I know that you don't want to publish any of my comments or to respond to any of my thoughts, but since I seem to be your only RSS subscriber so far, I figured that I'd continue to harass you with comment spam, in an attempt to help you improve the Sr. Bofi blog.

My criticism to date hasn't been because I hate BofI, but the contrary, because I love BofI and really want to see you succeed. With my background in blogging, I want to add something to improve the site through what I've learned to date. Right now, I worry that you've approached the blogosphere as a rookie and that you are making some pretty big mistakes when it comes to blogging and I hope that my comments (as much as you don't want to acknowledge or publish them) are designed to help improve the traffic you get to the blog, as well as the ways in which you can utilize the blog to improve customer service and profits for the bank.

My past comments have largely dealt with the lack of content and while I still think that you need to have 3 posts a week minimum for the blog to be meaningful to anyone, I do appreciate that you've been more diligent in updating the blog recently.

Sometimes this means writing fluff pieces, but that's OK because just like in academia, it's publish or perish when it comes to the blogosphere. Seeing more articles from you recently has been a big step in the right directions, but I'd considered implementing some of the following ideas as well.

First, the anonymous blogger is a big turn off especially amoung older customers. Already the internet is sketchy enough and while I know that this is legit, to the regular viewer who stumbles on it, the alias actually takes away from what you are doing. You should consider having using a real person instead of Sr. Blogger. This will put a human face on the marekting that you are doing as well as create a better layer of trust with your viewer.

Secondily, I still have concerns over how narrow of a scope this blog is. This might sound funny because the blogosphere is all about niches, but I still believe that you are limiting your audience and influence by specifically calling it a Sr. Blog instead of a banking 101 blog or just the official Bank of the Internet blog.

In my ideal world, I'd like to see Gary Evans blog personally for the entire bank and just focus the content to seniors instead of limiting the audience from the get go. It's a subtle difference, but branding is important and there are even some baby boomers who will be turned off by the Senior reference.

Of course that's the direction you've choosen to go with this, so if you don't change it I understand, but it will make it a lot harder for this to succeed if you isolate a large part of the audience by officially catering to seniors instead of letting your content speak for itself, regardless of the demographics of your customer base.

A lot of these issues I've brought up before, so I'll get straight to what prompted my comment rant today.

Where is the link love baby?

Not only do you not point to the blog on seniorbofi.com, but more important you've built a wall around this blog by not linking to sites outside of the Sr. blog. At the very minimum, you need to link to the opening account page where you say open an account today. If you really are going after Srs., then you need to make it as easy as possible for them to find out how to open an account instead of making them do a google search for the sign up page.

A lot of corporate blogs refuse to link to outside sources, but as a blogger what I know is that links are the currency of the blogosphere. What I mean by this is that you'll never get any free incoming traffic to the blog if people don't know who your are. Everytime you create a hyperlink, bloggers see the traffic that your site brings in, which builds love or they find the link doing vanity technorati searches. Most bloggers are obsessed with their incoming links because they do this for fun and it validates their site. Since this is a corporate blog your goals are different, but by placing a simple link to a more popular site, you'd be surprised at how much favor this could create (or at the very least more saavy rss subscribers who will help spread your message)

Sometimes, it's good to highlight a really good article by someone else only and build favor with that influencer, while other times you can link more passively to an older article that the blogosphere has written, but after having been heavily involved in a number of blogs over the last five years, I can tell you that the only way to build an army of bloggers that will bring new viewers to the site is to let them know that you are reading them by linking to them. In turn they will start reading you and after a year they'll pick up on something that interest them and you'll have crazy traffic from other blogs and from the Google juice.

One tactic I've used to help find and commmunicate with bloggers outside of my inner circle is to write a post and then put certain phrases into technorati, ice rocket or google in search of bloggers that might support what I've said. Ideally you want to link to three bloggers with every post.

As an example, for this post, I would have linked to the following three articles dicussing interest rates, children savings accounts and something fun.

http://theeaa.blogspot.com/

http://www.betterinvesting.org/community/blog/youthinvesting

http://www.learnthenet.com/english/index.html

You obviously would want to be careful not to link to competitors because there is a commercial purpose here after all, but if I was a SR. who didn't feel all that tech saavy, it might be neat to see some links once in a while to sites specifically catering to my needs. What I would encourage you to do is set up an RSS account of every single SR. citizen blog that you can find. Even the fun ones like http://www.helpmebubby.blogspot.com/ which are more about relationships advice then finance.

Then I would monitor these sources for news items and point people to them whenever you see something appropriate for your readers. This will help to build your content and it will help to expose your blog to other senior citizens that might be influencers in the Sr. crowd.

It's a lot of work to maintain a blog and maybe you really aren't all that interested in building up this property, but having a blog is a lot more then having a website, it's a constant open conversation that you have with your readers, critics and the blogosphere as a whole.

What I know about your brand, is that your bank has the potential to be huge in the blogosphere. Whether it's your pure online strategy or your value approach to banking, consumers and bloggers could be a very powerful force in bringing new customers to the bank, if you can figure out how to successfully tap into this. It isn't easy, but there are many promotions and many tactics that you could use to tap into this viral buzz. If you had a better understanding of how bloggers think and how you can capture their imagination, I think your brand could be just as powerful as Paypal.

While my comments have been negative in their tone, I hope that you'll understand that my end goal is to try and help you improve this site by sharing some of my experiences with you. Whether or not you choose to implement these ideas is up to you, but at the very least I hope that they cause you to think about the long term goals for the Sr. Blog as well as how you can leverage your brand to get more exposure to your bank.