With its capabilities to reach readers, individuals and businesses has populate the information transaction by using blogs to promote themselves. Businesses use blogs when they want to share information in a less formal way.
New businesses often have limited budget concerning their marketing strategies. Blogs can be an alternative for your marketing effort since they can deliver messages in less to no cost yet targeted to your customers.
There are several outlines strategies to help you turn your blog into an information packed, lead generating, customer raving, sales producing machine.
1. Design
Try and mirror the look and feel of your blog to that of your offline motive. If you have a logo, incorporate it into the theme of your overall blog design. If you have certain colors that identify your brand, be sure to place these on your blog site. You can hire a freelance designer or company that are well into this business. If you’re using WordPress, have a custom theme designed or a ready-made one altered to match your offline look and feel. Don’t underestimate your brands power to drive online traffic and readers.
2. Content Topics
Next on your list once your design is done is to create a plan for contents. This can be as simple as deciding that you will update the blog once daily, once weekly or some other regular schedule. It could mean deciding who will write the articles, or it could mean what specific topics you plan to cover. Want some examples? Try thinking of what your target buyer seeks in terms of information and formulate content that answers questions or paints a picture. And don’t forget to include multi-media content such as videos, audio, podcasts, digital PDF reports and mobile accessible content. The more variety the better.
3. Video
Online readers love to watch video as evidenced by the explosive growth of video sites such as YouTube. Not only that, but Google the biggest and best search engine on the web, gives good credence to online videos. Now when a search is done, depending on the term, you will most likely get served up a video along with traditional text only results.
As a small business owner, there are a tremendous amount of ways to use and include videos as part of your content marketing strategy. For example, a video showcasing a fun company event is a way to let customers “inside” your business. Keep in mind, that you can’t go wrong with humor, find a way to use humor in your blog and or social media campaigns. People love to laugh.
4. Network
By definition a blog is collaborative and this is what makes it stand out from traditional publishing. There’s dialogue and feedback, which is what you will have once you’ve established yourself in your respective niche.
You do this by aligning yourself with other blog owners and joining their social networks, try to find them via blog directories, Twitter, Facebook, Google searches and or word of mouth. Ask established bloggers to point you in the direction of those who would be a good match for you to network with.
5. Share
This piggybacks from point four above on networking. Once you’ve found 10 to 20 blog owners to network with, you now will want to share their content, spread it around via tweets on Twitter, status updates on Facebook and or linking to it from your own blog.
6. Outsource
As a small business owner, your time is limited and as such so is your time to blog and or do social media online. But once you’ve got a basic handle what a business blog is and what it can do for you. You can hire someone or outsource a part of the tasks involved in getting the blog off the ground and or growing it. But it’s essential that you take the time (initially) to learn the ins and outs of it, so that you can competently hire someone to take over. If not, you will be lost and so will your hired person.