Blog Marketing for Business

So what is a Blog anyway? Recently, there has been a great deal of talk about blogs. Blogs can be personal or business related. Business blogs or corporate blogs are one of the hottest growth areas for blogs and is opening new markets for business. Blogs allow anyone to quickly post text and images to the Web without any special technical knowledge. This opens the web up to more publishing and distribution of information.

Blog is short for weblog. A blog is a regularly updated journal published on the web. Wouldn't it be nice if the readers of a website could leave comments, about a specific article? With blogs, they can! Posting comments is one of the best features of blogs. Blogs generally represent the personality of the author or the Web site.

Some blogs are intended for a small audience; others have a readership of national newspapers. On a blog, the content consists of articles - also sometimes called "posts" or "entries."

A Blog is a Web site that contains dated entries in reverse chronological order (most recent first) about a particular topic. A blog has unfiltered content - some feel that the second somebody filters or edits the author it's no longer a blog.

Blogs are influential, personal, or both, and they reflect as many topics and opinions as there are people writing them. Many blogs focus on a particular topic, such as web design, politics, sports, or mobile technology. Some are more eclectic, presenting links to all manner of other sites. And others are more like personal journals, presenting the author's daily life and thoughts.

Businesses are turning to blogging as a marketing tool. Why? Because it gets results and gets results faster than traditional Internet marketing. Business blogging is a way to boost their online brand, to increase their importance with the search engines, to reach new potential clients, to communicate with current customers and to publicize information about their company.

Blogs are the new marketing tool that we can add to our bag of traditional marketing strategies. Blogs allow us to reach our targeted marketing niche. In the past few years, blogging has moved from the early adopters to the mainstream in business.

Blogs are now the most trusted media source for useful information according to a Blogads survey of over 35,000 readers. Value was compared against newspaper, radio, television, direct mail and magazines. It is estimated that in the US 27% of the people read blogs on a regular basis.

Blogs are powerful influencers. "More than half (52%) of Europeans polled said that they were more likely to purchase a product if they had read positive comments from private individuals on the internet." This is according to a Hotwire Ipsos MORI survey.

Blogs distribute information very quickly and efficiently. Because blog feeds are similar to news feeds, information spreads very quickly. Blogs are a great place to kick-start marketing of new products and services.

In business blog marketing, writing a blog posting is different then writing an article or a book. Blog readers have short attention spans; they need to be able to scan through your content quickly and easily. Blog postings are short, easily scanned and quick to read.

Can be scanned: Your reader should be able to quickly glance through your posting and pick up the main points. Use lists, images, tables, sub-headlines, examples, indented notes, indented quotes, icons, colors, bold and italics to break up your article and make it easier to scan.

Short posting: A typical blog posting should be about 250 words and be written in a simple format. The longer a post goes, the more people skim, and the less likely they are to get the information they really want.

Short paragraphs: Blog writing is best using shorter sentences and paragraphs for easier reading. Readers want information fast and in small digestible chunks. Use paragraphs of about 50 to 100 words or roughly 3 sentences long and break them up with bold subheadings.

Keep it simple: Simple means getting rid of extra words. Simple writing is persuasive. A writer's ability to edit himself is probably the most important blog writing technique

Use Easy to read fonts: Unusual font choices and other poor formatting choices can make something visually difficult to read.

You have made the decision that business blog marketing is an important marketing strategy. Now, what should you be writing about?

Focus is very important in selecting your blog topic. One reason for blogging is to be considered an authority on your subject. A narrow tightly focused definition can produce more traffic and better SEO results than a broad set of subjects. General all purpose discussions confuse the search engines and won't do as well.

There are 4 steps in selecting your blog topic

1. What interests your customers? It should be closely related to your business and catch prospects while they are making their buying decision. As an example, if you sell baby furniture, blog about choosing a baby name. People generally choose a name before they buy furniture.
2. What are you passionate about? Writing a blog takes dedication and commitment. It is much easier to write about something that interests you and that you are excited about.
3. Narrow your niche. Nowadays even a blog specifically about Home Decorating is too broad. A blog about Window Treatments would be more focused. You will more likely be seen as an expert in this narrowed topic area.
4. Research keywords and traffic. Use one of the keyword research tools available to make sure there is sufficient traffic. Select the phrases you should be using as you write.

If you want more traffic and you want to do better with the search engines a very narrowly defined blogging topic is always better. You just want to make sure you have enough content to be able to keep the blog going.