J.C. Penney wanted to draw traffic to their site for fall shopping. Blogs are perfect for this … but they didn’t have an experienced blog team. Instead, they worked with Federated Media, a network of independent bloggers, to create a new site that reprinted the blogs’ content.
Results were fantastic: They now show up in the top 10 search results for "fall shopping." Presumably the bloggers are thrilled, too, with all the extra traffic.
Abbey Klaassen wrote a great case study about this in Ad Age (read it here).
My quote from the article: "From a marketer’s perspective, it’s hard to write good stuff all the time and have a diversity of voices. When you can find like-minded folks who create a rich conversation, you get a much more appealing product."
Lesson 1: Blogs are amazing tools to generate traffic from search engines.
Lesson 2: Blogging is a cooperative community. Lots of people will help you out.