By Ram Iyer on May 16th,
2012.
Blogs are the easiest and
cheapest way to market your products or services. Sometimes
when people do not know where to start, how to overcome writers’ block and what
to expect, it leads to blogs being ignored. Some people try it for a while and
when they do not see immediate results, they even quit.
Caution: Blogs may not be
for everyone. Some products and services do not lend themselves to online
marketing. I have seen a lot of people waste time, resources and money with online
and social media because they heard from some social media expert telling them “they
need a Social media strategy". Do your homework before jumping in to
online and social media marketing!
GM can afford the mistake,
you cannot (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304192704577406394017764460.html)
Writing Blogs:
Blogs should be one to three
paragraphs long, and focused on your industry. Use easy-to-understand language
to write about trends, overviews, product reviews, opinions and outlooks on
your industry related topics.
The topics do not have to be
directly related to your products or services and as a blogger; you do not have to force yourself to include any special
keywords (make it natural.) Your article can be based on your experience
talking to customers, friends and family. It can be something you heard at a
tradeshow, watched on television or something you even read in a news-magazine. Feel free to point to reference sites
or articles on the web, with a link.
Titles should be catchy -
Something like "Online education saves tons of money for business houses"
- to highlight how education is being transformed; "Hand-sanitizers
greatly reduce the risk of common cold.
Writing a blog article
should take no more than an hour of writing and another hour of editing. Run it
by one person to make sure there are no grammatical errors (sometimes it is hard
to see a tense-mix-up or half-completed sentences.) Skip the review if no one
is available or if it takes more than a day to get it back.
After you finish writing the
blog, think of keywords that reflect your blog. Keep it true to the blog. For
example: if you are writing about hand sanitizers, do not tag it with
"child welfare" unless you are presenting a unique combination of
"hand sanitizers somehow either protecting or harming kids."
And you are finally done! Publish it!!
Next step: Popularizing them
1 comment:
I pretty much agree, though I think you have to use it in the right way to achieve success for your target market. I would suggest blogging as a way of showing off expertise in any given subject areas. Way too many bloggers are under the mistaken impression that the key to blogging success is writing at least one article every day. And while there is some merit to that, if your core business isn't blogging you're going to be wasting time trying to come up with 500+ words for a new article every day and going to produce lower-quality content. I think the better approach is to focus on writing a very professional article once in a while that demonstrates true expertise in any given niche. You can do that once every few weeks or months and focus on your core business most of the time. To supplement that, I would recommend using your normal Facebook or Twitter account that most people are logged in most of the time anyway and writing short observations whenever the mood strikes. And its not hard to post on these networks because the vast majority of people are on there everyday anyway. Over time, by promoting yourself on your website, through Facebook ads, through the types of services listed at BuyFacebookFansReviews for example, and through other methods, you can build up a nice little dedicated niche over time without going to the extreme and trying to keep an actual blog active, which involves a surprising amount of time to handle and you get the best of both worlds. Besides, with so many people essentially using Facebook and Twitter as their RSS feeds nowadays, I think that this type of strategy has quite a few additional merits. A handful of great articles is much better to have than a lot of average content. I think many businesses that are currently trying to blog nearly every day would be better off following the aforementioned approach.
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