A (marketing) hole in one -- the quick blog

Hole 9 Yards, a landscape contractor in Ontario's Niagara region, wanted a website -- quickly. So Chase set up a blog for them. It is a work in progress, but it took just a couple of hours to get the site in place -- and it already has some useful link-backs to help in the search engine rankings.

Avid golfers may find the this blog's headline a little deceptive -- I'm sure without some extremely low probability events, this blog for landscaper Hole 9 Yards in Canada will not win any awards for immediate effectiveness. On the other hand, Chase created this marketing blog within a couple of hours and it will enjoy link backs from at least two other blogs, virtually ensuring a higher search engine ranking. And the work to replace the 'stock' Wikipedia text with some locally relevant news and images should only take a few moments (in fact, if you go to the blog via hyperlink some weeks from now on discovering this posting, you may find the placeholder copy has long been removed.)

Here is Chase's original email to me regarding this imitative:

Mark,

A friend of a friend saw my Facebook profile update which listed my blog. They checked it out and mentioned to their friend who has a landscaping business the idea of creating one to promote their business. I got a call this morning asking if I could create a blog for them to use for marketing purposes.

Here is the draft I was able to create using only a business card which is the only marketing material they had. You may want to consider offering a service of creating marketing blogs for other companies who do not have the resources to get a web based presence.

http://hole9yards.blogspot.com/

Thoughts?

Last night, Chase sent this follow up note:

Mark,

I agree more local and relevant content is needed. Al and his wife are actually working on pulling together some photos of jobs they have done and getting me some of their company vehicles etc.

I am hoping to get the stuff up by the middle of next week.

After Al saw what I had put together he called me about 8:30 tonight and offered to beat any quote I got for my new driveway and take $500 off of the price. My initial goal was to simply offer to help a friend’s friend, good karma I guess.

Chase.

You can set up your own simple blog/website within minutes by following the log in and set up instructions at one of theblog service providers. We use blogger.com. It has an advantage, in my opinion, in that it is owned by Google. You shouldn't expect people to begin calling you right away, and it is important to maintain and update the blog on a frequent regular schedule for the search engines to recognize it properly. But if you don't have a professional website, and lack a budget for marketing, this is something of a no-brainer. We'll be glad to help our advertising clients with more personalized free instruction on the best way to use these resources.