If you’re into deals you may have heard of Woot. The daily deal site has been in the news in the past. They were acquired by Amazon and seem to be having continued success.
A recent article on Inc.com mentioned the success of Woot. The article, The Website That Gets Almost Everything Right, made a point of mentioning that Woot has a great content strategy including a clever blog strategy. While the article has some great points, I thought I’d take a deeper look into the blogging strategy of Woot.
Hopefully you can pick up on a few of their strategies and apply them to your business blog.
Woot Blog Strategy
Please check out all of Jon Gelberg‘s post on Inc. It’s a great review of Woot and how their entire website has been a success.
For this post we’ll focus on one part of Jon’s analysis:
Fresh content that is both interesting and entertaining is always a great way to get people to come back to your website.
Fresh Content
Fresh content is one of the biggest reasons companies have started blogs. Fresh content gives a business website the feeling of actually being current. Too many times there are sites that have static content on every page. New visitors come to the site and they can’t tell if the site is ten years old, five years old or 1 day old. There is nothing dated and nothing archived to give the feeling that people actually work for the company.
A blog allows a business a way to provide fresh content on an ongoing basis.
Woot does a great job with their fresh content strategy. Jon mentioned their recent March Angriness series. It’s clever. It’s fun. People enjoyed it and it brought people back to the site because they wanted to see what kind of new content would be on the site tomorrow.
Woot takes the idea of fresh content to another level that most companies wouldn’t dream of. Woot’s blog is updated multiple times each day. This is a great strategy. Not only does Woot keep people coming back to the site every day with fresh content, they keep people coming back multiple times in a single day. That’s huge if you can pull it off with your resources.
Many visitors to blogs are first time visitors. The goal is to get those people to convert to email sign ups or Twitter followers. You want to turn new visitors into repeat visitors and eventually customers. Woot seems to be committed to their blogging strategy and their frequency (and quality) is impressive.
Clever and Different
Another thing Jon mentions in his article is the cleverness of the Woot blogging strategy. It’s a great point. Woot has a fun and sharp sense of humor with their writing. They seem to understand who their target customer is and they have fun with their blog. They focus on being good with grammar, but they also make their posts conversational. I like that strategy for this type of website.
Let’s take an example from the post Always be Prepared. And Paranoid.:
You’re a “zombie enthusiast,” which is shorthand for “weirdo shut-in sitting on the computer and just hoping and praying for an opportunity to run around shooting people in the face.” And every zombie enthusiast has a plan, be it to bug out to the desolate countryside or forest (not a bad plan if you’re tough enough to live off the land), escape via boat or plane to some remote and uninfected island (bold, but very risky), or hole up in your fallout shelter with plans to raid the nearby Wal-Mart/gun shop/REI and stock up for the end of civilization (your corpse will be shambling the streets within an hour).
I love that. First, it’s funny. Second, it breaks the rule or writing quick, short paragraphs. That’s one huge sentence right there. I love it. It’s a personality. There are actual people writing this blog and people want to connect with people, not companies.
There are tons of blogs on the Web. Many have a similar personality. This happens because bloggers are afraid to be different.
Your company blog has to be different. You don’t necessarily have to be funny and clever, but you do have to be different.
Promotional Posts
Woot does work in promotional posts into their blog. They highlight the products that are the deals of the day. I’m ok with this strategy. In fact, blogging is really about gaining more profit for your business. You might get there in an indirect way, but really blogging is just another way to get profit.
Don’t forget about this point. Link to your products and services. It’s a fine art to balance blogging with simply promoting your products. Find your balance in order to increase profits with your blogging efforts.
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