I was recently asked by the editors of At Home in Arkansas magazine (full disclosure: I have a business and financial relationship with the magazine) to participate in their guest blog holiday series by providing this guest post on wine and the holidays. The magazine is the leading home design and lifestyle magazine in that region, and while the business is headquartered in Little Rock, it is recognized as the premier state-wide print and digital media brand.
The strategy of inviting guest bloggers has turned out to be a strong business move for At Home in Arkansas. First, they chose some of the best and most
followed design bloggers to contribute. Second, they promoted the series heavily through their Facebook fan page, which has just about 4,000 fans, and to their growing Twitter following. The blog, hosted as a sub domain of the website, has seen dramatic traffic spikes from increased site referrals and search results on the heels of each guest post. Guest bloggers, like me if you decide to check out the post there, have been delivering their audiences along with their content. Also, the increased rate of fresh, new content has also been a contributing factor to the growth in website visitors and has allowed At Home in Arkansas to market each single piece of content through their social identities.
The Guest Blogger program has been another strong example of the secret powers that social media brings to internet marketing programs, especially for businesses reliant on web traffic. The guest blogger series was devised by the magazine’s Chief Editor Diane Carroll, one of more talented and classy design editors in the entire industry, along with her social media savvy colleague Paulette Pearson. Here is what Diane had to say today:
The post is a great complement to this series that Paulette has done such a good job putting together. It’s been a huge success—our website hits are up higher than ever, a 13% increase in the last month, and FB fans are nearing 4,000.
This bump in traffic comes on the heels of the media brand growing their web traffic 50% over the summer after instituting an aggressive social platform recruitment and content sharing workplan that you can read about here in Viralhousingfix.
On a related but separate note, I researched the Arkansas state wholesale catalogue and the limited local product and brand availability is a reflection of the continued restrictions that state legislators, lobbyists, antiquated distribution systems, and various other limiting forces place in the way of even and fair access to wine as a legal product. It baffles me, especially as a Massachusetts resident living behind the bars of my own State Wine Penitentiary where we have to sneak wine across the border, how we have failed to let supply and demand and natural open market forces dictate where any wine can be bought or sold. We can’t do enough to support the Specialty Wine Retailers Association on their Wine Without Borders mission. We still live behind the iron curtain in too many states, it needs to stop.
Still, there are plenty of excellent wines to select from and buy in Arkansas, and Massachusetts, and it was fun to add my two cents to the local wine and food enthusiast scene with my guest post. Even more, it was an honor to be part of this strong line-up of guest design bloggers and to see the amazing results and engagement it has created for At Home in Arkansas and its contributors.