1) You get the benefit of having your site on a blogging platform that has built in mechanisms to get high rankings with the search engines.  This is because with every blog post you make, you get the attention of the search engines from the “ping” feature within the blog platform. If your site is on either WordPress or Blogger platform, you have an instant search engine boost from this pinging function.

Pinging is an action from one computer sending a test signal like  “sonar” from one computer to another. It was originally used to test diagnostics to make sure a computer is working properly.

2) The second benefit having your business site on a blog platform is that the world’s largest search engine, Google, loves blogs. Blogs make up part of the social media mix currently online. Google, when ranking a website will look for how many social media and social network sites are connected to the blog. The more incoming links and outgoing links your business blog has within it, the better it is for Google to give you a higher ranking.

So, when thinking of your marketing strategy when using your blog, know that the content you put in it will have a more than likely chance of being seen by more people than businesses that have just a static HTML site.

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.”

First, blogs give a reason why your customers shop at your business. You keep them informed on the products and services you offer along with the benefits for them.

Second, it gives your business a “personality” that makes it come alive. Your business should be an extension of you, the business owner. No one likes to do business with a “cold” or impersonal entity.

Blogs can alert customers of special offers or discounts from your business. This attracts people to personally visit your store.

You can give rewards to your customers for paying attention to your blog by giving special prizes or gifts just for stopping by and reading your blog.

It allows you to gather and grow an email list where you can keep in touch with your customers and sell to them in the future.

Blogs allow for a “two way conversation” with your customers. Blogs, by their very nature provides a way for customers to comment back to the blog owner, giving feedback, glowing reviews, or even constructive criticism. The blog owner has the capability to moderate each comment.

Lastly, blogs are websites that have built in software to help rank high in the search engines. Search engines are attracted to all blogs because of the search engine enhancements that are “hard coded” within.

If you regularly keep up with your blog from month to month, it will become a big factor in helping your business grow. In the next blog post, we will go over some key marketing tips on how a blog generates business for you.

Many marketing experts may tell you simply to put an opt in box asking for a name and email address in exchange for some free report or gift, but the real way to build your list is to offer value that is so awesome that it makes it impossible for anyone to not come back.

Think for a moment of a great TV show that got your attention. Quite often, these successful TV series would have a “cliff hanger” at the end of an episode that perks your curiosity of wanting to know what will happen next if you tune in tomorrow for the next episode. Get the idea?

You need to be more creative in the process of what your blog can do to market to your target audience.

Yes, it is true to have an opt in box to gather names and email addresses, but more importantly, you need to show more than one reason why a first time visitor or even a repeat visitor should keep on coming back to your blog.

Twitter has only started an advertising platform in 2010 and it seems to be  growing trend. What is unique, however is the active Twitter user base is quite small. Remember, there are over 300 million registered users but only a fraction are active and that fall into the demographic of “intent to buy” mentality.

Twitter, being the social network site that it is, will have a challenging time for businesses who desire to marketing in front of this audience. Only the early adopters will be taking advantage of buying from the ad space being offered on Twitter from their advertisers.

Some advantage for advertising on Twitter, is the immediate feedback the advertisers will receive from sending out timely “tweets.” It also gives added credibility to the “buzz” when combined with other channels of advertising.

It may seem that advertising on Twitter can be a valuable addition to your marketing arsenal. Be aware that the Twitter audience can be a fickle one since they are not used to being pitched with ads because it was originally intended as purely a social medium to communicate socially.

Many social media networks are going to have a tough time on selling lots of products if they want to go direct. Social media in it’s current form is strictly for social gathering purposes only and there is a fine line of “selling” from these sites.

Sooner or later most popular social network sites will be filled with online “commercials” and will eventually deflect many people who got on those sites for social purposes only.

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!

Check out the video below from well known video marketer Gideon Shalwick.

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.

Your blog gives you the ability to let them opt in to your email list so you can keep in touch via email. You can hold contests, give exclusive discount coupons only for your VIP list, or make announcements of private showings of your products, thereby tapping in to your most loyal customers.

Blogging takes patience! The one mistake that most business bloggers make is that they tend to be impatient and think that the blog itself is going to make money for them outside of the business operations. They have to look at it like a separate entity that will also grow the business but in a different way. The blog is the “silent” salesman that promotes the business 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

So, when starting up the blog, make sure you assign someone the duty of maintaining the blog going into the future. There must be a plan to regularly “feed” it with valuable content. There must be a way to generate interest in the blog on a daily basis. It becomes a virtual “daily” newspaper that gets delivered to your door for reading first thing in the morning.

Blogging will have a lasting positive effect on your business. With everyone going online through their desktop computers or their “mini computers” that reside on their “smart phones,” don’t worry, you blog will be read!

Guy Kawasaki has chosen to use blogging to promote his books and found that he gets to expand his reach of a new audience for his books at least one hundred fold. We found a video here that captures him being interviewed and talking about how valuable his blog has been to him when promoting his books.

Usually this situation concerns itself with corporate sponsorship of you blog. A corporate entity will be attracted to your business message and want to partner with you by buying banner ad space or get in as a content contributor on your blog. This is a great partnership because it lends itself to leverage both of your audiences to be exposed to the other. This can generate a larger subscriber list or even cross selling of your products or services.

We found a video below that is in the fashion industry that proves out that a business blogger, such as yourself, can multiply your exposure with a corporate tie in with another complementary business.

How do we do attract local search to your blog? Simple, just make sure you mention your local city in your blog posts. Let’s say you are a florist in Chicago, Illinois. A good number of your blog posts should contain the location phrase, “Chicago florist” in it. Remember not to mention it too much. Inserting the local city phrase and your business type at least once in each paragraph.  And it is not important to reverse the phrase to say “florist Chicago,” which does not look natural in a paragraph anyway. The search engines will pick up on “Chicago florist” and make the necessary changes to address everyone searching for “florist Chicago” as well.

So, for marketing you business with a blog, keep in mind that you should always be thinking up of a promotion, at least twice a month, where you could offer a special discount or free gift only to your blog readers who are local to your business. Many business owners leave out this important way that your blog can generate new customers to your store and a great probability to make new sales in the process.