Do You Have A Strategy To Use Your Blog As A Marketing Tool

As a business owner you probably have a business blog. My question to you is if you have a strategy to use your blog as a marketing tool? With blogging being an integral part of online marketing, you should have a strategy in order for your blog to become an effective tool for marketing, selling and generating revenue.

There are dozens of strategies you can use to gain visibility for your blog that won’t cost you or, if they do, the price is minimal. You need to decide which strategies will work for you and implement them consistently over time.

Some of your marketing can be outsourced. For example, I do all of my own writing, but I utilise the services of a Virtual Assistant (VA) to do part of the marketing of my posts. She would apply the strategies I have decided to use to gain targeted traffic to my blog. How much you do and how much you outsource is based on budget.

BLOG PURPOSE

The idea with a blog is to attract a steady stream of visitors who either return to your blog or they read your posts via feeds. However, before this can happen you need to get viewers to your blog.

To get the most out of your marketing efforts it’s essential to know the purpose of your blog. As with defining your market, the clearer you are the better. Remember that blogs generate revenue (directly and indirectly), position your expertise, give you massive visibility and create ongoing opportunities.

GOAL AND TACTICS

Once you are clear on the purpose or goal for your blog, for example:

• To establish myself as the expert in my xxxx industry
• To grow a list of subscribers to my company newsletter

You may want to select a few tactics to drive targeted traffic to your blog. Here are a few ideas:

1.    Submit your blog to various blog directories

2.    Use your keywords frequently in the titles of your posts. The more your keywords are used in all your posts, the more likely your information is to show up in a Google search when someone is searching on your keywords.

3.    Use article marketing. Take a blog posting, expand it into an article and have a link back to your blog in the resource box.

4.    Use media release to promote your blog like when when your blog first comes to market; when you are announcing a special event in a blog post or when you interview someone famous and post the interview on your blog.

5.    Gain visibility and expert status by leaving informative comments on other people’s blogs. You are often allowed to leave a web address or a blog address and when readers like your comment, they will click through to your blog.

6.    Invite experts to post on your blog. When approaching someone about doing a guest post, be sure to convey benefit to the expert in order to have a more positive response to your request. Then leverage from this by getting the word out – tweet the post, mention it on Facebook, distribute a media release etc.

7.    Create a Ping.fm account and you can ping your post title and permalink to be fed to several locations including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It is a great tool for your social media marketing efforts.

Select a few (or all) of these tactics to be included in your blog marketing strategy and implement them consistently over time to see great results from your blog.

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