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How to use Blogs as an Online Promotion Tool

Guest post by: Carrie Langstroth

Article Overview: Blogs are an excellent medium to inform people about you, your company, and the products you offer. To use blogs for online promotion you need to perform tasks that will help in generating traffic to your blog, use Email and RSS feeds to connect with your customers, run promos and give away free samples to grab customer attention and last but not the least use social media tools, such as twitter to complement your blog.

How to use Blogs as an Online Promotion Tool

Although rubbished earlier as being nothing more than vehicles for people to channel their frustrations and daily ramblings, blogs today are an indispensable tool for the marketer and growing business. Your blog can say a lot about you, your company, and the products you offer because they serve as extensions of your brand's or product's personality (in the case of businesses) or as extensions of yourself (private blogs).

Blogs are a force to reckon with when it comes to online promotion, case in point - Lifehacker, and what it has done for thousands of previously never-heard-of-but-now-oh-so-popular programs such as Rainmeter.

Read the following to help mold a positive perception of your offerings and to communicate with the very people who will matter most to your business:

• § Generate traffic to your blog: Blogs do get picked up by search engines, but that in itself takes some time for them to do so; not to mention that you may end up disappointed after googling your blog and seeing it on the 53^rd page of the search results. It is essential that you pull all the right stops in getting all the blog index websites like Technorati and good ol' Google to pick up keywords and meta tags contained for quicker indexing.

Use SEO websites to get those search engines pick up your posts and updates to grab more eyeballs. Also add Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter buttons to your blog to get more folks interested.

• § Email and RSS: A blog is worth nothing if it does not include an email subscription and RSS feed feature. Both allow existing as well as potential customers to keep in touch with you, ask you questions and get the opportunity to check out what they've missed via an RSS feed reader or just simply viewing your blog posts in their mailbox. It cannot be stressed how important connecting with your target audience, being approachable and generating goodwill is for your business.
• § Grab some attention: Give away free samples to frequent visitors. Also, conduct contests and special 'promos'. These would serve as 'test runs' to actually gain valuable feedback and suggestions from people who are willing to try out your product. Go 'out there' and let people gauge whether there is any room for improvement.

Conduct polls, post video demonstrations and add rating features to your blog. Start Q&A sessions, post an FAQ link that directs them to your website and resolve doubts by taking part in discussions. Individuals are spending their valuable time in visiting and checking out your space, so treat them like you would any 'expert' and be open to new ideas and inputs so you can use this first hand information to boost your sales.

• § Complement your blog with Twitter: Use Twitter updates to send multiple, concise messages to the community and make announcements, post new offers, send online coupons and give people real time updates about your business.
• § Blog advertising: If you don't have the time or inclination to be bothered with a blog, use the platform to advertise your product. Most research findings have shown blog readers and visitors to be an important part of niche markets; a huge majority are well read people and users of 'new products'. This is an opportunity for you to tap into this segment and substantially broaden your market base.

It would be a great thing if you also utilized the web's most popular blogging tools to become an efficient blogger. Remember, blogging is about PR as well, so don't overlook the platform when it comes to crisis management and reinforcement of a positive image for you and your business.

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Article Tags: blogging, generating traffic, media tools, online promotion, promotion tool, twitter
Referred by: http://jaykubassek.com



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Re: Kevin's Case Study #11 - A New Forum Category? - [quote:31qpen1j]This is just my opinion, but I consider the prospective categories, Online Marketing, Internet Marketing and Online Promotion, as being pretty much one and the same - just different words that different people use.[/quote:31qpen1j] I completely agree! Those are all just "internet marketing" as far as I am concerned. And I normally would have voted for internet marketing, however I chose social media marketing simply because there are more than enough IM forums out there already.
Kevin's Case Study #11 - A New Forum Category? - Hi Everyone, 2009 is a new year and I'd like to create a new forum category to jazz things up! In the past, there's been some interest voiced about adding a "Social Media Marketing", "Online Marketing", "Internet Marketing" or "Online Promotion" category. I'll implement [u:1g2tv6tf]ONE[/u:1g2tv6tf] of those new categories, but can someone first tell me what the difference would be between the existing "Marketing" section and one of those new options mentioned above? Thanks
Re: How can I promote my site? - There are various useful techniques for promoting a website. In SEO the techniques could be "white hat" and "black hat" techniques. White hat techniques includes following techniques to promote website as per the search engine rules. - Search Engine Friendly Tags - Website submission to Search Engines - Website Submission to Social Sites (Like twitter, Facebook) - Articles Promotion & Press Release Promotion - Quality Directories promotion - Contribution to Blogs, Forums Black hat techniques can reduce website strength in the search engine and can treat site as spam that could be following. - Keywords Stuffing. - Hidden Links - Maximum Links of unknown sites.
RSS explained - Hi Takuya, Many thanks for the indepth explantion. If I understand it right, it is mainly for the use of 'Blogs'. You refer to the use connected to 'Blogs. What about websites. Is there a benefit, too? Kindest regards Beat "Unlock People's Potentials!"


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