Consider what a blog plus a few bucks can do
Brian Carroll, E-Business Editor -- Furniture Today, January 22, 2006
Gregory Sullivan is an entrepreneur in Massachusetts who started Sippican Cottage Furniture a few years ago. He'll ship his period furniture anywhere in the contiguous United States, and he bench makes everything himself from his south coast workshop in Marion.
Nothing unusual so far. What's unusual is how he has leveraged a blog, a few bucks and some fairly primitive page rank strategies to move toward the top of search engine listings and sell a bunch of furniture.
And what he's done can serve as good lessons for small furniture companies doing battle in the Internet age.
First, the blog. Seeing the explosive growth in the "blogosphere," or that part of the Internet used by bloggers and blog readers, Sullivan started his own blog, one that chronicles the life of an independent furniture maker and provides news from Sippican Cottage.
What does his blog accomplish? First, it establishes a personal, direct connection between Sullivan and his customers, and potential customers. This is why the blog format has been embraced by top executives at such corporate giants as Budget rental cars and General Motors.
Second, the fresh content and inbound and outbound hyperlinks collectively raise Sullivan's profile among the algorithm-driven searches conducted by Google, Yahoo and other search engine biggies. Third, the blog gives Sullivan a "publication" on which to sell advertising himself, although he hasn't done that yet.
"I did much of the (blog) writing to leverage page rank in search engines," Sullivan said. "I've never paid a dime for search engine placement."
It worked. Search "cottage furniture" and Sippican Cottage comes up in the Top 15 findings at Google (12th), Yahoo (2nd), MSN (3rd) and AOL (15th).
Meanwhile, a few bucks have netted Sullivan better-than-direct-mail response rates on ads placed on a few blogs that others write. Specifically, for $150, Sullivan generated more than a half-million page views and approximately 360 ad clickthroughs on just three blog ads. He tripled his Web site traffic in two months, and the clickthrough rate on his ads was about 3%.
Sullivan said he likes blog ads because they're so inexpensive (as little as $25 per week) and because they typically reach an educated, sophisticated potential buyer, a profile consistent with that of the blogosphere in general. He placed a few of the ads on blogs written by lawyers, and he timed their placement to coincide with announcements of Supreme Court nominees, news guaranteed to drive traffic to those blogs.
"It got me wide exposure," he said. "I got some nice e-mails from fairly well-known pundits and a great deal of free publicity."
I thank Gregory for sharing his story. In the spirit of the open-source movement, and another sign of his savoir-faire, Sullivan said the inbound links and traffic are enough "wages for training my competitors."
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