Blogs are Marketing Tools
If you’re not blogging, you’re behind. Blogging is a great marketing tool, and a great way to interact with potential or returning customers.
I’ve been blogging regularly since 1998, and I’ve a learned a lot since I started. My first blogs were like most people’s, I suspect. They were just pointless ramblings about stuff that I wanted to talk about. It was all horribly written and I’m sure I was the only reader. Well, my brother read something once, I think…
After a few false starts, a lot of learning, and a lot of writing, I started to produce blogs that people read. Not only did they read, but they subscribed, commented, and kept coming back for more. Today, I run three blogs, each with their own focus.
That’s what I want you to pay attention to: Focus. I write my blogs for my audience, not for me. That’s what you’ll want to do if you hope to create a successful blog. Readers want to get something in return for their time and effort. Your blog has to give that to them, or they won’t return.
Here are the three blogs I currently run:
Cube Escape - This is an entrepreneur and small business blog, focused on helping people transition from working as an employee to running their own company. I post to the blog regularly, sharing tips, tricks, and recommendations all centered around the site’s theme. And that theme is centered around the reader.
Outdoor Survival Info - I started this blog in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It’s focus is to help people learn how to prepare for disasters, and how to survive if they find themselves in the middle of an emergency. A little bit of outdoor fun is thrown into the mix as well. I write articles for this blog, but I also act as an editor. I find articles written by others that I can post to the site. It’s all about publishing content the readers will find useful and informative.
The Pen of Caleb - This is the fun blog. Fun, but it does have a reader-centric purpose. You see, I love stories. I love all kinds of stories in all kinds of mediums — books, movies, and video games, to be specific. So I write reviews of stories I enjoy (and maybe some I don’t). This helps the reader by telling them about stories they may want to enjoy themselves.
Do you have a blog that’s lingering, and you don’t know what to do with it? Maybe you don’t have one at all and want to start one? I can help you start, maintain, or polish a blog. Your blog should work to market yourself, your products, or your service.
Contact Me today for a quote.
Editor of Three Email Newsletters
I am the editor of three email newsletters. I both write and find articles to publish to each. Each subscriber is given a premium bonus for signing up, and all emails comply with U.S. CAN-SPAM laws.
Here are the sites that have the newsletters:
- Cube Escape: Entrepreneur-focused blog. The newsletter’s theme is business opportunity, entrepreneurship, and genereal business. It is published weekly.
- BDR Gear: An online shop focused on emergency survival gear. This newsletter is more of a product announcement message, but it also pushes selected products. Reviews are also included. This newsletter is published twice a month.
- Outdoor Survival Info: A blog about surviving and thriving in the outdoors. The newsletter acts as a compliment to the blog, offering content not published on the site. It includes articles, product reviews, and survival tips. It’s published weekly.
Opt-in newletters (as these all are), are great marketing tools — they help to foster a relationship with your customers. If you’ve been thinking of creating an email newsletter, or if the one you have now needs some work, I can help.
Contact Me today for a quote.
Classic Messenger Bag - A Review Article
The classic canvas messenger bag. How does it measure up as a “get home bag?” In this review, I will be describing the basic features of the bag, and relating those features to my own use of it for carrying gear. I asked the question, “How will this work as a gear bag for use in emergencies?” Here is what I learned.
The first thing I noticed about this bag is that it’s pretty big. For a shoulder bag, it seems like it can hold enough gear to help get you home, or at least to a safer location during an emergency. This bag is an old-fashioned messenger bag, and as such is missing some of the bells and whistles that come on modern bags. But this lack of “modern” features doesn’t detract from this bag’s general usefulness. What you have is a simple bag you can use to carry some basic gear.
The bag is olive drab canvas with a two inch wide non-padded shoulder strap. The strap is stitched to the bag through some reinforcing canvas, so it’s going to stand up to some abuse. The canvas isn’t a hard, burlap-like material, but a soft canvas, similar to jeans. The main compartment doesn’t have a specific enclosure, so it relies on the Velcro flap to hold everything in. The flap attaches to two pockets, which are sized perfectly for carrying an MREs.
If you need to put small items in the bag, I would suggest you do a couple of different things. Inside the main storage compartment, there is a small zippered pocket you can use for small loose items such as spare keys, a multi-tool, or similar. Larger loose items, such as paracord or a backpack first aid kit can go in one of the smaller pockets on the side of the bag. There is one pocket on each side, and a lone snap to secure your items.
Like most bags, this one isn’t waterproof. It can withstand a little bit of rain, but if you’re out in a downpour, your stuff is going to get wet. If you have anything in the bag that doesn’t interact well with water, put it in a zippered plastic bag. That’s a standard thing to do with your gear, so make sure you do it. Matches, pocket survival guides, etc., should all be in plastic bags. This will make your bag easier to organize, your gear will stay in place better, and it will stay dry.
Overall, I think the bag is a fine candidate for a “get home bag.” It’s got room enough for a little bit of gear and some food and water. That should be plenty to get you home, or to some other safe location in case of an emergency. The wide strap – even though it is not padded – makes the bag easy to carry. I filled it up with some books to make it heavy and walked around with it. The wide strap helps tremendously. Even with the bag filled with heavy items, you’ll be able to carry it a long way if you have to.
If you’re looking for a small bag to carry some survival gear in your car or keep at the office, this simple shoulder bag will do the trick. It’s light and durable, and it has enough storage space to carry the gear you’ll need to get through the first stages of a disaster.
[Note: This is a marketing-oriented article that reviews a piece of merchandies, but then links to the item's product page -- an online survival gear shop -- in the resources section of the page. It was published in an article directory.
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