Blog Marketing

Return to the index of frequently asked questions about online marketing.

What is A Blog?

A blog (the term blog being derived from weblog) is a type of website featuring posts published on a regular basis by the website’s author, or blogger. Bloggers publish a wide variety of material online including: commentaries, news, opinion, descriptions of events, pictures, videos, forums and so on. Often blogs are set up in the form of a diary or online journal and keen bloggers often keep their blogs updated on a frequent (daily) basis.

Blogs are free to set up (e.g. Blogger) and are extremely popular. There are even search engines dedicated to mapping out the blogsphere (Amatomu, BlogScope, IceRocket, Sphere and the most popular, Technorati). By June 2008, Technorati had indexed over 112.8 million blogs. However, do not despair, it is never to late to jump on a band wagon and you may want to consider setting up a blog to attract more visitors to your website.

How (and When) to Use Blog Marketing

Before you set up a blog, you should consider whether blog marketing is the best medium for you to use for reaching your online target audience. If the vast majority of your market are still responding to mainly print advertising (yes, they will catch up one day), there is probably not much point spending a whole lot of time and money on a blog and blog marketing.

Blogs Make Great Spider Grub

However, if you are keen to capture more of the search engine user market, then blogs can be a really effective way of increasing the number of visitors to your site. Why is this, I hear you cry? Well, blogs offer search engine spiders oodles of yummy, fresh food to crawl over and take back to their indexes.

From an optimisation point of view, blogging can really satisfy the appetite of a search engine optimiser craving new content. Blog posts mean text, frequent blog posts mean lots of text and if published the right way, (for example, with the right Meta data in place) it means lot of keyword-rich spider bait.

Blog Marketing Tips

If blog marketing is the way you want to go, then here are my top tips:

• Set up your blog as yourdomain.co.nz/blog or blog.yourdomain.com.
• Use a blog editor such as WordPress.
• Make sure you know what the objective of your blog is. It’s very easy to set off on a tangent.
• Make sure you are writing posts that will interest and attract your target audience.
• Tailor your blog posts to echo your business goals and get a good return on your time (e.g publish how to articles, free tips and advice, case studies etc).
• Create editorial guidelines so all of your blog contributors stick to your business goal.
• Create original and interesting content (including links to other website and blogs), so you develop a loyal following.
• Update your blog regularly for viewers and search engine spiders ( spiders love gobbling up fresh ‘food’ and will come back for more on a regular basis).
• Write what you know about rather than churning out someone else’s opinion.
• Enjoy what you’re writing about, so your audience can sense your enthusiasm too.
• Keep it informal, use short sentences and don’t let your posts ramble on.
• Use keyword Meta data in Blog Meta titles, descriptions and content (on the front page and in each post).
• Submit your blog to directories and blog search engines.

Glossary

If these terms sound like a foreign language to you, please don’t stew about it. You can refer to the (easy-to-understand) glossary of terms for more information.

Store Them Away

If you want to keep any pages tucked away in your online pantry of goodies, simply bookmark the relevant page in your browser by clicking:

• ‘Favourites’ (if you’re using Internet Explorer/IE)
• ‘Bookmarks’ (if you’re using Firefox).

“Easy-to-understand information about blogs, blogging, bloggers and blog marketing supplied by Steph Kendall, optimiser, writer and editor.”