Marketing your business with a blog
Any company serious about leveraging the growth potential posed by the internet must be aware of the tremendous marketing opportunities afforded by the blogosphere. A blog (an Internet diary) is a way to maintain an ongoing communication with your customers and visitors to your site. Additionally, it provides a great way to help drive traffic to your site by using search engine optimization (SEO), links, and other key internet marketing principles to not only drive traffic, but also convert sales.
Search engine optimization is one of the key benefits of maintaining an ongoing blog communication within your website. Having a blog tied to your website helps you to use the blog to build up the search engine friendly, keyword-rich content that will establish your site for better positioning in search engines. There is a familiar phrase in search engine optimization . .Content is king.. To a large extent this is a main use of a blog. It allows a convenient way to build website traffic by having blog articles or entries that are subject related and incorporate the keyword phrases and content that your company wants to be connected to your site.
Another advantage of developing a blog is that it can be used to naturally place link backs to either main pages, or sales pages within your site. In essence, you are using a medium you control to help send visitors to where you want them to go. This is much easier than the process of building external links with partners or other sites to help accomplish the same purposes. For product or service sale sites, a blog can be a forum to present a sales teaser or summary of benefits that then entice the reader to continue on to a product page or sales page with a pre-established interest in more detail.
Communication with the audience is another of the main features of blog marketing. Blog marketing is a convenient forum to offer dynamic content, similar to a conversation with the audience. Many blog applications allow for comments from the audience, which may or may not be a good fit with a given site.s purpose. If a more conversational style blog is effective, a comments feature is a great benefit and keeps customers and visitors engaged. If a one-way, information driven blog is more desired, you may prefer not to offer this option.
Speaking of information driven blogs, the most important thing to remember about successful blogging is that your goal is to increase business visibility by offering content that visitors will appreciate. Blogs present your company with an opportunity to share things with your visitors that may not be well-suited for any other aspect of your business and your site. Industry news, interesting information, feature articles, product successes, or other interesting or even entertaining topics are more likely to entice visitors and repeat traffic than highly technical articles. Save the sales pitch and feature content for your conversion page. One mistake common to business bloggers is to lose focus on the goal of blog marketing . to drive traffic to your site and your conversion pages.
Driving traffic is the first purpose of blog marketing, but a high sales conversion rate is another essential measure of blog performance. The most effective business bloggers utilize the benefits of blogging to land visitors at the most appropriate pages within their site. For instance, more general blog articles or topics may be well-suited to send people to your home page. However, product-related features or news would be better-suited with links sending people to specific product or sales conversion pages.
While recognizing the benefits of blog marketing, companies also need to be aware of some of the common mistakes made by bloggers. First and foremost, many sites forget to bear in mind who their target audience or audiences are when blogging. Blogging without a purposeful target audience is not nearly as effective as focused blogging. This can be especially tricky if your company deals with multiple, clearly distinct target markets. Categorizing your blog, or making the audience of your message clear in some way, is vital to reaching your audience with impact. Blog users come in all shapes in sizes. It is also necessary to know what level of familiarity your audience likely has with the blogosphere. A less familiar audience would need more direction and a simpler blog to use. A more sophisticated audience could handle more advanced blog features.