

Successful bloggers are hard to network with, primarily because they get numerous similar requests. But we did manage to attract attention of a few blog editors who were happy to network with us. But as it turned out, instead of them guest writing for us, we were given an opportunity to guest write for their blogs, which is great. But that means, we will have to dedicate more grey matter in the already mind pressed environment of blogging for our site…Net(blog)working is hard work!

 

 

Filed under: Marketing, Matters Webby on June 12th, 2007

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