All Entries Tagged With: "business blogging"

5 Ways To Use Blogs To Drive Traffic Where You Want It

Blogging has grown a lot since it was first introduced online. It has changed, but the fundamentals are the same. Businesses are using blogs ever more and to great effect. Below are three ways that you can use a blog to drive traffic to your website:

• Use your blog posts to promote specific pages of your website. Don’t link to too many pages in the same blog post. This strategy is best used as a minimalist approach. Focus on one – or two at the most – pages per blog post and link to that page once or twice. No more. Focus on another page in the next blog post.
• In your sidebar. Pick a handful of pages on your website to promote in your sidebar. Create sidebar links for those pages and that’s it.
• Use a signature link in your blog posts. In your signature link, include a link or two to specific pages on your website and try to make those pages relate to your blog post topic in some way.
• Instead of a signature link, add a banner at the bottom of all of your posts. Link the banner to a specific page on your website. You can even rotate banners from one post to the next depending on the topics you write about.
• Use your RSS feed to promote specific pages on your website. The number of people who will see these links will be limited, but you can use the links as an incentive to subscribe to your RSS feed. Make those links to special pages that offer a strong benefit and plug that benefit in your RSS feed promotional literature.

You can drive traffic anywhere you want it to go using these traffic-driving techniques. For more insight into managing a blog, check out BCP.

Two Blog Strategies For Gaining New Business

Is there a trick to using your blog for business? Basically, no. You can develop relationships with your customers and use your blog as a tool for building business. There are two ways to go about it.

Many people try to keep their blog focused on developing relationships and providing quality content. The reasoning is that as people learn to trust you more they will feel more comfortable doing business with you. That’s a good strategy.

Another useful way to do it to use your blog as an SEO tool. Links and search engine saturation are two important measures of SEO success. By using your blog to build these two measures of SEO and therefore improve your search engine rankings you increase your chances of attracting business through organic searches.

Of course, there are no guarantees. There are risks associated with choosing one of these strategies and ignoring the other. If you use both strategies simultaneously then you increase your chances of attracting new business through your blog. Learn more about how this works at Blog Content Provider.

Pre-Blog Set Up Marketing

Before you set up your business blog you should start reading a few other blogs in your niche. What is your competition doing? How are they doing it? And take notes, lots of notes.

What you want to do is take note of things you like about the other blogs. What do you like and what do you not like? Write those things down so that when you start your own blog you have an idea of what it is that appeals to you. But it also helps to understand why your competition is using a particular strategy. Why did they put that graphic there? Why are those links in the sidebar? Understanding why something is done can go a long way to helping you develop your own blogging style and philosophy.

You might also want to leave a few comments on blogs. Just because you don’t have a blog yet doesn’t mean you can’t join the conversation. You can. But your comment won’t have a link that will let others visit your website. That’s OK. You can still do a pre-branding effort by using your name and when you do start your own blog then you’ll have some limited name recognition within your niche. It will be easier for blog readers in your niche to identify you because they’ve seen your name before.

The most essential thing to do before you start your business blog is to visit other blogs in your niche and get involved. That’s how you develop your own style.