Blogging is a great way to converse with your audience. Lately, as I was doing Online Marketing for various Companies, whenever I was asked what is the most important pillar for Online Lead generation, my answer was pretty much straightforward; blogging.
For me, blogging is a great way to interact with your audience, get instant feedback and portray a professionally sound image of yours around the globe. It’s your playground where you can do your talking and convey a message to your reader.
I won’t be wrong in saying that blogging is a great way to enhance your business and generate leads. Your social media revolves around it and in this blog I’ll be sharing how a blog can actually make it happen for you.
I have a rather unorthodox way of looking at things, so you might be surprised by the approach I will suggest but it works for me.
In my opinion, blogging is the foundation and front runner in Online Marketing. Your Social Media, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Optimization and Search Engine Marketing actually revolve around it. I won’t be wrong in quoting that by 2020 everything will be online and a blog is your source of spreading information. You will be using various social media channels and mediums to spread it but the news will be originated from the blog.
If you are a startup company, and for that matter if you’re an IT Company or an E-commerce Company (which is also considered an IT Company) then you need to have a blog.
Smartly promote your products
A trick that most companies miss is that they try promoting their products in abundance on their blogs and make it way too monotonous for the reader which results in losing the reader. The ploy here is to smartly promote your products. For instance, if you are a Web Development Company, writing a “HOW-TO” regarding a certain programming problem might be of greater value. It will yield a WIN-WIN situation for you. You’d get a chance to do your Branding (Marketing) and you would also get a chance to get the relevant traffic.
So, write relevant material on your blog, never promote your products on your blog.
Engaging the reader is very important
Another way of getting noticed is to bookmark and spread the word, Twitter (which itself is considered as a micro-blogging website) is a great way to advertise your blog. Tweet your posts and try engaging people. The best method to tweet is to leave a comment with the link of the blog. Just don’t tweet with the title of the blog. Ask an engaging question or leave something so catchy that will attract everyone who reads the tweet.
Blog Success
The most important thing for a successful blog is the number of returning visitors.
Never get too optimistic by the number of unique visits. If you have a higher number of unique visits and only a few people return to your blog then you have a problem here. You might be getting unique hits because of great Social media Marketing but your content is not compelling enough to make the visitor stick or subscribe to you.
Content is the key element here. Make sure your content is exquisite.
Talking about quality
People do keyword stuffing and use a lot of keywords in their blogs. As per Google’s updates, keywords have lost their value. Instead of focusing on keywords, you should make sure that your content is actually informative. Quality is compromised when you try to write keyword driven content.
In spite of following the old school rules of keyword stuffing, you should write about things which could be informative to your reader and at the same point are related to your niche.
Subscription option
Always place a subscription option to the visitor where it is prominent, that will help you make a strong data base and you’ll be able to get in touch with your visitors easily.
E-mail marketing would be an asset here. The best thing would be to make weekly, bi weekly or monthly newsletters and send them out to your subscribers. Another thing would be to go for an E-magazine and roll it out to your audience regularly. You don’t want to frustrate your subscribers by sending too many E-Magazines or Newsletters in a month. People don’t want to see their inbox full of News feed.
Stay in a good neighborhood
You should be connected to good blogs of your niche as well. You should often Guest blog on their blogs and ask them to return the favor. This will help you build a BLOGOSPHERE and a community of your own with the same needs.
It’s like people helping people and flourishing together.
There are thousands of people writing millions of blogs every day. To stand apart from this crowd and to get noticed you have to love your blog.