Blogging: The new age online marketing
Business, computer and internet today are highly coupled entities. In the world where
each and every day people are becoming more tech savvy, in a world where internet
penetration is growing at a massive rate and in a world of cut throat competition there is a
immense need to drive humongous traffic at your site. Blogging is one of the ways to
generate strong traffic. Blogging is a medium of self expression; it may be showcasing an
idea, passion or product to the internet world.
This whole concept of blogging started in the year 1999 when a website
www.blogger.com was launched, which offered free blog space. Millions of people
created blog and soon world’s largest conversation begun. Blogosphere was doubling its
size every five months. Businesses soon realized the opportunity of online marketing
through blogging because blog acted as a common ground for companies and customers
to exchange their ideas.
Fundamental reasons why blogs help in enriching a business are fresh and up to date
content, informal way of connecting to the customer and the useful links provided on the
blog for additional information.
Moving further lets have more insights on how blog can be use to generate online traffic
Make customer your friend
Customer buys from someone who he knows; therefore it is of prime importance to get
known to the customer. This can be done by through creating blogs which demonstrate
your expertise and intentions quickly. You can also put testimonials and experience of the
people who worked with you in past.
Enrich customer understanding of the business
This can be done by giving links to white papers, articles and resources relevant to your
business. This will help customer in getting better idea of how you work and what are the
key areas of working.
Buzz Marketing
In this arena influential bloggers evaluate your product or service and write blogs on
them; this attaches a lot more credibility to the product or service. Thus bloggers can act
as product evangelists.
Virtual directory for Press
Blogs act as a virtual directory for journalists as they offer readymade content on any
topic. If a company write blogs for every new product they make, journalist find it easy to
publish it in mainstream press and thus increasing exposure of the product. Blogs can
also help in communicating a message to the press at the time of crisis as uploading it on
the official website may take a longer time.
Knowledge repository
Blog also act as a knowledge management tool where in you can see all the past postings
for any reference. For a new customer a company’s blog may act like a tool to track the
company’s history from the beginning as the blogs are stored in a reverse chronological
order. Thus blogs also help in researching a company.
After looking at in how many ways blog can help to generate online traffic let us have a
look into how we can achieve this more efficiently and effectively. Some of the tips are
as follows
Monitor your blog
All the while we have been talking about importance of blogs, but monitoring them is of
equal importance. Monitoring a blog give us insights of who are reading your blog,
customers are coming from which blog source link, which search engines are finding
your blog etc. There are various sites which offer these facilities some of them are
www.gostat.com, www.sitecounter.com etc. Knowing from where you are getting most
of the customers you can concentrate on that area and thus can use blog more efficiently.
Use Feed
Feed is a small file containing latest updates about the website. Feed is updated every
time website gets updated. Whenever you update your blog an update is sent to the
subscriber through a spam-free, virus proof delivery channel that by passes their mail
inbox. Thus feed can help in updating customer about the latest updates on your blog
which may encourage him to visit your blog.
Promote your blog
Once your blog is created include the blog link in your email signature, newsletters,
website and other promotional materials. There is a need to make blog an important
aspect in marketing strategy. Mention the blog link wherever your company name goes
along with your website link.
Get Indexed
There is a need to get your blog indexed by blog search engines as well as other search
engines like yahoo and Google to provide better exposure to the blog.
Importance of Keywords
Most of the search engines do a web search on the basis of the keywords provided by the
user. Thus there is a need for bloggers to choose relevant keywords while creating a blog.
For example google’s blog page rank technique algorithm gives lot of importance to
multiple content matching through keywords user have entered.
Write concise blogs
Writing a blog is an art, it checks how quickly you can grab attention of the user. Make
your point in first 200 words otherwise reader won’t find it interesting to read it further.
Do not waste words. You can also use pictures and videos to explain your point of view.
Apart from these basic writing rules should also be followed like use short paragraphs,
punctuate properly, avoid passive voice etc. There is also a need to write a blog with full
passion and conviction to trap reader’s attention.
Gone are the days when companies use to have their websites only to interact with the
customers. These days’ companies are having both websites and blogs in place and
General Motors (GM) is one of the best examples of it which maintains its blog
http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/about.html along with its website. Thus we can see blogging
is the next big thing in online marketing as it helps in generating tons of traffic.
Happy Blogging all the way!!
