Building Your Business with Blog Marketing
One of the beauties of a SubHub site that they come already fitted with an RSS feed and they allow readers to post comments to your articles. For all intents and purposes, this means that besides being a membership site, they also offer a ready-made blogging platform.
Blogging is fast becoming one the primary marketing tools in any businesses toolkit for a number of powerful reasons, including profile raising, expert positioning, trust building, traffic building, search engine optimisation and target market engagement. And you don't need to be a marketing expert to make it work...
It's generally accepted that posting articles of use or interest to your target market at least twice a week is enough to keep your blog (and therefore your site) reasonably high up in the search engine results. This fresh, keyword-rich content means more traffic, but there are a number of other things you can be doing to further enhance your 'blogging for business' strategy. Today, I'm going to draw your attention to just one activity that will help you engage with your readers and bring in more targeted traffic.
At the end of most blog posts, you will see a link saying 'Comments'. Click on it and you're taken to a list of comments and/or a comment form where you can leave your own.
When I first started blogging, I was often moved to comment on other people's blogs but would find myself suddenly overcome with shyness, feeling that my opinion was in some way 'not worthy'! These days, I love browsing through my favourite blogs, discovering new ones and contributing by leaving helpful comments as I go. Now this may sound like a waste of precious time, but actually it's not.
In fact, I've created a blog marketing schedule with the simple goal of commenting on at least one blog a day.
How come? Because if done right, it's great for building traffic to your own blog and here are three reasons why:
1) It puts you and your business under the noses of your target market
By leaving a supportive comment on (shock! horror!) a competitor's blog, you are making their readers aware that an alternative exists. Make it friendly, witty, knowledgeable and helpful. Why wouldn't those readers click through to your site to find out more? The bricks and mortar equivalent, say in the mortgage industry, would be walking into Big City Building Society and finding Small Town Building Society advisors hanging around chatting to customers! And everyone's fine with it.
2) It creates a link TO your site from another website/blog
When you leave the comment, you are usually asked to leave your name and your URL. Once your comment is published, although your URL may not show, it will be behind your name, so anyone clicking on your name will be taken to your URL. Incoming links to your site, particularly those from more popular sites than yours, all help contribute to a higher Google Page Rank, which determines how high up in the Search Results pages you come when people search one of your keywords.
3) It's a great way to network with people in the same industry or with the same target market
I know its hard to imagine this happening in a traditional business, but staying with the mortgage lenders example for a minute, imagine if Big City BS, upon learning about a great niche product provided by Small Town BS, suggested an affiliate arrangement -- or even better -- a joint venture of some kind. This kind of peer networking is brilliant for 'profile raising' and enhancing your position as an expert in your field. The other party might blog about you (driving traffic) or simply come to your blog and leave its own comment there (encouraging reader interaction).
There are a number of other simple things you can do to grow your membership through 'blogging for business', including techniques that will increase traffic, raise your profile and encourage conversations with potential clients. I have written about a few of them in my Business Blog Marketing Booster report featuring 5 Power Tools to Boost Your Blog Traffic. Download it now (for free) at www.BusinessBlogAngel.com.
Copyright 2006 Claire Raikes. All rights reserved.