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Blogging as a Marketing Tool
Blogging gives the Average Joe an opportunity to share their thoughts and their expertise on certain subjects with the world. It can be fun, it can be professional, and most of all – it can be an extremely useful marketing tool.
Not only do corporate blogs allow a company to share their knowledge, but it also allows your customers to get you know you a little bit better. But most important of all, it gives search engines a way to introduce your company to new customers.
When blogging for marketing purposes; one of the most important things you can do is to make sure that your blog is SEO friendly. Knowing a few things about SEO will increase traffic to your blog and ultimately to your company’s Web site. After all, isn’t this one of the main goals of having a corporate blog?
The use of keywords that are appropriate and relevant to your business and marketing goals is extremely important in a corporate blog. Make sure each blog has a keyword theme that you have chosen at the beginning and continued throughout. Peppering your blogs with appropriate keywords will increase the odds of your blog being crawled by search engine spiders.
Marketing blogs should always allow trackbacks and comments. This allows the search engines another way to find your blog. When you allow comments and trackbacks, it is possible for your blog to be found via a search on a completely different topic. For example, say our client Richard, who owns a landscaping company, TexaScapes, comments from his URL onto a blog regarding marketing by our other client, Mercury Mambo. If someone is doing a search on Richard or TexaScapes – they will come across Mercury Mambo’s blog as well since Richard’s and TexaScapes’ URL are attached to Mercury Mambo’s blog.
Remember to always use links when working with marketing blogs. Link your keywords back to other pages in your main Web site, back to previous blogs, back to pictures in your Flickr accounts, as well as back to sites that may have contributed information to your blog or may be of interest to your clients and blog readers. This adds, yet another way for your blog to be found by the search engines.
Finally, and most importantly, keep your blog interesting and educational for your readers. The more that people read your blogs the better chances you have of people commenting, linking to, and sharing your blogs. A virtual word-of-mouth recommendation can be just as important, if not more important these days, than a real-time word-of-mouth.
