All Entries in the "Blog Marketing" Category

What’s A ‘Bad Blog’ Anyway?

Spend any time at all online and you are sure to run into someone recommending that you start a blog for your business. Stick around any longer and you’ll encounter someone warning you not to start one if you are going to have a “bad one”. But what’s a bad blog? It’s almost never defined.

The implication is that if the content isn’t a pleasure to read then it’s a bad blog. But what is a pleasure for one person to read is not necessarily a pleasure for someone else. Have an interest in reading about badminton tips every day? No? Well, maybe someone else does.

But it isn’t all about the nature of the content either. You also have to consider blog design and the quality of the writing. Sure, you want your blog to be attractive. And, yes, you want the writing to be high quality writing. But understand that not every blog has to be of the same caliber as a blog on the A-list. If they all were then there’d be no A-list.

So what’s a bad blog? Let’s start by defining a good blog. A good blog is one that:

• Informs your readers about topics of interest within your niche
• Sets itself apart as unique from other blogs in the same niche
• Drives traffic to important landing pages on your website (the job of closing the sale is on those landing pages
• If your blog is a sales blog then it closes a decent percentage of sales or converts and adequate percentage of traffic to sales, or leads, or whatever your goal is
• Adds optimized content to your website often
• If an offsite blog, builds back links to your primary web property
• Gets people interested in your niche talking in the comments section
• Provides you with information about the needs of your target market

Not every good blog does every one of these, but a good blog should do many of them. It seems to reason then that a “bad blog” is one that doesn’t do any of these or that only does a few while neglecting the most important elements of a good blog. The problem is, a blog may have many different purposes or your standards for a good blog may not match what someone else’s idea of a good blog is. What every blog owner should refrain from doing is allowing your readers from defining what is “good” and what is “bad” based on whether or not they enjoy reading it. That’s not necessarily the judge of a good blog.

Assuming that readers must enjoy reading the blog presumes that the purpose of the blog is for readership, i.e. enjoyability. But simply having readers enjoying your content won’t necessarily lead to sales. You want your blog to make you money, right?

Of course, not all blogs are sales tools either. You can have a blog simply for SEO purposes. The point is this: Define the purpose of your blog and live up to that purpose. That’s really the only measure of blog quality. Don’t do that and you’ve got a bad blog.

The Primary Reason Your Business Needs A Blog

You’ve likely heard all the reasons your business needs a blog:

• Branding
• SEO
• Customer Service
• Being Sociable With Your Audience
• Creating Dialogue
• “Connecting” With People
• Facilitating Social Media Marketing
• Insert Reason Here

But the primary reason you need a blog is hardly ever mentioned. The best reason to start a blog today is because your competition has one.

Now I’m not suggesting that you start keeping up with the Jones’. Nor am I saying that you should be a be a follower. But the reason you should have a blog if your competition does is so that you remain competitive.

You see, a blog is one of the most dynamic SEO tools available. Any business with a blog has a distinct advantage over the competition in a number of ways. Here’s how a blog benefits any business that has one:

• Increases search engine saturation – the number of pages you have ranked in the search engines
• Boosts your link popularity – the number of inbound links to your website
• Gives you more content on your website, making your site more crawlable and more often crawled by the search engines

I could go on and on about the benefits of blogging, but what it all boils down to is a blog on your competition’s website gives them an edge in the search engines. If you don’t have one then you are at a disadvantage. If you have a blog and your competition doesn’t then you have the advantage. If you and your competition both have blogs then there is a more level playing field, except that the one who can better manage their blog could have a better advantage.

In business, it’s all about competition. A blog can give you an edge where before you didn’t have one. And that’s why you need a blog today.

Should You Use Free Article Content For Blogs?

Should you use free article content from article directories for your blog?

Before I answer, let me say that I have. I’ve gone to an article directory and used an article for my blog, but I don’t do it every day. And I’d suggest that you not do it every day either.

However, using free article content for your blog is not necessarily a bad idea. You can do it if you think the article will benefit your audience and it adds value to your blog. Don’t do it just because you want content on your blog.

Free articles are there for a reason. The article directories are there for a reason. But don’t just snag an article as filler content. That’s a sure way to ruin your reputation. Instead, only use an article if your audience can’t live without it. The article will not help you with SEO so don’t look for those kinds of benefits. It will help establish you as a person with good judgment if you do it correctly and choose articles that your audience appreciates. If you fail to do that then your audience will abandon you.

The Blog Writing One-Two Punch

I used to call a combination of blog writing and article writing for Internet marketers a powerful one-two punch. While it can still be a powerful marketing puglistic combination, I’ve discovered one that is even more powerful – the blog-Twitter punch.

Savvy Internet marketers have discovered that Twitter is one powerful traffic driving machine. But if you use Twitter for delivering the hard sell, it likely won’t do much for you. Twitterers who are successful at using Twitter to drive traffic to their blog then to their website are doing it by using Twitter as a reputation tool to draw followers to themselves then to drive those followers to their blog and website where they can close the sale. It’s powerful targeted marketing. Have you set up your Twitter account yet?