Once somebody has found your website by way of a search or a link, and they have clicked on your URL, they have already approved the Name of your blog: The most important aspect of internet marketing is crafting the message your blog as a whole tells a first time visitor; sometimes even before they read past the first line. This message comes from the title of your blog, the individual post title, the graphics, and the name.  Marketing has many steps, but the most important is determining what message to send and to whom.

• What is your story?
• What does your blog title say and mean?
• What does  your post title say?
• What do your graphics and message all say together when someone sees them for the very first time?
• What does your blog message say to it’s reader?

I’m going to give some very specific examples, but before I go into some real life and hypothetical examples,  I’m going to clarify something:  I’m not just talking about making your website look pretty; in fact, you can have a very successful website that is ugly or plain and still have beautiful marketing, but that look will have to play into your message, and different looks, different ideas, and different trust factors can add strength to,  or kill your ability to market your blog.

Let’s illustrate this with some hard examples:  If all the websites could all contain the same article, which one gets read, which one gets put on the social networks, gets bookmarked, gets voted for on digg.com and stumbleupon.com, and gets all the attention online?

Now I will give you a specific example of that paradox  in context to bring together the overall connection between post, blog, and what message the reader will put together from the combination of thereof.  Note that all the examples involve generalization;  however, I think you’ll understand exactly what I’m talking about with these hypothetical situations: with the question above (which one gets the attention online):

• Consider 1. a personal website with plain / limited graphics 2. a marketing companies blog with slick commercial graphic design and lots of features; and 3. a blog devoted solely to a super niche topic with very creative graphics all centered around topic X
• Let us say that all three of the above websites post an article giving the same detailed advice on topic X.
• They use the post title “The ultimate guide to topic X.”
• Now we have three websites, all with same article and the same title, which one gets read?
• Which one has the better overall message to a first time reader when you look at all the elements?
• I would say the niche website, then the commercial blog, and last the personal blog. The niche topic website has the strongest message for this type of post.
• Why?  Because the title, graphics, URL, and overall message of the niche website are all topic specific.

Ask yourself this question and you will understand the point:

If I am a consumer looking to buy a house and I do a local real estate search, do I prefer to find in one click:

1. A portal with everything I need to know about the area including local demographics, school information AND real estate information
2. Somebody trying to sell me something form a large commercial real estate company with an elaborate real estate website
3. An individual agent’s  “I am a Realtor too” website.

A good point to make again here is that Google’s algorithms (the ways they choose which page comes up on a key word search) reflect these preferences for obvious reasons.

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