Ever the direct marketer, when I began my blog only a few weeks ago, I instinctively ended my blogs with a call to action ? or at least an invitation to continue the conversation I had started.

Examples:

?What do you think??

?Am I accurate here? Or way off base??

?Is this on the mark, or do you handle it differently??

I know bloggers know that they can respond to blog entries with their own posts ? but as a direct marketer, I know that when you ask for a response, you get more responses.

My own blog generated more than 50 posts within 24 hours of my putting it up online, which Paul Chaney says is an unusually high volume.

Is that because the blogging community wanted to see what I (a self-confessed blogging skeptic) was up to ? or that my first entry naturally stimulated conversation?

Maybe. But I bet part of the reason was that I ended with an invitation to respond.

In direct marketing ? online or offline — we call this ?asking for the order.?

Now, I?m new to blogging — and I don?t really understand it as a marketing medium.

I get the feeling that having a lot of posts isn?t the goal here, but I don?t really know what is.

So, dear reader ? can you clue me in here? What’s the goal of a blog and more important, how do you measure it?

The subject line ?Free Direct Mail Encyclopedia? outpulled ?Boost Sales, Increase Profits, and Expand Market Awareness? by 25%.

Three lessons we can learn from this:

1. Just changing the subject line can dramatically increase e-mail response rates.

2. You never know which subject line or headline is the winner until you test it. (The reasons some of you gave for why A would win seemed to me equally as valid and strong as the reasons others gave for B.)

3. The increase in response from the pulling power of ?free? more than outweighs any decline in response that may occur from ?free? triggering spam filters.

To download your free bonus prize ? my $29 report on improving online marketing results — go to www.bly.com and click on Reports.

By the way, this is a classic example of A/B split testing: test two approaches, and see which works best.

Don?t debate the merits of copy by arguing around a conference table. Test it and learn definitively which headline works best.

This is the basic philosophy that separates direct marketing from general advertising ? and by the way, it?s completely in keeping with the Cluetrain and blogging philosophies of marketing as conversation:

Don?t tell the market what you think sells. The market will tell YOU what they will buy.

P.S. If you guessed B instead of A, don?t feel bad. I often guess wrong on these challenges myself ? which is why I encourage clients to test more than one approach.

Edith Roman Associates, a mailing list broker, uses e-mail marketing to promote their services.

In a recent e-mail offering free list recommendations and a free catalog of mailing lists, they split test two subject lines:

A. Free Direct Mail Encyclopedia.

B. Boost Sales, Increase Profits, and Expand Market Awareness.

Which do you think was the winner — and why?

Choose correctly, and you win a FREE special report on how to improve online marketing results (list price: $29).

(I’ll tell you how to get your free prize when I announce the correct answer.)

Rick Bruner, an active blogger and my polar opposite in all things marketing, questions the effectiveness of my use of traditional media ? specifically, articles I write for DM News

He derisively refers to trade journals and newsletters as ?dead tree media,? and suggests that online communication, like blogging, is really where it?s at.

I?m not so sure.

So far my blogging has brought me a lot of fascinating discussions with bloggers (about 80 posts in its first week), but no posts from potential clients.

My DM News articles, on the other hand, bring me more than a dozen leads per article, all from the direct marketers who are my potential clients — because that?s who reads DM News.

My ?dead tree? medium is highly targeted. I am not sure who reads blogs ? but DM News has an audit-verified circulation of 50,000 direct marketers, which is my target market spot on.

Here?s my quick take on online vs. offline media?.

Online is more high tech, more today?s hot topic, more the flavor of the month, more appealing to the under 30 crowd, and more interactive.

Online is easier to respond to, and the response and discussion is immediately visible to everyone on the Internet. The conversation can spread like wildfire, which is a real plus.

Offline is more traditional, more appealing to the over 50 crowd, and has greater selectivity.

Anyone can publish a blog, Web site, or e-zine. That?s why David St. Lawrence calls blogging ?Citizens Publishing.?

But not everyone can get published in Harvard Business Review or the Wall Street Journal ? or convince McGraw-Hill or John Wiley & Sons to publish their book.

And that?s why these dead tree media, unlike a blog, give the author a certain status and credibility that self-published online writings, like e-books, do not.

The best tact is a mixed-media approach: For instance, I am a regular contributor to dead tree media including Writer?s Digest and DM News. And I am the author of 60 books published by such mainstream publishing houses as Prentice Hall and Amacom.

But I also publish a blog, a free monthly e-zine, and downloadable free articles and special reports available on my Web site.

Does anybody have an opinion on which is better ? traditional paper publishing, online publishing, or a combination? What has worked for you guys?

One thing unclear to me, a blogging newbie, is how often to write a journal entry in one?s blog.

From an ROI point of view, one should make the fewest entries (because of the time required) to generate the most posts, traffic, and buzz.

From a pure ?fun? point of view (the way I am doing it), one should make a new entry whenever one has something interesting to say.

However, it?s probably best to wait and make that fresh entry when the amount and frequency of posts made in reaction to the current entry diminishes to a negligible volume.

Reason: If you post earlier, you rob yourself and your readers of ongoing, active conversation on a topic they are still interested in and that has not died down.

Yes, they can still post to that old entry, but in my admittedly limited experience in the blogosphere, I?ve noticed that most of the focus and action seems to revolve around the freshest entry.

My friend, blogging authority Deb Weil, says: ?If you’ve launched a blog and are not posting new entries once a week or so, you’re not blogging enough. The name of the game is fresh. Fresh content, fresh ideas, fresh ways of thinking, fresh links.?

Derek Scruggs offered me this pragmatic, time-thrifty advice: ?For you, blogging should be 30 minutes a week, tops.? He suggests I simply post my DM News articles on my blog with a comments link.

Bloggers: How close am I to the mark here?

David Lawrence loves blogging and the Internet. He calls it ?Citizens Publishing,? which I think means (a) anybody can say anything and (b) immediately publish it on the Internet where (c) everybody can read it for free.

I interviewed writer Harlan Ellison in the May issue of Writer?s Digest, and he had this to say about writing and the Internet (not specifically blogging):

?Vast hordes of semi- or untalented amateurs festoon the Internet with their ungrammatical, puerile trash, and they think because this ?vanity? publication gets seen by a few people, that they are ?writers.? Horse puckey!

?That isn?t being published; that?s the fanzine press. And there are fewer and fewer real venues for a professional writer nowadays to make a decent living at the craft. Half the world is illiterate, and the other half treads water in the gravy of hubris secretly knowing they can write, if only they had the spare time.

?The Internet has destroyed the use of the library, it has destroyed the use of the dictionary, and as a result people don?t speak as well, because when you go looking up a word in a dictionary, you pass fifty other words that stick in your head and you find other serendipitous stuff, and you just become a better, more literate, smarter and more well-rounded person.?

Writers, publishers, bloggers — is Harlan right? Or out of touch?

While I am a rank novice in blogging, I have formed a few initial impressions.

I?d like to share them with you now, and pray these don?t get me into more hot water in the blogosphere:

1. For a solo practitioner (freelance copywriter) like me, my time is the only thing I have to sell.

Therefore, I am concerned that, since for me time equals money, my blogging is costing me a lot of money ? with no visible ROI other than fun.

2. Bloggers ? both those who have blogs and write the journal entries, as well as those who read blogs and write the posts ? seem to have much more free time than I do ? or more energy (probably the latter, though I work a 60+ hour week).

I am amazed at the detailed posts some of you guys make, or that you go look at, read, and respond to blogs so often.

3. I am beginning to suspect that the blogosphere, or at least the marketing segment of it, is much smaller than I originally imagined.

There seems to be active blogging from a small core of hardcore marketing bloggers ? about two dozen individuals.

4. In marketing and small business blogs, those who read and post to them seem to be individuals or other small businesses.

It doesn?t seem to me that the big players ? e.g., marketing directors of Fortune 1000 companies ? are active bloggers.

5. Some of you guys love to argue and are, by your own admission, contentious. On the posts on this blog, both Rick Bruner and Paul W. attribute to me statements I never made, and pick fights that no one else has started.

Am I accurate here? Or way off base?

I know a lot of the brightest marketing minds in the world, and Don Libey is certainly one of the top five, in my humble opinion.

So, not being a big branding guy myself, I enjoyed the latest issue of Don?s ?Secrets of the Catalog Master? bulletin, published by list broker Merit Direct.

In it, he basically says that branding is dead or dying on the Internet, being replaced by (what else?) ROI-producing direct marketing ? driven by Google.

Don says, ?Buying is no longer a matter of who [the brand or reputation of the seller] ? Shopping is a matter of word description. In other words, I will no longer associate buying pears with Harry & David.

?Instead, I will associate buying pears with the words ?pear? or ?fruit? or ?gourmet pears? or any of 58 other words or word combinations.?

He also credits E-bay with diminishing the important of online merchant reputation — as millions of people are sending money to other people they?ve never heard of and have no reason to trust simply because these sellers have a five-star rating on E-bay.

Don calls this kind of buying ?thought-activated word shopping? and says it is replacing branding in importance for consumers.

I imagine you branding folks out there are cringing, and you search engine optimization guys are cheering. I?m not at all convinced that Don is right. What do you think?