|
|
 |
|
| NMOA
Direct Marketing Article |
|
|
Fresh Content is the New King
How to Leverage Your Blog to Attract New Prospects and Grow Your Business
By Ford Saeks
You might have heard the saying "Content is King." This idea is now updated,
because fresh content is the new king. According to Technorati's State of
the Blogosphere series, more than 900,000 blog posts are posted every 24
hours. By posting this fresh content, bloggers are able to add timely and
valuable content for their readers, while at the same time increasing
traffic to their site, building relationships and establishing themselves as
the expert in their fields.
There are more than 200 million active blogs out there and three fourths of
the people who use the Internet read blogs. So what's all of the hype about
BLOGS and why should you care? By creating and effectively leveraging a blog
for your business, you will rank higher in search engines, attract more
targeted traffic to your site, create and establish repeat traffic, and get
more sales of your products and services, and that's just scratching the
surface of the benefits blogs can offer you. As a marketer for your
business, your purpose is to communicate the value of your products and
services. Blogs allow you to do that in a much more personal and interactive
way.
When planning your blog start by focusing on the benefits to your site
visitors. What do you think they'd want to know more about? Ask your
customer service, sales people or receptionist to make a list of the top
questions or areas of concern relating to your business. Spend some time
researching and reviewing other blogs on your subject or topic area. You'll
quickly find many ways that adding a Blog to your marketing plan just makes
good business sense. As a marketing tool, it allows you to create a much
more personal relationship with your viewer than regular web content. In
being able to establish a personal relationship with your prospects, you
will walk them through the process of knowing you, liking you, and then
trusting you, which will then lead to them buying your products or services.
6 Tips to Help You Effectively Leverage Your Blog
Use your blog to increase credibility. Make sure your blog is well
written so it entices the curiosity of a visitor. Also ensure each of your
postings allows users to ask questions and clarify doubts they might have.
Organize your blog so it also allows your customers to easily find the
information they are looking for by using the proper keyword tags and
categories and a search option.
Use your blog as an education based marketing tool. Blogs serve the
role of a teacher, so make sure your blog has valuable information for your
visitors so they can learn more about your industry, viewpoints, area of
expertise, products and specific technical information on a variety issues.
Furthermore, your blog must be a place where visitors can send feedback and
questions to you, which you can then respond to with helpful, relevant
information and answers.
Use it to boost product sales. Detail all of the benefits and usage
of your product or service on your blog. This attracts prospects to your
website, while at the same time, keeping customers updated on the latest
developments with your company's products or services.
Use it as a tool for internal communication. It is accessible to
everyone in your company, so why not make it a central place for company
information and updates? Display all of the latest events and the future
plans or training for your company. Implementing these and other strategies
will help your blog play a key role in helping you communicate to the
employees of your company.
Blogs also make great Content Management Systems (CMS). In addition
to regular blog postings you can also use blog software to update and manage
the content of specific areas of your website.
Use your blog to establish powerful word-of-mouth marketing and
recommendations. Create postings that invite comments. Viewer comments
on your blog create extra content which in turn will help raise your Search
Engine rankings and attract more visitors. Also, everyone trusts the
opinions of others more than they trust the marketing copy communicated by
the companies selling products. Generate content that entices your prospects
and customers to post their thoughts and comments on your products, services
and company.
When talking about Blog Marketing it's important to make a couple of
distinctions.
The first is "using a blog to help to market your website." In this
perspective, the blog is mainly used as a traffic generating strategy. Your
focus is on adding keyword-rich content in various formats - text, audio and
video postings - that solves your readers needs or desires and gets ranked
by the major search engines.
The second distinction is "marketing your blog." Many blogs are not
standalone websites, but are part of a bigger website and can be used for
publicity and public awareness. In this case you may just want visitors to
come and read the content posted on your blog, and then hopefully they
click-through to other pages and make a purchase.
There are many reasons for building your business blog - perhaps as a place
to highlight product reviews in a more personal way or write posts which
link to the products pages of your site with more product details. You can
write about how people use your products or services, like case studies, and
write about news and upcoming events - for use internally or externally.
Remember that personal recommendations are key factors in buying decisions,
so let your blog help facilitate this and in the process give potential
customers helpful information to encourage sales!
About the Author:
Ford Saeks is best known for his ability to position people and their
products and services for profit through proven Internet marketing,
innovative publicity and sales campaigns. He is the "go-to" guy when you
want to increase targeted traffic that converts into sales. Learn more about
how he can help you find, attract, and keep your customers at
www.ProfitRichResults.com.
|
|
|
