This post is more about “marketing” than it is about blenders—kitchen appliances—as such, but yes, it was prompted by a discussion about blenders, and it ends with a discussion of blenders.
Once again, on Twitter, the greedhead corporations’ definition of a Brand-Friendly Blog is rearing its undead head:
In other words, pick a corporate product, indenture your blog to it, and then see if the corporation ever sends you a dime. And with all those other writers out there, some of them in places where a dime is probably considered a pretty good day’s wages for an old woman, a dime is probably what you can expect to get after going to all the trouble of dedicating your blog to the service of one other person’s product. I've been earning commissions from Amazon all these years, but they've yet to reach US$100. Yet. Since 2011.
Attention corporate executives: Reality is often counter-intuitive.
Over its years this web site has recognized several e-friends whose blogs are credible and charming and product-supportive. People like Mudpie's Human Melissa and Valentino's Human Ruth Cox seem to own a market niche. They’re good writers, good photographers, and the companions of adorably photogenic and well-behaved pets. I’ve honestly enjoyed the believable animal stories they’ve posted that were utterly non-controversial, light, “positive,” really like a short-writing equivalent of a TV commercial script...until: one of two things happen to these blogs:
(1) Writers get bored, because the number of TV-commercial-like moments in any person’s life is finite, and small. If these people are serious about writing, in a few months they have to pick a different market niche or a different style.
(2) Readers get bored, because nobody even watches television for the commercials. If you’re socializing online with one of these very product-supportive bloggers you may tolerate a piece of commercial writing for someone else’s product once a week or even twice, but you don’t follow that type of writing in the way you follow the kind of blog that actually reflects someone’s real life and thought. But the corporate sponsors don’t want reality interfering with their bland sell-sell-sell scene, so readers quickly learn that there are sponsored blogs and then there are good blogs—and unless people are awfully good e-friends, we ignore the sponsored kind.
Either of these developments ends in one of two ways:
(1) The blog dies.
(2) The blog affiliates with Zazzle and/or Amazon.
This web site has staked its fortunes on the idea that huge retail sites like Amazon can afford to sponsor realistic blogs that touch on anything and everything...that may support multiple products or themes, and may not be bland, and may not always be written to the lowest-common-denominator level, and may actually challenge a reader with a fresh new thought, which is what I-as-a-reader am always looking for and what corporate sponsors dread.
Corporations haven’t picked up this web site, although individual businesses have (and some of them have thrived). Corporations have preferred to sponsor e-friends who’ve agreed to harness their blogs to the brands. And some of those e-friends are in fact better writers than I am, and better photographers, with better cameras, in addition to their willingness to commit to producing only bland commercial content all the time; and everybody in cyberspace, and probably their goldfish, has more e-friends than I have. I have to be the only writer who is earning money in cyberspace while knowing fewer than half a dozen real people who will admit having an e-mail account, and none of them has ever maintained a reliable, steady online presence.So from Associated Content and Bubblews forward, a lot of my e-friends have launched blogs that were much more successful than this one’s ever been, for six months or a year. And check the blogs at the bottom of the blog list below. How is it possible for this web site to follow a hundred and thirty blogs? The list on the right side of your screen shows blogs in the order they’ve been updated. The bottom half of the list has been dormant for months or years. Those bland commercial blogs that people don’t read do not “convert” page views to sales, so no matter how good the first dozen or so posts were or how loyal the e-friends, the sponsors drop them, and the writers become discouraged.
The solution is so counterintuitive and cognitively dissonant that it’s made some people laugh, but attention corporate executives: Your commercials are no longer competing with static on the radio or test patterns on the TV screen. Nor do people have to buy fifty pages of advertisements and “articles” about product to get a one-page funny column or cheerful short story. You can't have it all your own way any longer. You’re going to have to engage with real writers and real readers...on our terms.
You can’t afford to reject blogs that mention controversial topics. You can afford to blow off only the truly pathological points of view; NAMBLA and the Ku Klux Klan can be snubbed, but when this web site starts buying guest posts, we'll buy'em both from bloggers who denounce the Church of Scientology and from bloggers who are active in it.
There are blog readers, and even bloggers, who want to huddle together with “people like themselves” in terms of beliefs or of demographics. Personally, although I look for resonances of individual feeling, I want to learn about people who are different from me. Enough people share the dating web sites’ belief that people want to meet people who live nearby that it may be worthwhile for a web site to take that sort of observation as axiomatic. This site will, however, continue to remind the world that I am not about to send someone else money to introduce me to my cousins.
I realize that this is not an idea corporate advertisers want to absorb, but...er, um...this web site has seen a lot of bland commercial blogs come and go. It would behoove you, advertisers, to join the rest of the world in laughing at the hubris of long-gone advertisers who wanted to write all the scripts for all the commercial media.
Do you want to advertise lipstick? Well, ha ha ha and ho ho ho, wasn’t it absolutely craaazy that some lipstick advertiser once tried to tell an editor that a news magazine couldn’t feature a cover photo of war refugees because those women weren’t wearing lipstick? At a web site that has credibility, your lipstick ad might fit in beside a post saying something like “I never understood why anyone would want to smear grease on her lips until I lived in the desert.”
Sports souvenirs? Plenty of people write realistic, credible blogs about the sports they follow but, if you’re lucky, one realistic, credible blog might say “I root for Team A because player #29 is an evangelical Christian” and another one might say “I root for Team A because player #92 is an atheist.” Actually team sport web sites can be relatively safe if they focus on pictures and statistics, but web sites that censor that kind of unscripted reactions are likely to be boring web sites.
Books, even? I’ve noticed something funny about my book posts. I've written some honest, unscripted, sincere book reviews that said things like “Basically everybody on Earth should read this book.” What do people say to that? They say, “That’s a bookseller’s opinion.” I’ve written other honest, unscripted, sincere book reviews that said things like “I think this book is about 200 pages too long, but for those who want all the details about X, etc., etc.” What do people say to that? They say, “I’m one of the few who want to know all about X. I’ll take a copy.” This web site has sold a lot of books that it rated silly, cliches, mere romances, partisan polemics, or so outdated as to be a collector’s item. Honest ambivalence sells.
And I’m afraid advertisers are going to have to profit by my example if they profit at all. They can keep moving from hopeful blogger to hopeful blogger, sponsoring slick commercial-looking site after slick commercial-looking site, but since anything that is consistently product-focussed and product-friendly is going to be read as “a seller’s opinion,” those slick commercial-looking sites aren’t going to “convert” into either sales or great blogs.
So if you want to sell, e.g., blenders, you need to resist the urge to say arrogantly, “I’m going to sponsor only sites that are about blenders. I’ll not pay for any blender ads on a site that seems to be about dogs or poetry or a student’s year abroad. I’ll not place any blender ads on a site that expresses opinions, especially opinions that Al Gore and George Soros want to give ‘minority’ status in cyberspace. I’ll sponsor only sites that post a steady stream of ‘smoothie’ recipes, of which each gets a minimum of X number of views per week.” That’s the type of blog you think will move blenders—the type of blog that, in practice, is only ever going to be read by people who already use blenders, and is only ever going to sell a blender to somebody who wants to replace the one they had.
Not that I wouldn't write that kind of blog posts. In fact I've ghostwritten some. Not that that kind of blog won't be visited, either--if it's a "Blog" tab at a store site, where everybody's there to buy a blender and they want to read about when to buy which model. (Actual stores always sell more products than ads do!) It's just that the slick commercial kind of blog post belongs on the company's site, under the company's name.
The Advertising Age, the Waste Age, about which you learned what you’ve learned about marketing...is over. Deal with it. If you want a blender ad to be seen at sites that aren't called BlenderBrandX.com, you’d do better to look at quirky, literary, anything-and-everything blogs that attract slower steadier streams of traffic. You might want to reconsider advertising on this web site, even though Google has told you you didn’t want to do that.
If I post about blenders, that post is probably not ever going to be on the top ten list of my posts most often viewed. It’s going to sink down into the blog archive. Google is going to try to satisfy the Madison Avenue school of traditional TV-commercial-type marketing by hiding that post from search results. People are going to have to type “Priscilla King Blogspot blogging blending long rant” to find it from a search engine; if all they remember is something like “Priscilla King blender post” the big search engines will probably steer them to some retail store site advertising that “Priscilla” style curtains, bedposts, and rugs, in colors that blend, were on sale in Kingston in 2013. I know this from experience. And the funny part is, some people do take the trouble to search for "Priscilla King Blogspot blogging blending long rant."
I have written brand-specific product stories—just off the top of my head, the way we privileged Americans really do, occasionally, get into discussions of our experiences with name-brand products and the stores that sell them. In real life, when people remember the commercial brand name, they’re likely to be warning people off it, and I’ve done posts like that ("Food Lion Brand: Beans'n'Roaches"). But I did write some of these things for sites like Associated Content and Bubblews, and some of them were product-supportive (“Remembering the Toyota Camry,” “What Do You Put in a Taco,” “Souping Up a Can of Soup”). Those are the unscripted, honest, personal reviews that are most likely to motivate people who do find them to check out a new product. They’re also the kind Google thinks corporate sponsors are paying the search engines to steer readers away from.
When I open my Blogspot my computer is programmed to go directly to a “dashboard” sort of page Google provides for Blogspot bloggers. It has a button for “Stats.” I usually click on that button, first thing, to see what readers are reading. The Stats page automatically reports the total number of page views for the previous day and week, the top ten posts most often viewed, the top ten sites from which readers clicked or searched their way to my posts, the countries (but, annoyingly, not the cities or states) where people are reading, the posts on which readers have commented.
Usually the Stats page provides bloggers with a spiritual exercise in humility. Part of my learning experience has been:
1. Posts that are frankly product-supportive, even book reviews, usually don’t get read.
2. Posts that are frankly product-controversial, product-unfriendly, are more likely to get more views than product-supportive posts. A favorable review of a book that a lot of people agree is good will be read, but it seems to fade, in people’s minds, into a vague general mass of “Lots of people who like collections of short stories liked Alfian Sa'at's Malay Sketches.” A book review that warns people that it’s going to be “tepid” or “frosty” or “vindictive” gets more views, probably because more people want to laugh at snarky comments about a book than want to read about why they should buy the book...but then, after people have laughed, or among the ones who laughed, there are likely to be one or two people who want the book.
(I’ve tried exploiting this dynamic to say nice things about books and products in a snarky way. “What’s wrong with Flight Behavior is that too many good writers have written about the same place during overlapping lifetimes. It’s not faaair.” “Who wouldn’t want to buy Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up? Anybody who bought it when it was new, which probably includes all English-speaking adults.” Readers may smile, but they recognize product-friendly comments even in the form of wisecracks.)
3. Some posts that are brand-friendly will be read. I didn’t write, but an e-friend at The Blaze wrote, a post about the nutritional value of some popular items that are often denounced as junkfood. The title named a huge global fast-food chain that’s taken the lead in developing an online ordering system, putting Internet connections in each restaurant. (I think all Americans now know which chain I mean.) Nobody outside the chain had posted anything so supportive of it before, and when my e-friend did, did that post ever go viral. Apparently every manager of every restaurant was sending the link to every friend and ordering every employee to read the post on break time. Around the time most of those employees took their scheduled breaks, the whole site crashed! That’s the kind of blog post traditional marketers dream of discovering. But hey...y’know what? After its three days of fame, that post stopped attracting traffic. It wasn’t “the seller’s opinion” but it was perceived as such. It died.
4. Even if I honestly think that my cat’s unscripted, unanticipated reaction to a new flea comb was among the cutest, most heartwarming moments in my life as a cat owner—and I do, because Heather was an unusually lovable old cat and, although she seldom had a flea, she unmistakably adored being combed—that’s not going to be readers’ favorite post about that cat. Readers' favorite posts about the cat Heather were the Link Logs that rambled all over the place. This one got nine times as many page views as the post about how Heather loved her flea comb. Nine! So "product-focussed content" is not a priority for this web site.
5. Speaking of that post...For a few months I was doing Petfinder links, illustrating a few posts each week with images of cute animals who were allegedly up for adoption at various animal shelters around the Eastern States. (As all search engine optimizers know, 10101, 20202, and 30303 are zipcodes for the three major metropolitan areas in the Eastern States.) Those posts were among my all-time most popular. I enjoyed taking a few minutes to pick the cutest animal pictures in a different category each day. Some of the pictures looked weird on some browsers, but out of any three, at least one was guaranteed to offer readers a moment of cuteness. Categories were determined by which type of animal was suggested in the first e-mail or friend’s blog post I opened that day, so there were Cat Days and Dog Days, with searches for various breeds and colors.While doing those links I enjoyed more support for my own actual animal rescues, such as those are, and more support from other animal bloggers, and more traffic, and more invitations to “insider” forums, and giftcards and other pleasant things. I wasn’t even close to having gone through all the categories of adoptable animals that Petfinder lists--when Petfinder chose, for no obvious reason, to “upgrade” their whole site to a clunkier format, with slower searches and more annoying cookies. Petfinder no longer meets Blogspot’s requirements for linkability. So I had to stop doing the Petfinder links and my traffic dropped accordingly.
I learned: Readers like links. Readers like to click on a picture of something that appeals to them and open a tab showing where they can buy an object, or find out where to watch a movie, or make inquiries about adopting a cute animal. Google doesn’t like that because it interferes with Google’s attempts to control click-throughs and deliver the kind of results the Madison Avenue school of marketers want, but readers love it. Google barely tolerates it, probably because Amazon likes it, but this web site is legally required to hold linked sites to certain standards—no porn, no violence, no hatespews, and no cookies that don’t crumble tidily away when we click on the cookie cleaner button. So, sorry, Gentle Readers, no more Petfinder links. And sorry, Pris, no more 500 views of one post in one day!
6. There are a few posts that get a lot of page views because some readers like them, bookmark them, and make them their links to this site. There have been posts that got thousands of views because they supported something that was trending. Page views rise when (a) I post something new, (b) I share it on Twitter, or (even better) someone else does (because Twits trust each other's judgments of other people’s content more than their judgments of their own!), and (c) people are spending more time indoors. Page views drop in summer, on weekends (even if I’m online on a weekend), and during major holidays. Employers want to believe that people surf the’Net when they go home. Well they don’t.
7. So, although the Internet was tagged early, and for sufficient reason, as a venue for pornography, sex not only doesn't sell but it actually hurts blogs. This web site’s rules against even mentioning body parts (y’know, the ones some advertisers like to display in graphics, especially in ads for weight loss programs) started out as a satirical reaction to Google’s rules for Blogspot, which I thought were unnecessarily repressive. I’ve learned that they’re good rules, actually.
8. Plain courtesy costs nothing and should be part of every web site’s policy. Nevertheless, as this now-anonymous writer observes, if you start listening or apologizing to the crybullies, you will never again know peace. This web site would like to be a “safe space” for misunderstood people, but there are limits to everything. The limits of my tolerance for politically motivated crybullying are particularly low. Even while recommending that voters either vote against Judge Roy Moore as having been a rogue judge, or kick him upstairs for the same reason, I bar idiocy about how his dating younger girls, as a lonely awkward boy of thirty-five, had anything to do with real child molesters. (If he touched someone, and the person moved away and/or told him to stop, and he stopped, a man may be obnoxious and repulsive but he's not a rapist or molester. Those words refer to obnoxious, repulsive individuals who don’t stop.) And don’t expect any points for “the courage to speak out” if you denounce the past misbehavior of someone who’s retired, dying, or actually dead, especially if you did not denounce it when the person might still have been doing it, either.
9. Remember that honest ambivalence factor that can actually boost sales of books, when I say “Well, this book might appeal to somebody” and somebody almost always comes to me saying “I am that person”? I, personally, don’t enjoy shooting. (I know of no person with astigmatism who enjoys shooting.) Google hates firearms-related content, with such a passion that people claim to have documented Google refusing to search for the color burgundy. At the time when I started this blog, I had a junk booth in a flea market, so I was personally acquainted with all the people in other local secondhand stores. One of the "Gun & Pawn" store owners enjoyed being the "pawn star" who could drop a few Benjamins among his lower-paid colleagues, and he paid to keep a “Second Amendment Rights” theme active on this web site. (He wasn't this web site's only active sponsor for its first few years, but financial distress did become a theme about the time illness forced him to retire.) Google never even offered to pay me, or anyone else, for not having that theme. I might consider letting it drop, if Google started treating me to lunch and handing me a couple of Benjamins; readers have never really gone wild about this web site’s “Second Amendment Rights” theme, but there’s no way I’d ever listen to crybullies instead of an actual paying sponsor. You want a blog not to mention something you don't want associated with your product, you pay for that.
As long as most of my sales are to local lurkers, I could probably be marketing Confederate flags, which some local people regard as a Cherokee Thing. (White supremacists? Hah. During the Civil War the Cherokee Nation were divided between followers of John Ross, who advised leaving the White population to their own stupid war, and followers of Stand Watie, who hated Yankees enough to fight on the Confederate side--although the Confederates were, on the whole, afraid of them and didn't venture to notify them when the Confederacy surrendered. I personally think Ross may have been the most sensible man on this continent in 1860, but as long as nobody's actually fighting, some of my neighbors enjoy self-identifying with Watie.) My feelings about Confederate-flag paraphernalia border on "political correctness," but nobody's paying me to be p.c. about them...Like most adults, I feel motivated to reward people who offer rewards when they want something, and to punish people who presume to try to punish other people when they don't get their own way. I saw this happen during the past week: A car pool buddy watched two reruns of a favorite TV show. Both episodes featured baddies who wore Confederate-flag T-shirts. I don't know what else he watched on TV, or talked about, except those two reruns that I'd also watched...but now his car flies a Confederate flag. I personally don't like car-mounted flagpoles, but I have enough sense not to be a p.c. crybully about it.
As long as most of my sales are to local lurkers, I could probably be marketing Confederate flags, which some local people regard as a Cherokee Thing. (White supremacists? Hah. During the Civil War the Cherokee Nation were divided between followers of John Ross, who advised leaving the White population to their own stupid war, and followers of Stand Watie, who hated Yankees enough to fight on the Confederate side--although the Confederates were, on the whole, afraid of them and didn't venture to notify them when the Confederacy surrendered. I personally think Ross may have been the most sensible man on this continent in 1860, but as long as nobody's actually fighting, some of my neighbors enjoy self-identifying with Watie.) My feelings about Confederate-flag paraphernalia border on "political correctness," but nobody's paying me to be p.c. about them...Like most adults, I feel motivated to reward people who offer rewards when they want something, and to punish people who presume to try to punish other people when they don't get their own way. I saw this happen during the past week: A car pool buddy watched two reruns of a favorite TV show. Both episodes featured baddies who wore Confederate-flag T-shirts. I don't know what else he watched on TV, or talked about, except those two reruns that I'd also watched...but now his car flies a Confederate flag. I personally don't like car-mounted flagpoles, but I have enough sense not to be a p.c. crybully about it.
10. So, with that said...do people hire me to write about, e.g., blenders? Absolutely. And baby carriages. And racing bicycles. And other things I don't personally use. I don't use a blender for one of the secondary reasons why it's easy to talk me out of a trip to the rifle range; I don't like loud noise. But Grandma Bonnie Peters uses a blender. We can actually talk with firsthand knowledge about brands of blenders. (Note uses of emotional ambivalence and non-focussed blog post structure, here.)
When I was a little kid, my mother got an Oster blender, because that was what was available cheap at the time. That "Osterizer" was about the same size as the Vitamix blender we acquired later, but it was really a junior model. Osters need replacement parts at least once a year at best, they will not blend up the kind of firm vegetables (like raw carrots) that a lot of people really need to have ground up in blenders, and they'll need replacement parts fast if you try to blend anything that still feels warm against your wrist, but they whip up nice frothy protein-fortified shakes for growing semi-vegetarian children. The scream of the Osterizer used to summon my brother and me to the kitchen to drink one last carob-and-nutritional-yeast shake before bedtime.
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| Styles have changed over the years, but this is similar to the blender of my childhood memories. Fruit sold separately. |
Later, when I was in college, my parents went to stay with Dad's rich uncle, who had had a few strokes and still found it taxing to talk or chew food. He liked to look at a nice balanced meal, taste everything, then slowly mash everything together into a disgusting but smooth mess he might be able to choke down. So, since that was what the great-uncle would eat and since he could afford it, the parents splurged and bought the Vitamix blender, which will blend a hot dinner in a cup every day for a few years before needing replacement parts.
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| Dad joked for years about how overpriced it was, but when he became disabled, this was the blender he took with him to the "accessible senior housing" project. |
Later, Dad demonstrated that it's possible to use and clean a blender, while blind, if you have to. Unlike his uncle Dad kept an acute sense of taste and would blend compatible-tasting foods separately, cleaning the Vitamix in between cups.
Mother's never been completely disabled, although she owns a wheelchair and has used it at times. She kept a basic blender, often an Oster, wherever she went all through life, also owned various juicers, and eventually reclaimed the Vitamix. She still crunches carrots, but she uses blenders to make specialty processed foods--notably Rice Biscuit Bread, which gets a taste and texture similar to buttermilk biscuits from that combination of regular rice flour, blender-processed cooked rice, and blender-processed cooked apples. Whether you're gluten-free or not, you can do a lot more in the way of vegan meat and cheese analogs if you grind your grains, nuts, and beans to the right textures.
In our family I have the ugliest teeth--nobody but my adoptive sister has pretty teeth, but mine are the kind that make orthodontists say "If you want pretty teeth, consider synthetic implants." Oogesti had small, even, pearly-looking teeth after about age 75, whenever he chose to wear them; I have that to look forward to. Nevertheless I can still eat raw carrots and almonds if I'm reasonably careful. (I drink a lot of coffee and Mountain Dew, but I also brush with salt'n'soda and rinse with heated-then-cooled mountain spring water--about equal volumes of pure water and caffeinated drinks is the goal.) My natural sister started out with better looking teeth, then had too many babies and lost too much calcium, and let's just say that on some sad future occasion she can have the title of Hereditary Tender of the Blender.
I don't own a blender, and never have...but if I became a chef, or developed a major disability, then I'd want one. And I can say firsthand that a lot of people reach a stage in life where the Vitamix professional-quality blender is worth its sticker-shock price. I've not cooked for them; Mother has, and still does, regularly.
Crunching is fun for those of us who can still do it, and the exercise can actually encourage our bodies to keep our teeth as fully calcified for as long as possible. Nevertheless, not everyone can crunch. If you cook for friends, you should probably consider ways to pre-grind carrots and almonds.
Note honest ambivalence, lack of specificity between competing brands, lots of raw'n'ugly reality--a Madison Avenue marketing nightmare--but give this post a year or two to attract its niche audience, and then we'll see whether it's actually sold a blender somewhere. Obviously this post won't move as many blenders as a kitchen appliance store site, a health food store site, a chef site, or a "Retirement Living" site that actively markets blenders. But I'd guess that it's more likely to sell a blender than the bland, corporate-approved, search-engine-optimized kind of individual blog is.
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