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.

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.

The video below is from well known video blogger Gideon Shalwick. He talks about the tremendous credibility you get from video blogging. It brings out your own personality if you host your own videos. If you do presentations, you credibility can be developed with very good content.

Gideon has been doing video blogging for only several years and now making over a six figure annual income.

Using your blog as your main announcement calendar for your promotions work perfectly with these specials. You can make a featured section in your blog to show only these seasonal specials and would be shown on the static front page of your blog at all times.

Season appeal is universal and you can promote to everybody with the widest customer profile. That makes it easy for you to promote knowing that you are not wasting your time and effort whether you put on the correct promotion or not. Just because it is “spring” you could use that as a basis to hold a 50% off on winter items in your inventory as opposed to putting your winter inventory in storage and not making any money for you.

Other seasonal promotions used are; contests or drawing for a gift certificate or sales on discontinued items. With the four seasons available for your promotional programs, you are more or less complete with your total yearly promotional calendar.

Now you could expand to make promotions tied in with national holidays. So now you don’t even have to think about what kinds of promotions you can have when, just from seasons and holidays, you are set for the whole year on your schedule!

For the rest of your business blog “life” you are going to address the problems and concerns of your customer base. Your customer base does not care about your business other than being a source for the answer to their problem. Become their “trusted advisor.” You should be a leader to your customers on where your industry is going, what new features your products have that further addresses their problems.

All your content should value focused for your customers benefits. If you show honest attempt at solving their problems, you will generate a following.

The blog should work as hard for you as your other marketing efforts. With all these marketing channels working at the same time, you will generate a strong following from your blog AND your brick and mortar location.

Be creative and keep your blog visitors interested to come back for more.

By giving a free workshop, your customers receive great value and chances are, they will buy other products at your store on impulse.

So think up of a creative workshop or seminar, invite them from your blog, and when they arrive, get their name contact information and a “code” that you put up on your blog to prove they came to your event from an invitation from the blog.

This has proven to be a very economical and efficient way to market and get new customers.

It also helps to SEO your blog to your local target market area. In my next post, I will go over how to “localize” your blog.

The hidden value of your blog is in the branding, goodwill and giving your customers valuable content. It used to be harder in the past to keep the awareness of your business in front of your customers. Customers would have to wait until the next issue of a newspaper that you placed an ad in would get seen. Customers would have to wait for you to send your next direct mail piece that could take days or even a week to get to them to get word of your next promotion.

With the internet, a customer can visit your blog site 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to see your offerings and stay on your site as long as they want to get information on your business. And they can “tune in” to see you site when they want at their convenience.

Your blog site should be a “treasure trove” of all your products and services. Everyone has a “buying cycle,” that when they are ready, they will buy. Your blog is an excellent source for providing the information your customer needs when they are ready to buy. They are ready to go to your physical place of business after getting to “know you” through your business blog.

Always think of your blog as your silent salesman.

Business owners often forget to do the fundementals of marketing, which is regular scheduling of marketing efforts and active selling of your goods and services.

Do your self a favor and examine what you do in the course of a normal business day. What percentage do you spend on bookkeeping, on site management, marketing strategy, actual selling of your product, stocking of your store, and so on. With you, as the owner wearing all the “hats” to run a business, do you find that you spend the least amount of time marketing and selling? I would bet that is a fact in your business.

What you need to do is to make a plan that you carve out some time in the morning to market and sell and in the nights, plan and strategize what you are going to do to market and sell for the rest of the week, and the rest of the month.

Promoting your blog has to be one of your top priorities as your marketing mix. Your online presence will become more important, especially into the future. If you have no brand online, you will be left out of the competition for your product or service because 99% of the rest of your industry is online. Some have a great online presence. Others have badly designed sites or have a site that has been ignored for years.

It is up to you to consciously promote your blog as much as you can.

Here are some ways to promote your blog;

1. Insert your blog URL in your email signature
2. When making business calls, remind your customers of your blog
3. Print out flyers and leave them around in your store with your blog URL address
4. Put your blog URL address on your business cards and letterheads
5. Register your blog with all the local directories
6. Search out other blogs and websites and comment or give feedback where you can and insert your blog URL address

This is only a partial list of what you can do to promote your blog. Just remember that when you stop marketing, your whole promotion stops as well. Get into a mindset that you are going to market frequently and consistently. This is for the long term. This is how success happens!

What is great about these events is that it is doesn’t cost much and the returns are tremendous. If you host an open house, it is just a matter of getting invitations out to your customer list, placing small ads in newspapers or local publications and making a calling blitz to businesses or customers in your target area.

What is also effective is holding seminars at another place of business or online webinars. These are very strong marketing methods that can often lead to a ton of sales in a short time. As a matter of fact, you should host these live events twice a month if you can.

If you haven’t started planning for self promoted events, get started!

We are in process of putting out a product that shows businesses how to produce these events to bring in more business.

The large national corporations blast your TV with non ending commericals of their products and tie it in with “Thanksgiving Sale,” or “Christmas Specials.” How many times have we said to ourselves, our holidays are becoming more commercial. Well, it’s a fact, that we need to get customers attention by tying in product promotions and sales with the holidays. Some may think its “selling out” but if you really look at it from a business standpoint, it makes sense.

If you don’t promote your products at this time with the holiday “tie in,” you are losing a lot of sales. The reason being that your customers right now are distracted with the holidays. What better way to grab the attention of your customers than with promoting “holiday” and your “products” in the same breath?

Don’t feel bad. I don’t think your customers are going to be mad at you for your holiday promotions. As a matter of fact, if you promote your product in a fun and entertaining way, it won’t matter. Remember those “Superbowl” commercials? They reninforce the brand of many of those products without a “sell out” feel. As a matter of fact, people look forward to the commercials.

Get creative enough and you can use the holidays to promote your blog and expand your fan base almost immediately.

Take a look at this moment what you are using for your marketing and advertising in your business. It could be Yellow Pages, print advertising, flyers, business cards, radio commercials, TV commercials, magazines, classifieds, memberships, direct mail, co-op advertising, word of mouth, and so on. Well, you should complement your online presence (website or blog) with promoting your site’s URL. You have a “www. yourbusiness . com” that could be your blog site or main website. You should make every effort to make your blog URL as much your marketing message as the address of your business location. Consider it synonymous with your business location. This way, your customers or prospects gets to visit your site at a later time for more information. The beauty of a business blog is that it keeps customers in the know about ongoing promotions, what kind of products are provided by your business and also a little about the history about the business and its owners.

This is a great publicity component of your business and it will become more important in the years to come.

She is one of the members of the original “blog squad” with Patsi Krakoff. I think they both went their separate ways now but I do keep track of what each have been doing in the blogosphere. They are both still active in the blog world and have published many valuable articles for bloggers everywhere.

Here is a video below from Denise Wakeman on what “jazzes” her about blogging both personally and professionally. Enjoy.

Yes, if you represent outstanding customer service, or are the only business that practices “going green” philosophy, these are all causes to boost your marketing efforts. Not only is a blog good for positioning your business favorable with the search engines, you can also attract tons of visitors that share your view of how you do business. Not many businesses are aware of the power they have to take their marketing to the next level by using this one small aspect of marketing.

The first thing to do is to research what the buying public is focusing their attention to. Is it that they want an honest business that does not “bait and switch” their customers after a seemingly straight forward advertisement is presented? Is it that they only patronize a business that carries “green” or organic products? These are things you should be paying attention to.

Whatever the mindset of your target audience is focused on, get you and your business infront of them right now!

If you remember the old TV and radio shows, most of the taglines or slogans are still memorable today. The Alka Selzter commercial, “plop, plop, fizz, fizz;” “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should,” “Maxwell House, Good to the last drop.”

These are just some of the most successful slogans that sold millions of dollars of product. This is branding at its best.

Brands can be reinforced through a slogan, a logo, and most importantly…a blog. Blogs can include the slogan, the logo, ongoing information of your business, a way to directly communicate with your customers, and to help spread the word of your business.

A business blog is one of the most important marketing tools of your business especially if you have a domain name reserved in your business name. With more than 200,000,000 blogs online right now (this includes non business blogs), you want to make sure your business identity is reserved so no one else can get access to your brand name or likeness of your business name.

Click below for a source of getting your domain name now!

It is our basic human nature to be attracted to a good story. When you start a business blog, have a good story handy to help attract visitors to your site. It could be in the form of how the business started. It could be the unique twist your business has over the competition. It could be in the form of how the business is run.

Why do you think daytime talk shows (i.e. Oprah) or “soap operas” are so popular? They have stories to tell. Even reality TV shows use storylines as the attraction to get viewers. You’ll even see stories in commercials on TV. No matter how short the commercial, there  is a storyline with an interesting twist and a compelling visual to get people to buy the product.

If you tell your story in your blog posts, make sure you can interweave your story with all your other blog content. You should have a good mix of relevant content in your blog, well written stories, strategically placed advertisements, and a call to action for your visitors to come to your place of business.