Are you Blogging for Business?

Sangeeta Kumar

Blog requirements and platforms

Purpose

Making use of blogs for promoting the online business is considered to be one of the effective marketing tools. The latest trendthat can be seen in the business sector is making optimum use of resources to increase communication and interaction with targeted customers. Blogging is one of the effective approaches to increase traffic to one's website. Blogging has steadily become the most preferred method over the traditional methods over the traditional methods to increase visibility of the web page on search engines.Blogs in businesses are greatly used to increase popularity and establish business's reliability and name recognition.

Through blogs, you can build an invaluable platform where expertise, talents and experiences gained in the business can be demonstrated instantly to the people all over the world.

The primary function for a successful blog is to provide adequate information. All successful and popular blogs are those that provide information without overt promotion.

But that raises a big question for a business. If I cannot promote my products what value does my blog have?

The answers are very visible
  1. You make your brand known
  2. You come across an as expert in your niche.

The above two factors are enough to get visitors interested in your products. So your blog becomes a part of indirect marketing. In this age of direct marketing bombardment this subtle form of marketing appeals to a prospect. Your expertise has already been established but most probably

Hence, there are some factors that you must never ignore:
  1. Always put a 'call to action' on your blog.
  2. Display your latest products and your most popular products as images linking to details or specifications and cart page.
  3. The copywriting on the call to action page and the product pages must be well done to convert. Your blog has established your expertise; all you need now is the emotional pitch that tells the prospect how the product will change his/her life.

Popularity

The purpose and the ROI factor of the blog established, you now need to know how to make your blog known among all.
  • In this age of social networking you can use your network to tell others about the blog.
  • You can also make your business colleagues know about it and ask them to link to your blog. You may have to link to them in return.
  • Technically it would be advisable to submit your blog to some of the most popular blog directories.
  • Use keywords that your customers will use to find you in titles of blog posts. Search engines will pick it up and make you rank higher. The higher you appear the more chances are that your customers will visit your blog.
  • Post excellent content. Good content gets linked and this raises the value of your blog and indirectly your business. Generic content has no value.

Platforms

There are several ways to blog and many more types of blogging softwares. If you are thinking of setting up your blog on a folder or sub domain on your website the blogging software has to be compatible with the website. For a stand alone blog domain you can choose any platform and then decide on a host that will support the platform. You can even opt to host your site on a platform like blogger or typepad.

Happy Blogging! Best Sangeeta
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Sangeeta Kumar

Sangeeta Kumar is the Vice President of Web Marketing for GMR Web Team, a global online marketing, strategy, development and maintenance agency. Sangeeta is a jack-of-all-trades kinda person in the world of Internet marketing, excelling in market research to come up with a strategy based on the latest trends to get a website on page 1. She knows her stuff and enjoys a good discussion on SEO anywhere, anytime.


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