Using Blogs To Boost Your Marketing Efforts

The use of blogs is exploding, not only for recreational purposes, but companies are realizing the value in blogging to reach potential and current customers.  Just as you are reading this post, many other business people are reading posts on blogs all over the internet for one basic reason, information. 

 

It’s All About The Content

Blogs that contain useful information to the reader provide value, and that valuable information is attributed to the person or company that makes it available.  I have chosen to share my business experience in marketing and sales with you, and many like you.  If you find value in the information I provide, then I am attributed that professional experience that helps you to grow your business, and should you need marketing consulting or services, my hopes are that you will call.  Treat your blog similarly.

Be willing to share vital information that will help the reader grow their business, make it more efficient, more productive.  Blogs are publishing companies.  Consider yourself a writer for a magazine that covers your industry.  What important piece(s) of information would you share with readers to set you up at the “thought leader” in your industry.  And post accordingly

Your blog eventually becomes a very valuable library of  information that you can use to enhance your customer’s experiences with your company.  You can link back to these posts or “articles” that you’ve written at any time without having to re-write them every time you want to put them elsewhere.  Just copy the link in the address bar above your post, and paste it to your company’s website, or any other location, and you’ve just created a valuable link between your blog, and another site.  Links are very important to search engines, and we’ll discuss that more on later posts.

 

Keep It Relevant

Keep your content narrow and stay focused and relevant to your industry.  For example, if you’re Warren Buffet, with a blog on investing strategies, you would not want to let your blogs drift off into the area of credit management.  Search engines look for words to determine how relevant your information (content) is to the searchers request.  Too much varying information and your ranking takes a hit.  If you carry many product or service lines, consider a blog for each category, then link them to one central blog that can be your company’s log, as long as your company’s central blog remains relevant to one industry.  

 

Create Appropriate Tags

There will be a “tags” section when you publish each post where you can select how you want to tag each post as you write it.  These are basically labels that search engines look for to help it find information for the searcher.  So have some narrowly defined tags for each post that a search engine, and be sure they’re relevant to the post.  Look at the tags I’ve used to help search engines define this post, and will should give you a better understanding.

 

Create Categories

As the information builds in your blog, be sure to add categories that you can assign to each one of your posts.  This allows the reader to easily get access to all your professional advice in a particular topic with one click.  

 

Remember, blogs or websites are about USEFUL information.  Advertorials take a hit, so don’t use them to sell, use them to brand yourself or company with valuable information that will eventually result in relationships with those that read them.  Organize and broadcast your message appropriately, and create a valuable reference tool for your industry.