Blog marketing
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What is blog marketing?
Blog marketing is marketing your services or products online by contributing to blogs, either by writing articles for blogs (your blog or other blogs) or by commenting in blogs.
While blog spammers abound, blog marketing is more than posting in blogs to get your link out there. Successful blog marketing starts with content that's relevant and valuable enough to get readers interested in clicking on your link. If the content is relevant and valuable, it and your link will probably remain in the blog, while spammy contributions are typically removed or blocked from being published at all.
Advantages of blog marketing
- It's a low-cost way of getting your content in front of a broader audience.
- Blog posts increase exposure to your company and your services and products.
- Contributing to various blogs helps build a network of people you know and who know you.
- Your company can be represented by a real person and build relationships with clients and prospective clients through blog interaction, especially if it's a company blog.
- Links from blogs with relevant content may help with search engine optimization and lead to more traffic to your site.
Disadvantages of blog marketing
- Writing useful content for your blog or for other blogs takes time. If your contributions aren't useful, you may be seen as a spammer.
- Blog marketing, like other social media marketing, involves interaction and requires good people skills. If your people skills aren't very good, you could make your company look bad.
- If you create a company blog, someone from the company needs to write in it regularly to keep it active.
- Blog comment links aren't as valuable for SEO as they once were, and many blogs use the "nofollow" attribute for links to help cut down on comment spam.
How to market via blogs
Find relevant blogs
If you create a company or website blog, make its content relevant to your website. If you want to write articles or comments in other blogs, look for blogs that are relevant to your business. For example, as a web host, you could contribute to blogs about the web hosting industry, web development, customer service, business and marketing, and so on.
Once you find blogs that you'd like to contribute to, spend time reading the articles and comments to get to know the type of content published in each blog. You will receive more recognition when you comment regularly in a blog, so this is time well spent.
Contribute quality comments
We've all read blog comments that are short, fluffy, and a waste of time to readers. Don't be one of those. Post only when you have something of value to contribute. For example, you could expand on a point raised in an article with an example that illustrates it. You could politely agree or disagree with a point made in the article or in another comment and explain why you agree or disagree with it. If you aren't sure if a comment will be well received, don't post it.
Take care to use correct grammar and punctuation, and be sure that what you post is factual. Avoid trying to advertise in your comments; you have the URL field for your link. The quality of your writing reflects on you and your business.
Not all your readers will be looking for the services you offer, but some will at some point. If they have a positive impression of you through your contributions, chances are that they will remember your company and consider your services.
Write blog articles
Some blogs accept guest writers to contribute articles. In return, an "About the writer" short bio that can include a link to the writer's site often appears at the end of the article. If you or someone in your company is a reasonably good writer and can write useful content, being a guest blog writer can add exposure for your company.
For the more ambitious, creating and maintaining a company blog gives you the opportunity to publish blog articles whenever you want to. More than one staff member can contribute articles. Regularly published articles provide fresh content for your website, increase traffic to your site, and create a platform for you to interact with the public.
See also
Web Hosting Wiki article text shared under a Creative Commons License.
