All Entries Tagged With: "Blog Marketing"

Why You Shouldn’t Listen To The Gurus

The gurus want to sell you books. They are full of advice about how you should do this or you should do that. But they aren’t holding your hand while you’re doing it, are they?

It’s nice that they want to share their knowledge. Isn’t it? I mean, they’re not giving it away. It’s not free. There is a price tag on it. But your success doesn’t ride on that price tag. They get paid whether you succeed or not.

The fact of the matter is, online marketing comes in different shapes and sizes. What works for one situation may not work for another. A blog is an instrument. In the right hands it can play a beautiful tune. To someone else it may just make a bunch of noise. At Blog Content Provider, we consider ourselves your personal guide to blogging and when it comes to blog marketing, if you don’t succeed then you don’t succeed. Our business model is based on your continued success. If you don’t make then we don’t make it. What guru is going to tell you that? Do you get a refund on that e-book if you fall on your face? Will he retract his advice? If we don’t help you succeed, you can fire us. And that’s why we bank on what we say. Because we’re doing it.

Are You Buying Into The Blogging Hype?

It seems that marketers are all too ready to hype up the latest in marketing strategies. Guess what? Blogging is in. But should you buy the hype?

Before you do, consider some of the harsh realities of blogging:

• It is time consuming
• You can blog for days, weeks, or months and not close any sales
• Blogs have a traditionally high bounce rate
• It’s not as easy as it looks
• Good blogging can increase your SEO benefits, but bad blogging can kill your business

OK, that’s pretty negative. So if blogging is so bad, why are we advocates of businesses starting blogs? Well, quite simple. The benefits far outweigh the costs. See for yourself:

• Good blogging involves good writing
• Blogging is the most cost efficient means of marketing online
• A good blog can increase your search positioning by 1,000% in a few weeks
• Blogging makes for a great lead generation tool
• Blogging = SEO (if it done right)
• You can drive tons of traffic to your landing pages with a well-written blog

If you’re ready to start a blog for your business, ask yourself these questions:

• Can I write?
• How good am I at SEO?
• How familiar am I with online marketing strategies?
• Does my website get the traffic I want
• Are other methods of marketing online delivering results?
• Am I getting enough leads to follow up on daily?

If you answer in the negative on any of these questions then chances are you can benefit from a blog. But you can also benefit from a blog ghostwriter.

Let’s face it, you have your specialty. Stick to it. And let the online marketers who have their specialties stick to theirs. It’s just good business sense. Don’t you agree?

Blog Marketing 101 For Small Businesses

You may think that this downward trending economy is not a good time for blog marketing, but it’s actually the best time in the world to start a blog and consistently communicate with your target audience. There are several good reasons beside “it’s a cheap form of marketing” pitch. Here are some other good reasons why blog marketing is so effective and that you should be doing it right now:

• The economy won’t always be sour – True. What goes up comes down and what comes down goes up. When the economy is popping again your blog will be aged, seasoned, and well developed. You will have established yourself as an authority in your niche and have built real staying power.
• You need the content – Blog marketing is content. Every time you post a new blog entry you are adding new content to your website. More content means more search engine mojo.
• You are the authority, so act like one! – People love to do business with authority figures. If you don’t have a blog then you’ll have a more difficult time establishing yourself as an authority.
• Your competition has a blog – Blog marketing is no longer an option. If your competition is doing it then you should be doing it too. Otherwise, you’ll fall behind in the search engines and never catch up.
• It’s fun watching the results – Like seeing success appear before your very eyes? Then start a blog. It’s like magic!
• It’s a link popularity contest – Link popularity is very important and a good off-site blog can help you build more links faster.

There are six reasons to start your blog marketing strategy today. How many more do you need? Find out why blog marketing is the best thing to do right now.

Should You Start A Business Blog?

Blogging seems to be the buzzword of the decade. Everyone seems to want to get in on the action. Presumably, business owners who are just showing up at the blog party are doing so because they’ve heard somewhere that blogging is a great way to market their business. Well, it is, but only if you do it the right way.

There are many things to think about when starting a new business blog. It’s not all cupcakes and roses. You have to consider how often you’ll blog, whether you’ll do the actual writing yourself or hire someone to do it for you, and what you’ll write about on your blog. Too many new business bloggers start out writing then find out they have nothing to write about. Either they’re not focused or they haven’t thought through completely what they want their blog to be about.

At Blog Content Provider, we take a multi-strategic approach to blogging. First, there’s SEO. Why blog if you aren’t going to target your blog posts to search engines? You want your blog posts to rank for specific keywords related to your business so that you attract the type of readers you want. But focus entirely on SEO and you’re likely to write boring content that no one wants to read.

If you focus your blog posts on a conversational style of writing instead of “marketingese” then you’ll make people feel more comfortable about reading your blog. They want to see a real person, not some stuff shirt talking down at them. It’s a different kind of marketing than what most people are used to.

Thirdly, social media has become a strategy of its own. You’ll have to decide to what extent you want your blog to be socially motivated.

When it comes to blog marketing, think it through before you do it and when you decide that it’s time to start your company blog, learn the right way to do it before you jump in and ruin your marketing plan before you implement it.