Everyone seems to have a blog. Your colleagues, your cousin, even your cat. Will your business die without one? No. Can a blog boost your busi-ness? Absolutely.
That is, if you create a smart blog marketing strategy. Otherwise, a blog is nothing but noise. Why? Because there are literally thousands of new blogs being created each day in the blogosphere, the universe of blogs. Just as with a Web site, you need to make your blog stand out from the crowd.
A blog, short for weblog, is an online journal published for the public to read. Typically, the author updates it frequently. At first glance, it looks like a Web site. Look closely, and you’ll probably notice many fairly short posts organized by date. That’s a blog. You can use tools such as Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, or WordPress to create and manage your blog.
A blog gives you key communication opportunities. It gives you the ability to:
- Instantly publish timely information.
- Create a public, yet controllable, conversation with readers.
- Turn negative publicity into positive publicity.
- Build your status as an expert.
- Improve your organic search rankings.
- Get media coverage.
- Attract new clients.
And those are just a few of the benefits!
By comparison, a Web site seems stagnant next to a blog. Sure, you can update articles and press releases on your site. But it’s not realistic to think that prospects and the press will bookmark your site to check back and see what’s new with your company.
Even if you have an online newsletter, often called an e-zine, which is short for electronic magazine, only subscribers will see it. Although an e-zine is a powerful marketing tool, it’s cut off from the rest of Web surfers—not to mention search engine spiders.
A blog, however, is a conversation out in the public space. Readers can stop in for a visit, sometimes post their comments, and even request direct delivery of your posts.
If you want to reach blog readers, simply spitting out company marketing materials won’t work. Your blog must be personal, educational, and responsive.
Anyone Can Do It
Being responsive is becoming increasingly critical because blogs aren’t solely published by companies. On the contrary. The popularity of blogging has skyrocketed because it’s a quick and easy way for anyone to say anything. Everyone can be publishers. The question is: What are bloggers saying?
Some are saying nothing, some are saying something, and some are slamming your company. Wait. What? That’s right. The blogosphere is a public relations powerhouse, which can work for you or against you.
The more visible your company is, the more likely it will be a target of good and bad press. Journalists aren’t the instigators of negative news. Be on the alert for angry customers, consumer protection watchdogs, competitors, and anyone who just doesn’t like you. Blogging is a highly visible outlet for unhappy people. A blog gets primetime visibility because it’s juicy spider bait.
Search engine spiders scout out blogs because they are full of content that’s constantly updated. Plus, blogs can attract links more easily than a Web site can. If you create a blog that serves the public, you’ll continue to create a fan base that will link to your blog without you even asking them to. Because spiders love content-rich pages with quality links pointing to them, a blog can often be more appealing bait than a static Web site.
This discussion about engaging readers, responding to bad press, and baiting spiders should show that purely publishing a blog ain’t marketing. Whether you already have a blog, or want to publish one, this chapter reveals sound strategies for leveraging supporters and complainers to get free publicity and new clients.
Stop Persuading, Start Engaging
First, let’s start with what’s on a blog. An author writes a series of posts or blog entries. Each post typically has the following features:
- Post title
- Permalink, the URL of the post
- Post copy
- Author’s name
- Date and time of the author’s post
If you let people post feedback, then you’ll have a Comments section under each post. You might also show TrackBacks, which are links to other sites that mention your post.
To see a fun example of one, go to Park City Mountain Resort’s Web site and click the blog link. (You’ll see how the resort leverages its blog at the end of this chapter.)
Who Is the Ideal Blogger?
If you’re a consultant, readers obviously want to hear from you personally.
A company’s ideal blogger is the CEO, product developer, marketing manager, or someone whom readers would love to get the “inside scoop” from. You might invite several spokespeople to post. Each author could share a different peek into another side of your company. Having multiple authors also reduces the responsibility of any one person to keep the blog content fresh, which is one time management issue resolved.
Publishing your blog is not a job for an intern! Your authors are online PR spokespeople. These employees should embrace your company’s values, have played on your team for a while, and understand what they shouldn’t post in a public space that can reach millions of readers.
This isn’t a job for your PR firm either. Blog readers want to hear from someone at your company, not your bodyguard who will publish prepared statements. Give your readers access to a real voice. And coach your blogging team to write as though they’re having a casual conversation, instead of writing an article. Creating a casual conversation is an effective way to engage readers.
What to Share
The beauty of a blog is its ability to grow your business without pushing a hard sales message at people. Yes, you should absolutely link your blog to your site, maybe even to specific products or services, if appropriate. But be careful. Overwhelming “Buy NOW!” content along with too many links to your own site will brand your blog as a big ‘ole sales pitch in the eyes of your readers. You’ll kill your blog.
Your job is to educate and engage. Do these two things and business will come your way. No sales pitch is needed. Leave that approach for advertising campaigns, not public relations ones.
Another blogging blunder is to regurgitate your company information on your blog. Save that for your site; it’s not usually exciting stuff for a blog. To get, and keep, the attention of your readers you could share the following information:
- Quick “how-to” tips.
- Answers to a recent poll or survey you offered. (You could also offer a poll or a survey on your blog and ask readers to participate.)
- An interview with an industry celebrity or star.
- Comments about other blogs.
- Your opinion on a recent news story.
- Information about an event, conference, or trade show.
I’m sure you noticed that none of these are specifically about your company’s products or services. You can certainly use your blog for company updates. Large corporations often use a separate blog to respond to customer service questions or announce updates to products that change constantly, like software. But assuming you’re starting with one blog, think about creating content that’s not always all about you.
Let’s look at an example. Instead of solely talking about the products it sells, a pet supply store could write posts about:
- Seasonal pet health tips.
- Employees’ personal stories about their pets.
- Animal adoption events sponsored by local animal shelters.
- A charity event the pet supply store will sponsor.
- Ways readers can help abandoned animals after a national disaster.
You really have an unlimited number of things you can write about—although, I’m guessing that if you don’t already have a blog, you’re worried about investing a huge amount of time to maintain one.
There are bloggers who post every single day, and they certainly get more exposure on the Web because they’re publishing more content than other bloggers. Frequency is ideal. But if you’re just getting started, try blogging monthly. (If you want, you can post comments on other people’s blogs for a while before you create your own. You can get some good exposure this way, too). Then increase the frequency of your posts when you’re ready. Again, having multiple authors helps share the responsibility of keeping your blog updated.
Shorter posts help also. Understand that you’re not writing an article. An effective post entry can be a few short paragraphs or even a few sentences. What you say, and how often you post, is more important than your word count.
An easy way to write often, while also keeping your content engaging, is to invite readers to participate. Ask a question. Ask for success stories. And ask for ideas. Although getting feedback might seem overwhelming, that’s exactly what you want.
It’s a Dialogue
A blog that doesn’t allow people to post comments is a monologue. Boring. It can’t truly be engaging unless you create an open dialogue. A dialogue is interesting.
Some blogging tools let you prevent people from posting comments altogether, or allow you to approve comments or even moderate comments before they’re posted.
Jeremy Wright, author of Blog Marketing, strongly suggests that blog owners allow comments to be instantly posted. Otherwise, commentators could be confused or disappointed by not immediately seeing their comments live. For publishers who stay on top of their blogs, I see Jeremy’s point. But I believe you should review and then approve comments before they’re posted on your blog.
That’s because if you’re not constantly monitoring your blog or using a tool with anti-spam features, spammers can dirty a blog quickly with meaningless comments and links used to improve their search engine rankings or their clients’ rankings. Unhappy customers or crafty competitors could post terrible things before you catch them. I say, check out comments before you publish them.
This sounds scary, I know. I didn’t allow comments on my blog for the first few months of its life. While I was working away on a project, I freaked out thinking about reviewing comments at 1 a.m. when I finished working. I wasn’t ready. It’s okay if you’re not ready either. As with any of the strategies mentioned in this book, take the steps you’re ready to take. Publish a blog to get the feel of posting and discover your voice.
When you’re ready, be accessible. Let people post comments. You get to learn what your customers need and want. You can even get instant feedback on an existing product or service, or one you’re thinking about selling—free market research. This reason alone is why you, or a blog monitor you assign to the job, should keep an eye on your blog.
Ready to blog? Not quite yet. You know how to make your blog engaging. But before you type one word, be sure that what you write will get noticed by the spiders. If you do this correctly, they’ll make your content visible to a whole new world of readers.
Emerging from the Clutter
The explosion of blogs makes it a challenge for new blog publishers to emerge from the clutter, but not impossible.
Start by making the search engine spiders work for you, especially since you don’t have to pay them. How much of your blog you can optimize depends on your publishing tool. First, try and fit relevant keywords in these areas to seduce spiders:
Post Title
Placing keywords in your post title benefits you in two ways. First, because the title of a post is seen by readers, it’s also seen by spiders. Don’t use your core keywords in every title. That’s spammy.
Remember how to create a keyword theme for your site from Chapter 1? Apply this concept to your blog. Use a variety of different keywords in post titles that support your blog’s overall keyword theme. This technique helps attract readers who may see your posts’ titles in the search results, as well as under a “Previous Posts” or “Archives” section on your blog. (Many blog publishing tools automatically file your posts under this kind of category, not to worry.)
There’s a second way a post title can attract spiders. The post title might be used in the permalink, the URL of that blog post. For example, if the title of a pet supply store’s post for its cat blog is “5 Steps for Raising a Healthy Kitten,” the permalink for that post might look something like www.blogname.com/5-Steps-for-Raising-a-Healthy-Kitten. This is yummy spider bait. Hopefully, your publishing tool creates unique permalinks for your posts. If not, it might be something you can change in your tool’s settings.
Post Copy
Again, because readers see your post copy, spiders do too. So create relevant content. For example, a pet supply store’s blog publisher shouldn’t always post about his travel adventures without connecting his content back to pets. Irrelevant content isn’t just confusing to readers, but spiders don’t get it either. This pet store would have a tough time trying to rank well for pet-related keywords. The author isn’t connecting his content to the company’s keywords. Don’t make that mistake, or it’ll cost you valuable visibility in the search engines.
Links
Blogs are great link bait, which basically means that you’ve got something worth linking to. Bloggers love linking to other blogs. If you’ve got valuable content and get the word out about your blog, you’ll get links without asking. Of course, asking doesn’t hurt, especially if your blog is new. Who loves links? Spiders do. As they’re crawling the Web, spiders have a better chance of finding your blog if you’ve got a lot of links to it. And they’ll reward your blog with a high link popularity score, too.
Don’t forget to link to other blogs and sites. In your quest to brand your blog as an expert resource, you’ve got to link to others.
Blogrolling is the act of linking to other blogs. A blogroll is similar to a page of links you might have on your Web site. However, instead of creating a “Resources” page as you might for your site, a blogroll is generally placed in your blog’s main navigation. You should definitely link to authority resources that are relevant for your readers. Doing this improves your status as an expert, which spiders notice as well. A blog or site with no outbound links seems awfully suspicious.
You just learned three essential steps for optimizing your blog. Simple, right? Optimizing your blog isn’t radically different from optimizing your Web site. But because many business professionals don’t realize this, they end up publishing a blog that’s not spider friendly. Now that you know this, you can optimize yours so you can say “Come on in, spiders. This blog tastes great!”
Start with these techniques, and you’ll easily attract spiders as well as the human audience. It doesn’t hurt to push your content out to people. There are a lot of hungry blog readers out there—so feed them.
Set Your Blog Free with Feeds and Pings
You can’t sit back hoping readers will return to your blog. A few loyal readers might. Most won’t. Don’t fret—they’re not gone yet. You can invite them to subscribe to your feed. This allows you to deliver your posts to them.
There are two main types of feed standards: RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds and Atom feeds. Each is a format that collects and distributes content from various blogs and Web sites. You can offer one or both feeds on your blog. A feed reader or news reader is needed to display the RSS or Atom feed as readable content. Bloglines and Feedreader are examples of free feed readers.
Still with me? Offering a feed allows people to subscribe to your blog posts and receive them through their feed reader. It’s kind of like a Web site visitor subscribes to your e-zine and must then check his e-mail program to read it.
I’m not going to talk about how to create an RSS or Atom feed because, well, I’m not that kind of girl. That’s true geek speak; I’m only half geek. There are free resources on the Web, if you’re interested in learning how to do this.
For example, FeedBurner, which is a feed management provider, offers a helpful “Feed 101” section on its site. Or you can hire an Internet geek for the implementation part. (Thankfully, feeds are built into most blogging platforms so you’re not required to know how to do the technical stuff.) Let me tell you why these technologies are important and how they can be leveraged to attract sales, spiders, and status.
So far in this chapter, I’ve focused on attracting the attention of prospects and search engine spiders. What about the press? Getting quoted by them instantly improves your expert status and can immediately boost your business. And if the publication is online, a link from that authority site to yours is priceless. Therefore, make your blog newsworthy.
Business professionals who understand blogging for the press are posting case studies, statistics, tips, special report summaries, and highly valuable information that is newsworthy. Please highlight this. I’m telling you what we, the press, really want. And the good news is that your prospects appreciate this information, too.
It’s becoming increasingly important to offer feeds to hook journalists. Or at least post comments on blogs that do. Journalists watch blogs for story ideas and sources. In fact, many of them subscribe to blogs via news readers. If you want to increase your chances of being featured, feed the press. Because even if you’ve got direct access to them, sometimes your content isn’t right. Other times, your timing isn’t right. At some point, your news will be timely and relevant for someone’s story. A feed keeps your new content in front of them.
Of course, journalists are searching the blogosphere, too. And there’s another way to get their attention. Actually, you can reach spiders this way also. Ping them. It doesn’t hurt them, I promise.
In the blogging world, pinging means telling other sites you’ve updated your blog. The blog publishing tool you’re using might have a pinging feature. You can also use Ping-O-Matic or Pingoat, which are free services that will ping blog engines for you.
Okay, okay, you’re not actually pinging the spiders of big search engines such as Google, MSN Search, and Yahoo!. However, because those spiders do crawl the results of blog engines, pinging indirectly helps you reach the major search engines. Besides, journalists as well as prospects are searching the blog engines anyway.
If you’re new to blog marketing and this feels overwhelming, skip feeds and pings for now. You can come back to this section when you’re ready to explore more ways to get your blog content out on the Web.
Blog marketing is taking off because it’s fast and powerful. You can become famous overnight. However, there’s good publicity and bad publicity. Because the blogosphere is fueled by consumer-created content, bloggers can play a significant role in your online reputation. This also means they can ignite an out-of-control fire that damages your brand without you knowing it.
What’s the #1 mistake marketers make with blog marketing?
Blogs aren’t like other marketing tools. There are different rules to play by and the audience, culture, and expectations for blog communication are completely different. The vast majority of blogs have no message and no authenticity. Engage your audience; the more you listen, the more you’re listened to. And communicate in a real human voice. It’s more like sitting around talking to friends at the dining room table than talking to peers at the boardroom table.
What’s your favorite simple but powerful tip?
The first step to blogging is not to blog. Read blogs…for weeks. Understand what’s going on, comment on articles you have an opinion on, and generally get involved in the small section of blogging that interests you. Then start a blog.
How has blog marketing helped your business?
My entire business is blog-based.
Attract Good Press, Fight Bad Press
The blogosphere is the wild West of the Web. People are posting—constantly. What bloggers are saying about your business can spread like wildfire. This can catapult your celebrity status or burn your brand. Because the rise and fall from stardom is highly visible online, reputation management is quickly becoming a critical part of Internet marketing. Pay attention to bloggers because they can support or slam your reputation.
In his book, Jeremy Wright sheds light on the frightening power of blogs. He shared that a blogger figured out how to pick a Kryptonite lock with a Bic pen and posted about his discovery. The post was picked up by Engadget, a gadget blog with over 250,000 readers a day. Then the New York Times and Associated Press featured the story. Kryptonite was even hit with a class-action lawsuit. According to Jeremy, Kryptonite knew about the blog fire, but didn’t respond because they were dealing with other issues of this crisis internally.
This horror story is every business professional’s worst nightmare. While most companies will thankfully never experience this kind of painful publicity, it could happen.
You can stay tuned into the blogosphere with IceRocket, Feedster, Technorati, and other blog engines and directories. Search for your company name, product and service names, names of key executives, and your URL. You can also monitor these keywords through Blogpulse, which is a free monitoring tool that can be used to track blogs. It’s quite handy.
To Respond, or Not to Respond
It’s important to respond to unfavorable posts where appropriate. By posting your comments on blogs that say not-so-nice things about your business, you show that you’re tuned in.
Your customers might be blowing up on blogs because your company didn’t process their refund, answer their e-mail, or return their call. Frustrated, they’re releasing their anger on their blogs. It’s kinda like therapy. Try to find angry customers and let them know you care about them. Apologize, fix the situation, and tell them it’s been fixed, or offer them a solution to their problem. Not only will your previously unhappy customers thank you for your response, but you’ll also score major brownie points with those blog readers, who could become your future customers. Plus, the press watches blogs so your response could lead to a glowing PR opportunity. You never know.
Unfortunately, not all complainers are customers you can help. Some bloggers are simply unhappy people. For whatever reason, they decide to hurl general insults at you or your company from their blog. Other bloggers are competitors trying to smear your name. Still others are creating controversy as link bait.
Link Bait
Link bait is content created to attract links. A lot of links equals good spider bait. So, everyone should do link baiting, provided it creates valuable content with readers in mind. But be aware that a blogger might attack you or your company as a link-baiting tactic.
To my horror, while wrapping up this book, I was personally attacked on a blog for an article I had written. The post wasn’t just unprofessional—it was mean and untrue. I was upset. Then something beautiful happened.
Several of my colleagues, who are also recognized experts, immediately posted comments on that blog. They attacked the personal attacks on me, defended my article’s editorial integrity, praised my first book, and mentioned my long-standing reputation in the industry. And several said the personal attack was just a link-baiting tactic. Wow! I couldn’t have asked for better publicity.
I also responded, explaining my side of the story without responding to the personal attacks. Next, I invited readers to debate the content of my article. The buzz was over in five days.
A few authors have shared similar stories with me; they let others jump to their defense instead of responding.
If you find yourself in a similar situation, know that you have several options. You might do nothing. You could respond. Or you may use your own blog to publicize your side of the story and invite feedback from your community of readers. On that note—whenever you’re blogging, think before you post.
Legally Speaking
As reported by The Washington Times on October 12, 2006, a Florida jury awarded $11.3 million in damages to a woman who said she was defamed on an Internet message board. Currently, there are several lawsuits against bloggers.
Tempted as you may be to fend off a personal attack with a personal attack, or launch one, it’s not a good legal or ethical idea to do so. Always be professional. What you say today might be available on the Web forever.
The bigger and more popular your blog, the better link bait and spider bait it becomes. Blogs are spider magnets. Much more so than your Web site. Although I don’t suggest creating a blog solely to seduce spiders, higher organic rankings are a profitable perk. There’s a dark side of blogging. Let’s talk about spammers and sploggers.
Spammers and Sploggers
Wherever there are search engine optimization opportunities, there are spammers. Blog spamming is a favorite tactic because it’s free, easy, and effective.
As a blog owner, you need to protect your blog from comment spammers. If you plan to hire an SEO professional, make sure you don’t hire a splogger, someone who creates spam blogs as a way to get immediate organic rankings.
Most spammers aren’t doing it for sport; they’re doing it for money. Although spammers could be promoting their own company’s products or services, they’re more likely affiliates, ad publishers, or SEO service providers.
Affiliates promote other companies to get a commission for clicks, leads, or sales they generate. (If you have or want to launch an affiliate program, be sure to read Chapter 7, “Unleashing an Affiliate Force,” first.) Spammers might also be ad publishers. For example, they could be Google AdSense or Yahoo! Publishing Network partners who get a commission when the ads on their site or blog get clicked. (Read more about that in Chapter 9, “Reaching Out Through Contextual Advertising.”) Finally, there are SEO service providers who spam.
Remember in my first chapter on SEO I talked about the importance of a link strategy? Well, spammers have discovered a way to exploit it. Two popular blog spamming techniques include the following:
- Posting comments in your blog to embed a link to the company(ies) the spammer is promoting
- Creating splogs, or fake blogs used for spamming, to embed links to the companies the splogger is promoting
Blog Protection
Comment spamming has been around for several years. This practice was refined with guestbooks. Spammers developed a robot, or bot, that would search the Web for guestbooks and then post a generic comment in the guestbook, along with a link to the spammer’s site. This program could post to thousands of guestbooks at a time. Compare that to running a “real” link campaign.
It takes weeks to identify relevant Web sites, ask for a link from their site to yours, possibly post a link to their site in return, and follow up to ensure your link has been posted on link partners’ sites. And how many links could you get this way—a few dozen? That took too long and was too much work for spammers. They played the numbers game. They developed a bot to post to thousands of guestbooks, which tricked the spiders into rewarding them for their link quantity, not quality. It was a temporary tactic, but it worked.
Guestbook spamming tools were the predecessors to blog spamming tools. Because blog spammers buy domains to burn, they don’t care about being caught. If you’re allowing anyone to post a comment to your blog immediately, you could get hit by their tools at some point—unfortunately, faster and more often than you’d expect.
Again, that’s why I recommend changing your publishing tool settings to give you editorial discretion over comments. If you’re going to be an active blog publisher, then follow Jeremy Wright’s recommendation of paying for a management tool that has an anti-spam feature that removes the obvious spam.
Keep a careful eye on your comments anyway. Comments like “Thanks for sharing such great info” or “I love your blog” should get your attention. It’ll be your call to remove something that seems suspicious if you’re not sure. After all, some readers might give short and sweet compliments. To investigate, check out the URL included with the comment. If it links to a casino, erectile enhancement drug, or porn site, you’ve been spammed.
The Rise of Splogging
Sploggers create fake blogs littered with links to sites they’re promoting. A recovering spammer told me that in no time at all he can program a bot that generates thousands of content pages optimized for the keywords the spiders were crawling the Web for—in real time!
This kind of program may have aided in the splogging attack on Google’s free blogging tool, Blogger, and Google’s free blog hosting service, BlogSpot, in October 2005.
According to CNET News.com’s article on October 20, 2005, the previous week a splogger published tens of thousands of splogs. Many of the splogs included names of well-known bloggers, which clogged the RSS readers of the people who were tracking posts by the well-known bloggers. Not to mention the fact that the blogosphere and search engines were polluted by these thousands of splogs.
Goals/Challenges
What were your goals for blogging?
First, we saw it as a way to set ourselves apart from our competition and to connect with our guests and team members in a new way. Second, we wanted our blog to be and sound authentic, and certainly didn’t want it to seem like another marketing ploy. So, we utilized individuals in different departments and facets of our business to blog. We felt that having a cross-section of bloggers would allow our readers to better understand the scope of our business. Third, we wanted a way to respond immediately to positive and negative items concerning the resort.
What challenges/concerns did you face implementing the campaign?
Our toughest challenge was getting upper management to approve the campaign! We had to explain how a blog could help our communication with our guests and team members. We also had to address their time-management concerns about being able to keep the content fresh but not spend all of our time doing it.
Strategy
Describe your implementation strategy.
Although we didn’t have a set schedule when we rolled out our blog, we did have a formal goal of having a daily post for the first few weeks after the initial blog rollout. From there we wanted to have a post at least every other day through the winter season. We did sit down with our principal bloggers to create a list of topics to post about, but we didn’t set it up as an editorial calendar because we recognized that an authentic blog reflects topics that are as current as possible.
How long did it take to launch your blogging campaign?
Our initial launch took about one to two weeks. We did a soft launch; then after receiving positive feedback, we placed a link to our blog on our home page.
What problems or surprises did you encounter, and how did you resolve them?
With seven blog authors, consistency and management of who will post, when they’ll post, and how often, have been our biggest challenges.
Results
What results did you achieve?
In two weeks of launching our blog, we saw our blog traffic increase by 2,000 percent. We also saw it as a tool to distribute information to our guests. When one of our chairlifts experienced mechanical problems and was closed down for five days, we used our blog as a way to provide our guests with real-time information.
What’s your #1 recommendation for blog marketers?
The best technique for effective blog marketing is consistent communication. Know what you want your blog to achieve and then create timely and interesting postings that’ll bring people back!
While I hate search engine and blog spam, I hold the tiniest speckle of admiration for SEO spammers. They’re brilliant, creative people. They’re outlaws of the Web. It’s dangerous to hire them, and it’s annoying to deal with the chaos they’ve created, yet I find stories of their mayhem a little fascinating. I can’t help it. Okay, this extreme clogging of feed readers is not cool. That’s similar to e-mail spam, which is evil.
I’m sharing information on how comment spamming and splogging work because you need to get educated on this stuff. If you’re informed, you’ll be able to better protect your blog from spammers, and hopefully you won’t accidentally hire a splogger.
There are legitimate ways of marketing your blog. Quite frankly, for a little more work upfront than spamming, the payoffs are significantly bigger. You’ll create a community of prospects, customers, and press who will see you as the expert. Spiders will notice too, and will reward your blog with extra opportunities for visibility and resulting business.
Tips to Remember
You can participate in blog marketing in two ways: post comments on other people’s blogs or become a blog publisher. Both are good. Yet when you’re ready, launch your own company blog.
First, think about what your readers want to hear from you as a business professional. How can you add value to their lives?
Then think about how to blog in a way that will invite the press and spiders to check you out. When they notice you, they’ll carry your message far beyond your current blog readers.
To up your buzz factor, jump into social media. Even though blogs are social media, I’ve dedicated a separate chapter to the social communities. These are networking communities with their own sets of tools and marketing opportunities. Let’s head there next.
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