Just recently I've had the pleasure of interviewing Robert Scoble, the co-author of a hit blogging book, Naked Conversations, on marketing with blogs.

In the first part of the interview Robert covers the key basic elements of "why blog for marketers", how blogs will help you improve your sales results and the 5 things that make a blog a blog ... from the marketing perspective of course.

Listen to the interview here (MP3 or WMA) or read the short recap below. [BTW - the recording quality was pretty bad this time 'round]

And then don't forget to tune back-in in a few days to hear Robert counter my "what's so special about blogs" challenges, as well as other marketing topics, such as "should a blog be on a separate domain or part of your corporate website".

And of course, don't forget to get his book:) Haven't received mine from Amazon yet (yeah, no over-night shipping to Central Europe), but from what I hear it totally rocks.

Why Marketers Should Blog

a] Bloggings helps you with your Google rankings.

b] Blogging helps you win over customers, by providing them with more information than your competitors ... and of course by helping you get more Google juice.

c] Good blogging generates inbound links and drives traffic to you.

d] The key is in talking with your customers, sharing your knowledge and becoming a though-leader. Conversations with your market are the key.

e] Blogging helps improve the product. Robert talks about his own experiences of doing his entire book writing project on his blog, facilitating customer feedback while writing chapters.

The 5 Things That Make a Blog a Blog

1. Blogs are easy to publish and update frequently, by anyone anywhere. No tech expertise required.

2. Discoverability. Blogs make use of pinging to notify the search engines and news aggregation websites to help the marketer make his content discoverable without lifting a finger.

3. Conversationality. Instantly see how people are reacting to your content (via trackbacks, comments, search engines etc.) and continue the conversation.

4. Permanent links to individual posts make it easy to share your stories, articles, conversations and data.

5. Blogs have RSS feeds. And if you've been reading this site for any ammount of time, there's really no more to add.

The Interview

Interview title: Audio Interview With Robert Scoble on Marketing With Blogs #1

Interview duration: 10:50 minutes

Download: .wma [10MB]

Download: .mp3 [2.5MB]

Podcast RSS feed link:
http://www.marketingstudies.net/interviews/rssinterviews.xml