Your Blog Needs A Strategy

I was listening to a presentation yesterday about the advantages of blogging and the way it can assist your company to flourish. The person was going on about the credibility it offers you and how it will make you generate trust with your potential clients. This ultimately will improve your chance of selling something.

The interesting thing was that the presenter was right regarding everything a blog could do, what they didn't point out was that just posting with a blog site will do little if nothing for you unless:

1) The blog's message is very relevant to something your audience is interested in.
2) There's an attractive offer that causes your audience to take action.
3) There is a call to auction with your post and in your blog site.
4) And, by far, most important, you have an audience.

If you do not have all of these things in place, then your blog is no better then a gold coin at the bottom of the ocean. The chances of finding it and doing anything with it are somewhere between slim and none.

Blogs Are Free, Or Cheap

One of the advantages of blogging is that it's so inexpensive to get started. One of the disadvantages to blogging is that it is so cheap to get started. Because there's such a low barrier to entry, there are thousands of blogs being created every hour. So if you don't have a way to stand out, you are going to rapidly get lost in the cloud.

Bottom line, posting to a blog will be observed by nobody, unless you make certain it takes place. This is where the strategy has to come into play. You need to know what you intend to do with your blog first and foremost. Is it going to be to generate new sales, educate your market, be used as a communication tool between a group of people, or simply your way of ranting to the world.

Each of those choices effects the way you create your blog, and how you get people to visit it. But once you figure out what you intend to do with your blog, now you've got to figure out how to get people to notice it.

How People Find Your Blog

There are a few ways to get visibility to your blog.

1) You can invite people through social media.
2) You can buy traffic and use email marketing campaigns, or PPC campaigns,
3) Or you can get your blog ranked through SEO and optimization.

The last one is by far the most difficult and will take the most time, but ultimately is the most worthwhile and can provide you with the best return. In addition, these strategies aren't mutually exclusive. You can apply all 3 in parallel. If you are trying to generate business using your blog and time is of the essence then I recommend you do all three. If time is on your side and you've got limited funds, then options one and three are going to be your best bet.

I'm not going to get into depth on each method, there are several sources that can tell you how to purchase a list, do an email campaign or a PPC program on Facebook or Google. But I will give you a quick tip on the SEO side. Expect that it will take a minimum of three months of posting daily before your blog will obtain much visibility on the SERP's. If you are looking for one day turn, you are wasting your time.

The only exception to this would be if you have a really unique subject that most people aren't talking about, but there is still demand for the information. You will have a better shot of your specific posts getting ranked much more quickly if that's the case.

One last point on SEO. This isn't for the faint at heart. Take your time and do your research before you dive in. You need to understand keywords, post and site optimization, competition, page ranking and what Google really wants. This alone can take a fair amount of time to learn. However it's worth the commitment of your time. When you learn to optimize your blog site and your posts, you can really improve your probability of success.