How To Effectively Use Blogs - Part 2

How to Leverage Internet Marketing Tools to Grow Your Business - Part 2 - How To Effectively Use Blogs

Blogs were originally created as web logs where people could create personal online journals, often posted in reverse chronological order. Blogs have since evolved to become an effective online marketing tool for businesses of every kind.

There are several main blogging techniques that can be used to market your business online:

• You can create a corporate blog for your company website to provide visitors updated information about your company and your new products. A corporate blog can also provide a forum for customers to provide product reviews and company feedback. This blog type should be integrated into your current company website.
   
• You can comment on other relevant blog sites to encourage traffic to your own site. If you are going to implement this technique, ensure that your comments are relevant and insightful, not sales oriented. Communicating value added information will create online visibility for you, helping you to create increased blog traffic for your business. Click here for my list of Free social networking and blog sites.
   
• You can create your own blog using a separate URL address from your business. This blog should be a forum for you to share expertise on your business and relevant business topics. You can set up a FREE blog service through several providers such as WordPress and Blogger. The KEY to your blog is the number of visitors that you have reading your material on a daily basis. These visitors are valuable leads for your business and their information can be utilized in a number of other marketing techniques to be discussed later.

When you are creating a blog using a unique URL, you will need to create a site that is visually interesting and full of relevant content. Your content should be of value to the readers with links to drive traffic to your main site or to an Opt-in squeeze page. An Opt-in is anything that encourages the website visitor to enter their contact information in exchange for something of value. Common examples include a FREE E-book, Ezine or research report.

The visitor’s information can then be used in other marketing techniques to convert them to a customer over the long term. If you are using Opt-in functions, consider using an email autoresponder service (to be covered in a later chapter) to deliver the Free information quickly to the person making the request. The quicker that you can get the information to the visitor to keep them engaged in your company or idea, the more likely you will have a repeat visitor and a conversion to a sale. Your blog postings should be frequent and should always be fresh content. Consider posting daily or 3-5 times per week to capture the attention of the reader.

How do you market your blog?

Consider using blog carnivals, SEO techniques in the content of your postings, RSS feeds, social bookmarking and link sharing. Blog carnivals are online blog events where a company or group of companies, combine blog postings together to release to a wide audience or readers. The content is often presented in a magazine style format for the readers. A great blog carnival is www.blogcarnival.com. There are hundreds of blog carnivals available. Be sure to read the rules about links and signature files before you post content to increase your chances of your blog posting being accepted. If allowed, the Permalink from your blog software will link the blog posting that you submitted directly back to your site.

To generate additional links to your site, use an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed. These feeds were created to make it easier for blog readers to keep up with the new posted content on their favorite blog sites. Popular RSS feeds that you can add to your site are: Yahoo, Bloglines and Google Reader.
Blogging is an excellent strategy for both your current website and a new URL to drive additional traffic to your business.