Josh Greene: Marketing, Blog Tech, and Toy Robots

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There’s a lot of good stuff at Josh Greene’s blog. 

Josh has good taste.  He writes on a number of topics, including social networking, marketing, and toy robots.  Ok, I don’t think he writes about toy robots that frequently, but it was pretty cool anyway.  Mostly he writes about marketing, which is a subject I can read all day long.  His August 30 post about tchotchke, for example, is a short but useful commentary on marketing giveaways.

Josh posted recently that he was going back in time and adding titles to his older blog entries. This is a welcome decision, not just because blog entries without titles look too plain, but because there’s really no way to link to a specific article if it doesn’t have a title.  I had intended to link to a random post from his archives, but all I can really do is link to the archive page.  Fortunately it looks like he’s already titled some (maybe all?) of the meatier articles in his archive, like this one from 2005.  “Sell Side Advertising” is an interesting commentary from 2.5 years ago on the way things are now.. advertisers put together their advertising methods and offer them to publishers.  It is then up to would-be publishers to decide whether to run the ad, and do so largely in whatever way they want, given certain advertiser restrictions.

Hosted on Blogger, Josh’s site has a solid backbone behind it.  Page loads are very fast, averaging two to five seconds.  His theme is very attractive, although the length of his page (more on that in a minute) leaves a long stretch of plain white background that, even if just for aesthetic reasons, should be shorted a little.  His archive goes back to September of 2004, with a couple of entries before that.  He’s been blogging regularly for a long time and has achieved an impressive PageRank 5 because of it. Having been linked to by other sites hundreds, if not thousands of times over the last three years is a testament to the value of his work.

I do have a couple of suggestions that might improve the feel of Josh’s blog a little.  First, I would suggest trimming the front page down to the ten or fifteen most recent articles.  Right now there thirty-six articles being displayed.  While the load time is good, it makes for a very long front page.  It also takes you nearly four months back in the blog’s history.  Posting frequency is a matter of personal choice and time, and I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to suggest that he post more frequently, but having four months’ history on the first page only serves to highlight the fact that his posting frequency averages around twice per week. 

My other suggestion would be to respond to comments.  Most of Josh’s posts go by without comment, which is unfortunate because I think Josh seems like a personable, likable guy who could have a more lively community.  Responding to those comments he does receive could help encourage readers to respond to to most, if not all of his articles. 

Comments are a form of social reinforcement; when people are responding to your posts, it tells new readers that other people are reading your blog as well, and that you are interesting enough to hold their attention.  For me, seeing a bunch of posts with zero comments actually hurts a blog.  It seems lonely, and can make even otherwise stimulating content seem a little dull.

JoshGreene.com is a fine marketing blog worth reading.  He brings a lot of new online services to attention (Never heard Pagii before, for example) and offers insight and wisdom about a variety of interesting subjects, like the weakness of Home Depot’s radio campaign, a body shop that boldly compares its prices to competitors (but didn’t bother to keep the comparison up to date), and of course, toy robots, which are tons of fun.