Social media like Facebook and Twitter are throwing a dark shadow over blogs. Social media are extremely convenient. The applications are very easy to use, the short posts do not require any commitment and the reward with LIKES, FOLLOWERS, etc. is instantaneous. Today, no business can ignore the power of social networks in its marketing strategy. The question is the following: does blog marketing still able to benefit you? The answer is definitively yes. Blogging goes far beyond social networking!
A blog can contain a tremendous amount of information to support your website. If the website purpose is to hold the essence of your business to move towards a sale, the blog is really a great tool to both meet with people and communicate with them.
1) Meet with new people.
- A blog is a true website specialized in communication. Therefore, a blog is crawled by search engines, indexed, cached and get a rank on its own in the search engine result page. Yes, you can gain traffic from search engines on your blog.
- Many people use the Internet to find information before going through a purchase. A blog is the perfect place to inform people. It is the best place to win people’ trust. Show your expertise and orientate their choice towards your company. Tell your visitors you know what you are talking about and they would be safe going with you. Make your blog a more casual gate to your website.
- A blog post is not like a tweet about something cool you saw, or some weekly special. To be able to meet people, of course, a blog requires a strategy. If you know your customers, you are very well aware of what they ask and what are they interested in. Create pages related to your business. You may use the queries you receive from your website to choose the topics to talk about on your blog. Look carefully at the phrases they were using and use parts of them inside your blog. Other people might be using the same phrases in search engines and Google may display your website on the result page. You may also use Google Keyword Tool to expand your choices and play with semantic variations. You could also use your blog to specifically reinforce your website SEO but be careful with the use of exact keywords, the trick is very obvious. Google does not like to be tricked. Play naturally with your blog, this is the strength of a blog. Engage your posts with your readers’ community. Give your opinion and solicit people to give their own.
2) Communicate with people.
- As already mentioned, the main purpose of a blog is to communicate with people. With online companies, the business-to-client relationship has lost its human touch. Today, we buy from one company, tomorrow from another one. We buy without really knowing who we buy from anyway… Your company blog is a way to get in touch with your clients. You must use your website to tell people who you are. Your staff could take turn to post on the blog, display their name, picture… Give your blog a real life and humanize your company.
- More than that, your blog can become a real database of in-depth information to give to your clients. Good posts can be extremely useful to save you time. Written once, they can be used over and over to give your clients the answer they want. Furthermore, publishing information on your company blog gives a greater value to the information itself. Give your clients a good reason to recommend your company with useful posts.
Get back to your old blog or get started with one. Blogging is hard work. You need fresh ideas and to stick to a schedule but it is still worth it. Alternatively, you could hire web content writing professionals! Good luck.
Nice post. I learn something totally new and challenging
on blogs I stumbleupon on a daily basis. It’s
always helpful to read content from other writers and practice something from
their websites.