Fresh Content is the New King: Leverage Your Blog to Gain Prospects and Grow Your Business

By Ford Saeks

You might have heard the saying “Content is King.” This idea is now updated, because fresh content is the new king. According to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere series, more than 900,000 blog posts are posted every 24 hours. By posting this fresh content, bloggers are able to add timely and valuable content for their readers, while at the same time increasing traffic to their site, building relationships and establishing themselves as the expert in their fields.

There are more than 200 million active blogs out there and three fourths of the people who use the Internet read blogs. So what’s all of the hype about BLOGS and why should you care? By creating and effectively leveraging a blog for your business, you will rank higher in search engines, attract more targeted traffic to your site, create and establish repeat traffic, and get more sales of your products and services, and that’s just scratching the surface of the benefits blogs can offer you. As a marketer for your business, your purpose is to communicate the value of your products and services. Blogs allow you to do that in a much more personal and interactive way. 

When planning your blog start by focusing on the benefits to your site visitors.  What do you think they’d want to know more about?  Ask your customer service, sales people or receptionist to make a list of the top questions or areas of concern relating to your business.  Spend some time researching and reviewing other blogs on your subject or topic area.  You’ll quickly find many ways that adding a Blog to your marketing plan just makes good business sense.  As a marketing tool, it allows you to create a much more personal relationship with your viewer than regular web content. In being able to establish a personal relationship with your prospects, you will walk them through the process of knowing you, liking you, and then trusting you, which will then lead to them buying your products or services.

Tips to help you effectively leverage your blog:

• Use your blog to increase credibility.  Make sure your blog is well written so it entices the curiosity of a visitor. Also ensure each of your postings allows users to ask questions and clarify doubts they might have. Organize your blog so it also allows your customers to easily find the information they are looking for by using the proper keyword tags and categories and a search option. 

• Use your blog as an education based marketing tool. Blogs serve the role of a teacher, so make sure your blog has valuable information for your visitors so they can learn more about your industry, viewpoints, area of expertise, products and specific technical information on a variety issues. Furthermore, your blog must be a place where visitors can send feedback and questions to you, which you can then respond to with helpful, relevant information and answers.

• Use it to boost product sales.  Detail all of the benefits and usage of your product or service on your blog. This attracts prospects to your website, while at the same time, keeping customers updated on the latest developments with your company’s products or services.

• Use it as a tool for internal communication. It is accessible to everyone in your company, so why not make it a central place for company information and updates? Display all of the latest events and the future plans or training for your company. Implementing these and other strategies will help your blog play a key role in helping you communicate to the employees of your company.

• Blogs also make great Content Management Systems (CMS). In addition to regular blog postings you can also use blog software to update and manage the content of specific areas of your website. 

• Use your blog to establish powerful word-of-mouth marketing and recommendations.  Create postings that invite comments. Viewer comments on your blog create extra content which in turn will help raise your Search Engine rankings and attract more visitors. Also, everyone trusts the opinions of others more than they trust the marketing copy communicated by the companies selling products. Generate content that entices your prospects and customers to post their thoughts and comments on your products, services and company.

When talking about Blog Marketing it’s important to make a couple of distinctions.    The first is “using a blog to help to market your website.”  In this perspective, the blog is mainly used as a traffic generating strategy.  Your focus is on adding keyword-rich content in various formats — text, audio and video postings — that solves your readers needs or desires and gets ranked by the major search engines.

The second distinction is “marketing your blog.” Many blogs are not standalone websites, but are part of a bigger website and can be used for publicity and public awareness. In this case you may just want visitors to come and read the content posted on your blog, and then hopefully they click-through to other pages and make a purchase.

There are many reasons for building your business blog – perhaps as a place to highlight product reviews in a more personal way or write posts which link to the products pages of your site with more product details.  You can write about how people use your products or services, like case studies, and write about news and upcoming events – for use internally or externally.  Remember that personal recommendations are key factors in buying decisions, so let your blog help facilitate this and in the process give potential customers helpful information to encourage sales! 

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