Search engine visibility is, ultimately, about the successful conversion of your readers to consumers of your product or service. Properly optimized sites flood you with traffic but how you handle those potential customers from there determines if they subscribe to your RSS feed and become a “regular”.

Communities of Passion

“Communities of passion” is an excellent phrase used by Fred Greene of Smarter Podcasts that describes those groups of enthusiasts that tend to congregate around the object of their passion. Examples would be skate boarders, surfers, bicyclists, amateur photographers, or, in Fred’s example, golfers. If you are a retailer who has a product embraced by passionate users, podcast marketing is increasingly becoming one of the most productive blog marketing methods available for you to showcase your brand.

Edwin Watts Golf is showcased as an excellent example. As interviewer Paul Colligan of Profitable Podcasting explains, consumers want to learn “how to be better consumers” of the products and pursuits that they love. Producing podcast content that instructs an “enthusiast” on the wisest ways to invest in their passion, converts them into a loyal customer.

Become the Content

What makes Edwin’s approach to sponsorship different,however, is they signed on with the understanding that they wouldn’t hawk a thing, but instead , became part of the content. In that way they could position themselves as “thought leaders” for the game of golf by answering listener submitted questions while covering all of the newest developments and techniques in the game of golf.

Edwin’s 15 minute spot becomes a seamless part of the entire golf Podcast, allowing them to provide relevant info to the listener and encouraging their listeners conversion to customer by virtue of the value of the information given, not by “being in their face”.

One listener emailed the golf retailer to declare that they were making all of their golf purchases from them simply because of the value they provided with their weekly Podcasts. That’s a convert! The campaign has been so successful that Edwin has signed on as sponsor for another 52 shows. Since the podcast ranks at the top of YouTubes sports categories, you can imagine the exposure Edwin is getting.

If you market to a “community of passionate users”, podcasting is a means to make them passionate about you as well.

(Source)

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Tags: conversion, marketing_methods, minute_spot, podcast, podcast-marketing, search_engine_visibility, thought_leaders

This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 9:35 am and is filed under Podcast Marketing, Search Engine Visibility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.