Just tell them that the same marketing tecniques that is used in the offline world applies to blogging.

You still need to have:
- Mission and vision statatement;
- SWOT and PEST analysis
- Satisfy a need
- Kaizen (continuous improvement) approach.

The only difference is that the barriers to entry in blogging are low. This means that there is more competition.

I will actually be at this conference, and I look forward to hearing your speech!

As an Internet marketer with a blog I would like to learn about additional ways to expose my blog, get more visitors/traffic, and build readership.

I would be interested in any tools I could use to increase exposure, advanced techniques for getting my RSS feeds exposed. Perhaps the best places to publicize my feed to.

Also, would like to know if social bookmarking is worth having on my site, or is it a waste of time.

Anything of that nature. :)

Any additional tricks or tips to getting people back to my blog or getting referrals would be great info. too!

Darren, as far as talking to them about blogging, I think the folks in the audience who will get the most from your talk will be the creative visionaries, not the annoying “internet market-y types”.

When you started blogging, it was because you loved it, not because you thought you could make a quick buck. Your business sprung from your passion for blogging, so it is much easier for you to have an air of authenticity on your blog and keep a thriving community, even though your blog has advertisements and affiliate products.

The challenge many internet marketers face is that they didn’t start blogging because they loved it and would do it for free anyway. They created their blogs with the purpose of selling products, and for them it’s an uphill battle to convince folks of their authenticity, which makes it challenging to cultivate a community. Also, they may not even realize that it’s important to have a community or an honest dialogue with readers in order to have business success.

So one thing that might be interesting to talk about is the soul behind a blog and how a blogger who happens to be an internet marketer can find purpose, outside of making money, for his blog. Your own story would be a huge inspiration to them.

Nick – sorry but it’s not a public thing. It was open to people to come to (paid) but I’m pretty sure it’s sold out now.

Thanks for the props :-)

there is a lot of good advice on the other comments already. The only thing I want to add is: tell them stories.

Facts and numbers are boring and people dont take them home. Stories, however, is something they will easily understand and remember.

Is your presentation open to the public? I am an avid reader of your blog and would love to come and hear you in person. Where will you be presenting?

Another site uses its blog for editorial commentary to help establish the company as an expert resource in the metal fabricating community. Two more blogs that I write personally are designed to deliver event and product information to subscribers, hopefully encouraging them to visit my site and buy something.

In my humble opinion, I’d comment that the blog is not a marketing tool in itself but SUPPORTS existing marketing tools (such as a front-end like Yaro said). Any blog that is filled with marketing sales pitches or hype will lose it’s readership pretty quickly. As you eluded to, the blog is the way to get to know the person behind the sales hype. In a traditional setting, such as a face-to-face in-person sales, it’s easier to judge the person and establish how genuine and trustworthy they are…even if it’s just intuition. However, given the ease of deception via the internet, building this trusting relationship is next to impossible based purely upon sales pitches and hype alone.

What directions should the marketers take on their blog? That depends on their product but the most successful ones that I’ve come across use a “interactive-newsletter” style that presents the latest company, product and market news (like a traditional newsletter) but allows the web 2.0 interactivity via comments, forums, competitions,multi-media (point #3 of your presentation).

But I’ve found that the cornerstone of effective internet marketing blogs is the “personality” behind it. Even with a plethora of interactivity, internet consumers would prefer a personal-style in the bog rather than a faceless , sterile company-orientated blog.

Perfect example: Yaro Starak!

Kumiko
xo

On a slightly different angle, what about the PR types and online marketers who email with requests for the blogger to feature their products?

My “pet peeve” in this regard is when a PR shill has not taken half-a-minute to check out the blog and make sure it’s a good fit for their product. (Example #1, you mention “fitness” briefly in passing, and then get inundated with press releases for weight-loss products – not of particular interest. Example #2, you get a request to beta-test the latest greatest thing, spend some time exchanging emails about it, only to learn it’s for USA only – when a quick glance at the front-page profile should have made it clear to the PR hack that the blogger’s not American. ) — Time-wasters!

To be fair, though – the idea of interacting with Other People’s Blogs for marketing purposes (whether to present a product for review, to engage a blogger as an affiliate, or to purchase a traditional ad) is still quite a new territory for most marketers, and it’s possible that the bad old rep of blogs and bloggers is still hanging on…

I do get that sense that a great many (less sophisticated or perhaps less experienced) marketers are taking a shotgun approach to pitching the blogs — i.e., shoot wide at a big target, and hope for a number of hits.

But surely, that can’t be the most effective use of their marketing efforts??

I started in CompuServe forums in 1993, moved on to the Usenet, an email discussion list, and finally newsletters. I called this “Internet marketing” because I didn’t know what else to call it, but it’s very different from the “us to you” model that you so dislike, and it got rave reviews from the customers who participated. (Not surprising, since almost everything I did was the direct result of a suggestion from one or more of them.) If I was doing the same sort of job today (offers welcome!), I would use blogs, alongside other online communication tools that may be more familiar and comfortable to your audience.

So instead of just talking about blogs, you might want to broaden your talk into how to bring the (very desirable) conversational aspects of blogs into other kinds of marketing.

Feel free to drop by http://www.beginningwithi.com/whatido/ details on what I did, and verbatim customer reactions.

In order to help them understand that their current overhype truly does have the effect of annoying bees buzzing around our heads, you’d have to offer them alternatives that would help them get to their goal more effectively.

Succinctly, your job, should you choose to accept it, is to:
1. Let them in on the fact that the “spaghetti on the wall” approach doesn’t “stick” anymore. In other words, tell them nicely that they’re currently having the opposite effect they want to have.
2. Offer better ways they can market, with less hype, ways that would survive the dreaded delete button.
3. Remind them that the marketer with the most sales is the one who takes the time to build relationships.
4. Suggest that they take a cue from bloggers–the most winning approach these days is to be real.

Things to remember if you are anxious. Put simply you run a hugely succesful and well read blog – you know probably far more about the mechanics of blogging and the etiqutte than anyone else invited. A good deal of what you know, you probably think is obvious – but just because it is to you doesn’t mean it is obvious to others. You are taking along knowledge abour the one subject they are crying out to learn about.

You will rock, I’m sure.