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5 Ways to Use Your Blog

Written by: Carma Spence-Pothitt

Article Overview: We all know that blogs have emerged as powerful marketing tools, especially for the solo entrepreneur. Here are five practical ways to use your blog to promote your business and build a following of loyal prospects.

5 Ways to Use Your Blog

We all know that blogs have emerged as powerful marketing tools, especially for the solo entrepreneur. This is, in part, because blogs fare so well in search engine results. This fact alone has led to the evolution of many marketing tactics using the blogging platform as their base. Some include:

* Blog and Ping: when you post to your blog, you “ping” a variety of blog directories and search engines to let them know you have new content.

* Tagging: you associate each post with a variety of keywords, or “tags,” to help people find your posts in search engine results.

* Linking: your blog links to another blog who links back to you. This can be done within posts or in the “blogroll” function of blogging software.

* Social network linking: you link your blog to social networks such as Facebook or Twitter so that every time you post to your blog, a message goes out to that network.

And these few tactics are just skimming the surface.

Here are five practical ways to use your blog to promote your business and build a following of loyal prospects:

1. Tell Engaging Stories
Blogs are most effective when they attract a loyal readership. And the best way to do this is to entertain, inform and engage your audience. Write about things that are worth their time to read … be it on an emotional level or a professional level. Depending on your personality and your business goals, you might consider including events from your life and then move on to your marketing message.

2. Write Product Reviews
This technique is particularly effective when you want to promote affiliate links. But be careful with this technique. You don’t want all your reviews to be all sugar and roses. Let your readers know the faults of the products you review. Try to be objective. And don’t think narrowly about this technique — product reviews can include book reviews using your Amazon affiliate link! This is also a good way to give some love to your joint venture partners, and even your best clients!

3. Provide Excellent Customer Service
One of the unique properties of blogs is the ability to have comment boxes on posts and pages. This is where readers can leave their feedback regarding your posts. You can use this feature to gather questions, complaints or suggestions from your readership. Even better, you can post your answers as part of the comment thread!

4. Hold Contests
Want to challenge your readers to write the most moving testimonial for your products? Have them leave their submissions on your comment box. Want to hold a raffle? Have your readers leave their names in the same comment box. The possibilities for contests are limitless, and blogs make all of them possible.

5. Gather Valuable Feedback
Post surveys and polls on your blog. Encourage readers to post feedback in the comment box. The blogging platform truly gives you the power to gather instant and valuable feedback from your audience, and respond in a fairly quick manner.

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  Don't Rely On Google Alone for Getting Traffic to Your Blog
  Blogging The Easy Way Is More Than A Trend
  Blogging Your Way to a Successful Home Business

Article Tags: affiliate link, amazon affiliate, book reviews, business goals, emotional level, facebook, faults, joint venture partners, loyal readership, marketing tactics, personality, powerful marketing tools, professional level, prospects, roses, search engine results, search engines, skimming the surface, social networks, solo entrepreneur



Related Forum Posts
Re: Best Internet Marketing Strategy - Hi David, I agree about the Blogosphere. You have a smaller group that Blog, but do so on the premise that they think they should, but have never really considered the purpose of their Blog. Then I think there are a few SEO or Internet Marketing types that see Blogging as just another link building strategy. But the largest group of Bloggers, tend to be people who enjoy writing and discussing their topics of interest. Blogging is good for link building, but the true Blogger is a breed apart from the rest. They want to dialog, to debate, to have feedback and they are very willing to link to other worthwhile conversations that are relevant to their topic. I agree with you. These group of Bloggers obviously are passionate about their writing and together, they create huge conversation trails interactive and travel from Blog to Blog. But the evidence is clear with this group that loves what they write about. With comments enabled on a Blog and having a Blog tuned to a specific purpose you already have the evidence of original Social Media.
Re: Alexa Ranking Goals - That's great GT! What method did you use to put up the Entrepreneur Blog Network in your Wordpress Blog? We're always looking for the easiest methods to help bloggers who are not techies get involved.
EvanCarmichael.com suggestion - Maybe I missed it but I would like to suggest that a Blog be created to support the Forum. The idea is that in the blog you put in snippets of some of the biggest conversations with a 'read more' link to the forum itself. Setting up the Blog and clipping some conversations onto it wouldn't take very long.
Jen's Blog - Spam protection - Jen, I like the Blog and just posted a comment to one of your articles. From my experience you need to implement some sort of SPAM capture tools. i use them on my Blog and it's been a life saver as I'm getting hit by spam atleast 5 times a day. I use Wordpress and they have plugins like Captcha and SPAM Karma installed.
Blog Marketing Anyone? - Hi Kevin I suppose you could use the same SEO principles on a Blog as you can for a website but the more content you have within your Blog, the better rankings/traffic you would receive. Would you have time to write a full length article with tips in it every day or second day to get the article count rolling over every week? I would also like to know if anyone has had any experiences with marketing blogs and the traffic they received.


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