Using your Blog to Market your Business

An excellent post on using blogs to market yourself was written by Rohit Bhargava, VP for for Interactive Marketing with Ogilvy Public Relations.

Bhargava shares 7 tips on how to effectively use a blog as a marketing tool for your business.

1. Share your insight, not the obvious
   Your point of view is what makes your blog a resource.
2. Link to your influencers
   Bloggers pay attention to who links to them. That’s why this blog is linked to Rohit Bhargava’s blog.
3. Optimize your blog and posts for search
   This is easily done if you’re using Word Press or Typepad.
4. Talk about what you know
   Trust me, pick a topic that interests you. If you pick a topic that you think you “should” blog about, you’ll find it’s a chore to blog. Picking a topic that interests you means you’ll find it less difficult to sit down and actually begin to type or blog.
5. Make your blog part of your signature
   Include your blog’s URL in the sig of your email.
6. Post about the moment
   That’s the “magic” of blogging… it’s supposed to be topical and current.
7. Have a good archive
   You need to keep an archive so new visitors can read old posts. Some real gems may be hidden in last month’s or even last year’s archives. Some posts will never go out of style.

The problem most business owners have with blogging is they just don’t have time to do it!

Blogging is a HABIT and it’s a LOT like the exercise habit. At first, it’s hard. My daughter always says the hardest part about exercising is putting your shoes on to do it. Once you tie your shoes and get down to doing it, it’s not that awful. The same is true for blogging.

Schedule time for it…just as you would an exercise program.

Oh, and like an exercise program, you won’t see immediate results. Lots os people will READ blogs but won’t leave comments. One company launched a blog and asked all their employees to blog. The employees blogged for about two weeks and then fell out of the habit. However, when the business owner looked at the log files and tracked visitor’s movement through the site, they found something amazing. While virtually NO ONE was commenting, people were reading the blog. Not only were people reading the blog, but those very visitors were the ones who eventually ended up purchasing products and services from the company. In the end analysis, the blog was the most important element in converting visitors into customers.

With this information in hand, management then went back to their employees and asked them to resume blogging. With the log analysis information in hand… the employees returned to their blogging with new enthusiasm.

By the way, the web analytics program used to provide the information for the company above is Click Tracks. If you’re serious about using your web as a marketing tool, then you need Click Tracks. Oh, and you don’t have to have an IT department to understand log files to use it OR understand the results. Check it out!