By getting in the mindset that blogging is really a two way conversation between your business and your customers and prospects, the more you will be successful at business blogging.

Second, if you write in a particular style about your product or service, that will further attract your audience. There are blogs who write in a casual conversational style, and others who write in vulgar language, still others who write as if they are the teacher and you are the student.  Whatever style you have, it goes without saying that your target audience will be attracted to your writing style as well.  This directly reflects on your own personality too.

The way you design your blog is also important in getting through to your audience. If your blog has a black background with little white lettering, or bright tan color with a good sized easy to read font in black, it will attract a certain audience who finds it comfortable to read in that format.

If your blog has way too many buttons, bells and whistles to click on, a visitor may become confused and surf elsewhere because it may appear to off topic for what they are searching for.

Always remember that the visitor is coming to your blog site to get information quickly in an easy to read format. They don’t intend on spending the whole day to read your blog. The attention span of web surfers are so short that it is important to get their attention right away and serve up the information or solution that they need.

Quite often, people will go to your blog site to get an answer to a problem quickly so they can get on with their lives. We live in such a fast paced world that our blogs need to adapt to this audience.

“Blog marketing is all about giving your visitors what they want, when they want it.”

One mistake that a lot of bloggers make is to write a blog post that is not valuable or not relevant to the topic of the blog.

“Content is king” as they say, and there is a lot of truth in that. I know that it can be a challenge to keep making posts on a daily basis and keep it interesting, engaging, and entertaining to your visitors. You may be asking yourselves, what is the best way to write content, then?

What has worked for us is to make an outline of all 12 months of the topics you want to talk about and stick to that plan. It shouldn’t take more than an hour to make up this outline. You can worry about the exact articles later. The main thing is to develop your list of topics. It can be recurring topics throughout the year. Some can be related to your customers needs or related to the seasons of the year. Tie some of your topics into the holidays too.

Once you decide on the topics to write about, start researching early online and you will get an unlimited amount of ideas that will get your creative juices flowing. You may want to assign one person in your company to dedicate a set amount of time each week to research each topic you have laid out to write about.

If you implement a system of the outline of topics, you will never run out of quality of content to add to your business blog.

Remember, you become a publisher the moment you start a blog. Blog visitors want to continue reading your blog if you provide, on a consistent basis, good high quality content that is helpful to them.

A great way to keep your viewer base is to offer valuable tips and tricks in your industry and niche. People love free advice and since they devour content on other sites, such as the news or sports or weather, you should make your blog part of a necessary read for their daily “fix!”

Just under the header image of your blog is the navigation buttons. You want to design these buttons very carefully. If you have too much, like a “newspaper” type of format, there will be way too much choices for a visitor to make and they will tend to leave the blog page all together.  Make the blog look user friendly. It should have only navigation buttons that are most likely going to be used and practical.

Navigation buttons are there to get you to the home page, to help describe the purpose of your blog, to have a way to contact you, and to provide a way to show your services and products. If you have any more navigation buttons than that, you may be overloading your visitor with the many different ways to go with your blog.

Also, make sure that your blog has ways to tell your visitor how to contact you or more importantly, where your business is so they can personally visit your store. After all, you want to use blogs as a tool to help marketing your physical store front to new and repeat customers through your doors!

What do you really know about your visitors? How can you find out. The first obvious choice to discover information about your visitors is with the Google Analytics software.  You can get this software at http://www.google.com/analytics/

There is a site called quantcast.com that can help with more in depth analysis of your visitors. What both the Google Analytics and Quantcast do is help you find out where your blog site visitors are coming from, where they live, what sex they are, educational background, even how much money they make. What can you do with this information? Plenty! From a marketing standpoint, you can promote products or service that appeal to a particular age group or people who are particularly interested in buying one primary product that will offer a solution to their problem.

When you arm yourself with good information about your blog site visitors, you position yourself in a better way to make a sale either directly from your blog or able to attract a real life visitor to your place of business.

Here is a video from an international blogger that gets to the point about blogging.

Do you know your metrics? What is metrics?

“Metrics is a way to measure certain aspects of your operation so that you have a starting point from which to improve your statistics.”

Some measurement stats you should be aware of is:

1. daily unique visitor count
2. overall hits per month
3. number of backlinks to your blog
4. how large is your email marketing list

These are just some of the basic metrics you should be aware of.

The reason you should keep track of your daily unique visitor count is to make sure you are doing everything you can to constantly attract traffic. Unique visitor traffic is new visitors to your blog who never came to your blog before. The one most important thing you can do to help your unique visitor count is to keep posting on a regular basis. Every time you make a new post to your blog, you are pinging the search engines and attracting them to help get you higher in the rankings. When you go higher in search engine rankings, the more likely you are to attract unique visitors. Getting new visitors is very important because it helps you rank as an “authority” site. That is, a site that carries a lot of weight as a site that contains very high quality information relevant to the search from the search engines.

Overall hits per month counts all visits from unique visitors, repeat visitors and visits from search engines. You want to know this statistic to make sure you are not “static.” The object here is to constantly figure out ways to increase this figure from month to month.

Backlinks are  necessary in order to help rank you site high in the search rank. The number of one way backlinks to your site proves to the search engines that your site is looked upon as the site to see because other sites have “referred” their visitors to your site. Again, this proves your blog site as an authority of your niche.

Email marketing is hot right now.  Having an email list or a subscriber base that is growing is a good sign that your business will grow too. Always figure out ways to grow your list and to monetize it. You want to make money from your subscribers. They are your fans!

Your blog style must be interesting enough to attract people who need an answer to a problem they have. Or the blog must have a style to attract people to visit again and again so that you can develop a relationship with them to eventually purchase your product or service by coming into your store.

In either case, your blog style should include a warm personality so that it is a pleasant experience everytime the visitor comes to your blog. If your personality is entertaining and you can convey your marketing message while being lighthearted, by all means do so.

The most successful bloggers we talked to stated that their style is basically “real.” In other words, your content is not salesy and gets to the point of helping your visitors with valuable advice.

Put yourself in the shoes of your customers. How would they like to be treated when they are on your website? What kind of content would you like to continue reading on the site. Do you like the “style” of the blog?

Every blog has a built in “personality” which, when you visit the site, you make a micro second judgement on whether you want to stay and read on and possibly visit again, or immediately leave the site, never to come back again.

Before you start a blog for your business, plan out your blogging style. Make sure it is geared toward attracting your target audience.

Think about this for a moment. You make a simple video that profiles your business or blog and you post it to Youtube. You catagorize and tag it with appropriate terms and labels that relate to your product or service. So when someone goes to Youtube or the other video sites, there is a “search” box just like a search engine, your video will come up in the search listings just like a normal search engine bringing up websites.

What does this mean to your business? Simple, more sales! Here is how it’s done. Make a video promoting your business. It should be between 1 and 3 minutes long and explain what your product or service offering is. It should end with showing your phone number, and/or website information. Upload this to Youtube first since it is the largest video host site in the world. You want to be able to capture a percentage of the 400 million views per day. Just think of how many people are going to search for your product or service when they enter their search terms within that site.

Remember that you are going to tag your video with the appropriate key words of your product or service. Then, after your complete the upload and tag the video, proceed to upload to viddler, daily motion, metacafe and repeat the process. You then have the power of putting your business in front of the millions of people who are searching for your product or service from all over the world!

Now what is the purpose of gaining the attention of the whole world when your business is located in a small community or fairly large city? Simple, the people who are searching in your locale that find your video with your local information are likely to visit you in person. For the rest of the world, the video being viewed by more people from outside your locale are actually helping to build your search engine rank of your website! So there is value of the people around the world who see your video.  One of the most important aspects of video marketing is to gain as many views as you can so it will count as a popular video. In a sense, websites are judged based on a world wide popularity contest. The more people who view your video or your website will make your website rise in the search engine rankings with all search engines. The higher you are in the search engines, the easier it is for more people to see it and contact you based on the contact information you provide there.

Video marketing is where it’s at now! Start making your videos and making sales.

First of all, it is natural for all of us to be very enthusiastic when starting a blog. You have many ideas and you can’t wait to get your various content out to your readers. As a matter of fact, you may even stuff too much content all at once when starting. It is better if you plan how to manage your content by “dripping” your content on a regular schedule. In a “perfect” world, you should be submitting one blog post per day. Now think about it. You don’t want to run out of ideas for blog posts because that is your main life blood of keeping the search engines coming back to your blog site again and again.

Rule #1 – Plan out and have ready your blog content in advance. This means have at least 2 to  3 weeks of blog content ready to insert in your blog.

Rule #2 – Brainstorm content ideas going forward. Take notice of which keywords are attracting your target audience. Why is the visitor coming to your blog in the first place? Take the keywords that have attracted visitors and concentrate more content towards those topics.

Rule #3 – Vary your content within your blog to make it interesting. Insert pictures, video and sound to liven up your blog so that it is pleasing to the eye and ears.

Remember that you can never run out of content to present. It is only a matter of taking a look at the trends within your industry and start talking about that as well as new products and current products you offer your customers.

Check out the video below where Seth Godin goes far deep into making your business indispensible to your customers.

What you write in your blog post is carefully read by most your readers and will either attract or repel readers. For the people who do visit your blog and are attracted to your content, you have made the first step in presenting yourself as an authority in your niche.

Think about it for a moment. When you used to read the newspaper in your hometown, you subscribed to it eventually because you found it to be a valid authority for your news. They built credibility with you because you believed what news was presented by them. This is the power of the printed word.

Newspapers are a one way communication between the publisher and the reader. Either the reader is “turned on” or “turned off.” Blogs, on the other hand is a two way communication between the blogger and the reader. The blog presents information and the reader has the ability to respond in the form of a comment or subscribe to a newsletter that the blog may offer.

So, when writing your next blog post, remember that you are a real life publisher and the readers are counting on you to provide credible information that they can use or think about. When writing your blog post, make sure you do some research and offer information that is useful to your readers. The more valuable content that you write, the more visitors, readers, and customers you will attract.

You are the authority they are looking up to. Take your role in providing information seriously and you will have a very successful blog.

Inserting an “opt in” box in either the upper right corner or within the header of your blog site is the “tried and true” way to maximize the chances of growing your customer list online.

If you were to check the upper right corner of our blog, Blog Marketing Experts, you will see our opt in box. We offer a free report on how to grow profits in your business if you were to enter your first name and email address. We pledge to keep you, as a subsciber updated on the lastest things in the business blog world as well as notifying you of our products and services at substantial discounts.

There are many advantages to both you and your subsribers in this method of marketing. First, the subscriber gets to keep in touch with you and is available to give you direct feedback on your business since they now have a way to contact you. Second, it gives you the opportunity to develop a relationship with your subscriber that will eventually turn into a paying customer.

The greatest advantage is that both you and your subscriber become long term connections and therefore help to perpetuate your business way into the future. With a solid customer base, you stand to generate sales through any economic climate.

1. Print advertising
2. Online presence
3. Press release
4. Special events

Let’s take a look at print advertising. While our main philosophy is to get most of your advertising “bang” on the internet, we also believe in print advertising, in moderation. We feel that having some brand presence in print advertising helps to a certain degree. With print advertising, such as local newspapers, magazines, and coffee house newspapers, you will get credibility built up.

The most important of all ways to attract customers is through an online presence. With the “death” of the Yellow Pages advertising and other phone book directories, getting local online seach rank is the only place to be now. Instead of grabbing for a 4 inch thick soft bound directory, the majority of people are going online to the search engines to find what they are looking for. It is imperative that you have a website and that it is ranked at first place for the locality that you are in. Along with local search optimization, you need online coupons, video, and mobile phone presence.

Press releases through the internet will gain you a very large audience in no time. When submitting a press release, make sure the organization that is doing the submission for you hits all the national news agencies. You could end up on Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fox News, and other big media conglamerates.

Special events involves holding fun activities at your store location. Go all out with this method. Line up local TV, radio and newspaper reporters to attend for dramatic impact. You will find that, the combination of all these ways will garner more visitors to your site sooner than later.

Long after your grand opening, you should be ramping up all 4 of these methods throughout the year. Remember, never let up on the marketing methods, especially during an economic recovery. You never know when the economic rebound will happen, but in doing all these methods in the meantime, you are guaranteed to succeed far beyoung your dreams!