6 Tips To Use Your Blog To Market Your Business

As you may already know, a blog is an excellent tool to let the world know about your business or your product, to connect with potential customers and promote your expertise. Knowing how to maximize your blog’s impact, however, can be challenging. Here are six tips to help you do just that:

1. Blog Consistently. Many small business owners get excited about blogging, post 3-6 times, and then stop. To get the desired effect (search engine and human traffic), you need to update your blog on a regular basis. Aim for three to five times a week, at least until you build up your readership. You can then scale up or down as needed. The search engines will love your new content and keep coming back to index it. Potential customers will like your new content and return to read your blog.

2. Use Your Blog For Branding. Your blog is an extension of your business, so make your blog represent the essence of what makes your business unique. Your brand, including your business name, logo and purpose, should represent your business identity; your unique position in the market.

3. Use Search Engine Optimization To Optimize Each Blog Post. The purpose of your blog is to get people who are in your target market to read your posts and enter your sphere of influence.  Thus, you should use a keyword research tool to find phrases that are related to the main subject of the post, and weave them into the content of the post.

4. Have A Special Offer On Your Blog. Offer a free special report, free ecourse, or preferential notice of new product releases or discounts on services in exchange for signup on your mailing list. This will transform people from casual surfers who just happened to find your blog to newsletter subscribers.

5. Share Information About Your Events, Products and Seminars. You may think that everyone has already heard about your upcoming teleclass on life and work balance or your e-book about achieving financial success. Not so! The person reading your blog might be hearing about you for the very first time, so they have no idea about your teleseminars or products unless you specifically tell them.

6. Avoid overselling. Overselling will dramatically reduce the number of your blog readers. Do, however, let your blog readers know about your seminars and products. If you don’t tell them, nobody will.

A blog is an excellent tool to generate additional web site traffic, get new newsletter subscribers and sell more products. Use your blog to introduce potential customers to your business. Keep your content fresh and they will return to learn more.

Getting Started With A Business Blog

A business blog is a great compliment to your online marketing strategy.  It serves as a one-to-many communication channel with a feedback loop that allows two-way communication with your target audience.  Moreover, the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed that comes with a blog allows readers to register or subscribe to your blog, indicating that they want to see all communications from the blog.

There are two primary options to start a business blog.  You can start a basic blog in just a few minutes using popular blogging platforms or hosted services such as Blogger and WordPress.  Although these platforms are free, they offer less flexibility.  For example, you have limited control of the look and feel of your blog.

While blogging platforms are a good place to start, they should not be considered a permanent solution. The primary reason is that you can be shut down at any time without notice.  If you have several links pointing to your hosted blog and then decide to move to a self hosted platform, you lose all of your marketing efforts.  Essentially, you’ll have to rebuild your linking strategy.  Therefore, if you are serious about blogging, you should not use a blogging platform for more than a month or two.

The more reliable alternative that provides maximum flexibility and control is self hosted blogging software such as WordPress.  WordPress provides more functionality and control than a blogging platform.  Many hosting providers, such as Hostgator, provide for simple, push button installation and upgrades.

Whatever platform (hosted or self-hosted) you decide to use as a starting point for your business blog, remember that a blog requires planning.  Your blog should be part of your business strategy and include clearly identifiable goals. You’ll then be well on your way to a successful business blog.

Should you decide on WordPress, the self-hosted option, and need help getting started, take a look at our Business Blog Packages.

Boost Your Marketing Results

When it comes to connecting with clients, an engaging and content-rich business blog can be your most valuable online marketing tool. Blogs are a user-friendly, customized and flexible medium for disseminating useful information for effective positioning of your products and services in the market. And with over 57 million Americans reading blogs, according to Bloghology, you gain a definite edge over your competitors.

Starting and maintaining a business blog is a great way to let people know that you’re in business and what you can do for them. It allows you to draw in new leads and turn leads into conversions.  These new leads can be further wooed through follow up online newsletters, special offers or any number of tactics. With this almost limitless and relatively inexpensive marketing tool, your profits have an ability to soar.

To be effective, a business blog needs to be well designed. In addition, it needs to be regularly maintained and updated. This means that you must:

• Plan Your Content: It’s important to set some targets in terms of how often you update your business blog. This will help you stay on track with your publishing efforts. You also want to create content that engages your readers, makes them loyal to your blog, and keeps them coming back for more.

• Keep Your Content Fresh: Ensure there is a dedicated resource for the maintenance of your blog, which includes writing blog posts. The worst thing you can do is launch a blog and then allow its content to slip, which will imply all of the wrong things about your business.

• Make Your Content Relevant: Try and make each blog post relevant to your business objectives. This is a great opportunity to show off to potential and existing clients and engage with them through comments and feedback.

You want to avoid:

• Saying the same things as everyone else in your industry
• Writing posts that don’t engage your readers into a conversation
• Talking too much about business and company accomplishments
• Selling to your readers in most of your posts
• Simply posting an ongoing stream of articles

Effective use of a business blog is essential to the growth of your business. Your competition knows this and they probably have a business blog. If they are savvy enough to realize its marketing potential, then they have a competitive edge. But you can make up ground and pass them up with a well designed business blog of your own.

So, are you ready to start blogging? You can easily set up a free blog on hosted services such as Blogger and WordPress to get your feet wet. However, if you’re fully committed to a blogging strategy, the self-hosted version of WordPress is your best bet. Depending on your marketing goals and level of technical knowledge, one of my blog packages can help you get set up quickly and easily. When you are ready, just contact me for a free consultation. Then get prepared to…Blog Away!!!