Mover Mike

The Business Journal in Portland, Oregon dated April 29, 2005, has a special section called The Marketing Industry. Today there were two articles about using blogs in marketing. The first, Portlanders turn to blogs as cheap marketing tools by Jodi Helmer, focuses on the Bev and Mike Landfair. In order to boost Landfair Furniture + Design Gallery, the "bricks and mortar" business, the Landfairs started an online store Landfair Furniture Annex and are using a new marketing tool, a blog, Landfair Furniture, to drive traffic to the online store and boost awareness of the Landfair Furniture Gallery.

The Landfairs are among a handful of locals pioneering the use of blogs as business marketing tools. Those pioneers are finding that blogs - online journals that are updated regularly - are easy to establish and inexpensive to maintain, and they have the potential to reach a large customer base.

Besides the Landfairs, Charles and Jennifer Turner, brokers with Prudential NW Properties, added a blog as an extension of their web marketing. "We saw a blog as another avenue of marketing ourselves," says Charles Turner. Portland lawyer Charles R Schrader uses a blog to reinforce his reputation as an expert in construction labor law.

The blog averages 356 hits per day and also appears as the No. 1 ranked werb site on Yahoo...for the search term "construction labor law".

The second article, Blogs restore personal element to marketing by Toby Bloomberg, President of Diva Marketing.

In a world that spins too fast to even know your next-door neighbor, blogs help re-create the "corner grocery store relationship" that even small businesses lost with the onset of mass marketing strategies.

Bloomberg avers that:

Blogs build brands through ongoing natural conversations.

Blogs increase credibility.

Blogs provide content for traditional Web sites by linking to the blog. (She uses the Landfairs to support this point.)

Two excellent articles and we are proud to be used as examples. Get your copy at the newstand or look online, some time next week at The Business Journal.