“I’m following best practices for e-mail campaigns. I’m producing interesting (I think), well-designed newsletters. I’m including viral marketing within my newsletters, hoping to encourage pass-along. The Weblog landing page is pretty well designed and easy to use. I think the content is compelling. Why wasn’t my traffic growing at the same rate as my coworkers’?

“I don’t know the answer to that last question,nor do many marketers know why their site traffic lags. What I did know was it was time to bring out the big guns.

“I started buying Google keywords.” Jared Blank —What If You Built a Blog and No One Came?  (ClickZ)

I wish Jared the best of luck. In the past, I have missed no opportunity to criticize the strategies of his employer (see: “Parasites on the Internet: The Jupiter Media Menace,” written when I really had a chip on my shoulder about the excesses of the dot-com bubble). But this article, and the whole “create a reputation for your analysts by letting them blog” strategy benefits the whole Internet. Blog on, Jupiter… blog on.