Successful Blogs from the study

Feeds

Daily Eats, Tery Spataro

posted: October 29, 2006 8:39 PM

1.1.6 Company: Daily Eats

Blogger: Tery Spataro
Student Interviewer: Leah Hyland
Company: Mind Arrays
Blog: http://www.mindarrays.com/blog.html

Additional blogs: Daily Eats
Blog: http://www.dailyeats.com/

Tery Spataro is the founder of Mind Arrays marketing consulting, and creator and co-author of the food-related blog, Daily Eats blog.

Tery explained how she uses blogging to get out a message to her audience, “I use it for Mind Arrays to write about things that effect marketing, customer relations, focus on consumer products.” In recent posts she draws attention to a poorly thought out new commercial by web.com, which used tasteless humor, further demoralizing homeless people. I just thought we can’t go down this route as marketers; I really wanted to get people focused on that. I used a number of different ways of getting it out there.“ Tery’s posts contain opinion and a review of the industry for her readers. That opinion and review are what makes the blog a success.

Daily Eats is another blog Tery posts for. She uses Google's blogger because she thought she would gain higher readership and the assumption has paid off with extra traffic. Google is the most important search engine on the web with more people using Google than any other search engine. Google owns Blogger, a blog-authoring tool, and she believes Google might give Blogger a break in rankings.

She has asked a number of other bloggers to contribute to the Daily Eats blog. Asking people to contribute has been a successful tactic for building a highly visible blog.

Backing up an opinion with facts through research is a step Tery found important for bloggers to take in writing a post. Otherwise, Tery suggested blogging could easily be misunderstood for fact rather than opinion. Tery said, "But I think it would be good if someone said on their blog ‘this is just my opinion’.”

Addressing the success of Daily Eats blog, Tery said, "I use the stat logs to estimate how many visitors are turned into repeat visitors. I have also spent time on what pages are attracting the most visits and the amount of time for page views."

She said, "I think of a blog as a better form of a newsletter, that you easily post every day, and if you do it right you can have a fairly big readership. It achieves everything that you need, and it’s very quick. It’s not an email so it’s not clogging up mail. Different from newsletters, blog readers usually subscribe to a blog get the feeds when the blog updates."

Tery works to get other bloggers to comment on her blog, by commenting on other blogs.

She described an incident where another blog, YaGoof!, spammed Daily Eats blog, as a way of promoting the blog's sponsor. Rather than get angry, Tery took a conciliatory approach and worked with YaGoof! to get them information about appropriate blogging etiquette with regards to commenting on a blog. That olive branch approach really worked and now Tery has reviewed some of YaGoof's candy sponsors.

Some of the posts that received the most traffic and comments on Daily Eat's blog were about interesting combinations of food, for example, a Twinkie and sushi combination. Tery explained these posts were really unusual and funny.

For Mind Array's clients Tery develops a blogging strategy. A blogging strategy is similar to a PR strategy. Commenting on the reasons to blog by a company, Tery said, "Creating a sense of community, building direct relationships, and developing the right message is the right approach to developing a public blog for a company. Additionally using blogging as customer support to answer questions about your product are all good reasons to blog. Reasons not to blog include if you are going to talk only about yourself or do the hard sell for your products." Tery continued, "People really want to know what’s behind products; not just that it is manufactured and should be bought."