Facibus On Blogging

In Information Architecture there is the concept of facets. Basically, they are different ways of getting to, and looking at, the same topic. S.R. Ranganathan, a librarian studying in London in the 1930s, noticed that different people liked to find the same information in different ways - and this set faceted classification in motion.

There are ways of using different facets in blog marketing - providing many paths to the same information. Apart from increasing the chance of serendipitous discovery, linking from different sites increases search engine ranking (as long as it is done intelligently). Providing channels into the target site from seemingly unrelated sources gives it a far greater exposure.

Here’s a simple example: imagine that you are selling used books on eBay. You could draw purchasers in by the following:

• the eBay listing itself,
• your eBay store,
• customer new listing email newsletter,
• a book review website with an online store,
• genre-specific forums,
• author websites and fan sites, and
• for non-fiction: topic specific sites (gardening sites for gardening books, motor vehicle sites for car books, and so on).

Any of these have the capacity to increase sales.

A faceted marketing example
Nathanael Boehm is annoyed at the parking situation here in Canberra, Australia. It is fairly woeful - our local government is OK with a parking deficit of 10,000 spaces in the city center (that is, there are 10,000 fewer car parks than there are cars heading into the city) and the public transport infrastructure can’t handle the shortfall. To promote a solution, Nathanael has put the following in place:

• the Fair Canberra Parking site,
• mentions on his own blog, and
• a Facebook group.

As the word has caught on, it has also been mentioned in:

• The Canberra Blog,
• RiotACT, and
• this blog as an example.

Whether it takes off virally or not, Fair Canberra Parking started as one person’s dream. By exposing the topic in areas with different readers, it has a better chance of success.
Intelligent linking
I make the point above that linking must be done intelligently. This means attaching the links from (and to) unique pillar content of value within its niche. Link spamming is a bit dumb because it is not sustainable - sooner or later, the ranking services catch onto the spamming patterns and the temporary advantage is reduced.

Link farming (having a nest of blogs that cross-link to one another) is slightly more sustainable - although there is some suggestion that the blogs should be hosted at different servers.

Everyone wins
There is a method to this madness - Permaculture principles state that you should never use one thing for one purpose alone, and in faceted marketing, every blog in the chain of crosslinking benefits through greater exposure. Writing a winning post on one blog to promote another (even if the promoted blog is not your own) benefits you as the writer.

In conclusion: try to include links to your own blog or blogs whenever it is reasonable to do so - crosslinking is the art of the successful segue: finding an angle that ties two seemingly unrelated posts together to the benefit of both. If you are unsure of how to tie things together, try reframing.

This article was originally posted on BlogFuze.