The fact that you are here means you must see some value in blogging, but how can it help you grow your business?
Most small to medium business owners have limited time, so any time they take needs to be geared towards helping them grow their business. That being the case, it is vital that all of your Marketing efforts, offline or online need to produce results.
Unlike search engine marketing and other forms of marketing, blogging may be more difficult to measure in terms of revenue generated, but that does not mean that a blog cannot help your bottom line.
First of all, the search engines like blogs. Blogs are updated regularly and they are easy to index, and can help you in optimizing your website by linking to your website from your blog.
What does this mean? The bottom line is that they can help you increase your chances of being found on search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN.
A blog can help you establish yourself as an expert in your industry. A blog is a place where people can read your comments and articles and comment on them in a non threatening manner any time of day from anywhere in the world. This can be very important for businesses that sell complex products o consultation services.
A blog is easy for you to update for one author or for many authors. Unlike a website, a blog can easily be updated by one or more people-even if they have very little internet aptitude. If you can send an email with an attached document, you can probably figure out how to blog. This enables companies like real trends to have multiple yet exclusive consultants contributing content to their blog.
How do I drive traffic to my blog?
Tell people about it. When people ask you questions in social settings or even business settings, certainly answer their questions, but if you have blog you can say “Our blog gives free advice and answers to questions like these and is updated on a regular basis. Please check it out at http://www.myblog.com/ and feel free to add your comments. "
Email a link to friends, family and customers. Hopefully you have an email list of your customers that you use for email marketing campaigns. If not, there are some excellent and inexpensive online marketing tools that can give you the appearance of a fortune 500 company. Many companies offer internet consulting services (and more free information) to help you pick out the best program for your business. Of course, they can also help you with your blog.
Get other blogs and websites to link to your blog. If your blog has value, many people will want to link to it, or at least trade links to help drive traffic their blogs as well.
How much does a blog cost?
The great news is that you can get a free blog from multiple sources. Please visit Ascend eMarketing for a list of free blogs or search for “free blogs” online.
Of course, some businesses prefer to setup up a blog in a similar way as to how they would setup a website. The main advantage to this approach is that you can utilize your own “URL”.
For example, the address for this free blog is http://www.semprofessionals.blogspot.com/ . If we wanted to set up a blog that was simply http://www.semprofessionalsblog.com/ we would have to get our own software and pay for hosting, which could cost $10 or more a month.
Paying for a blog has some advantages:
A blog may seem more credible to some people because the blog is its own entity. Of course, some people may identify with blogspot or Myspace, so that could work either way.
Having a truly unique domain name may give the blog more credibility with the search engines.
A paid for and customized blog may be more customizable.
The good news is that you can get some great results with a free blog, but you have other options.
That’s all for now. Looking forward to your comments.
[blog]
[marketing]
[internet marketing]
[search engine optimization]
[seo]
[blog marketing]
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