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.”

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.

We mentioned before to present valuable content to your audience and to start to do that seems like an easy task. But with each and every blog post you make, it becomes a challenge to keep up publishing your content. Your know why? It is because you don’t make a rough list of the type of content you want to present and also to bring out the creativity within your mind to always put out good content.

Even I, as a professional blogger, can sometimes get a mental block and not know where to lead my audience every now and then. As time goes on, it does take motivation to get new ideas or to build on the content already presented.

One thing is certain, you must be dedicated to your blog. Just like your business, there is only a very small percentage of people who are going to keep the blog going for months and years to come. Be well aware that if you continue to write in your blog on a regular or semi-regular basis, it should be quite easy to rank with the search engines for years to come!

Remember that all the content you create stays on the internet forever! All the content you build makes your website become more valuable to all the search engines. You become an authority site and the search engines will respect every word you write in your blog.

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.

When you begin your blog, you are starting a publishing business. If you never thought of starting a publishing business, now is the time. Not only do you run a business from your physical storefront, but now you are adding a publishing arm to your business, which is a good thing. By starting to publish a blog online, you have opened up a new channel of advertising your business in a most economical way. You have the freedom to format your blog in any you want. Take, for example, you can have a section that profiles the products you carry in your store. You can also add articles of interest to your customers in a separate part of your blog. Still other areas can contain discount coupons and ongoing contests to keep interest with your customers and also your online visitors.

Blog publishing is so easy now and the learning curve is as short as several days to be fairly competent with posting and adding other forms of content.

Blogging can be fun too. It is easy to teach your employees to handle your blog posting duties. Chances are your employees already have their own personal blog or are active on the internet, making comments on other blogs.

Not to be overlooked is the value you present to your customers when you blog. Most other successful businesses in your industry have a business blog and you cannot ignore the fact that it has helped these businesses be in the forefront of the industry just because of it.

Blogging enables you to have a two way “conversation” with your audience. You make a blog post and you allow commenting to your blog posts, which is the very essence of the Web 2.0 function.

A permalink is a URL link that contains the words or phrase that describes the content within a particular blog post. This is very important for search engines because what you are doing is describing the content for the search engine so it can easily “classify” it and consequently get a higher page rank because of it.

That All In One SEO plugin or other plugins that enable you to further “label” title tags, description paragraphs, and more category and page tag descriptions will further help the search engines in getting higher page rank as well.

The rest of your blog set up will include making a posting schedule, including videos and pictures.

What is “fresh blog content?” It is content, whether in the form of text, video, or pictures, that is relevant to the blog theme and captures the interest of the reader to the point that they come back to visit again and again. If blog content gets to be “boring” or “long winded” or goes off on a tangent not interesting to the current readers, you lose repeat visitors.

Your goal should be to attract new visitors as well as keeping the repeat visitors because your content is always valuable to the reader in the topic of your blog.

While thinking of it, keeping blog content coming in fresh, it can get challenging. Just think of it as a “talkative” child that does not stop thinking of things to say. There is a prolific nature in children to talk and make comments about things around them.

You must, likewise, be prolific in writing new content that would be of interest to your target market. How do you do this? There are two main ways to keep the content flowing.

1) The content that you write that is original. I am sure you can always talk about your business, the industry of your business, the latest breaking news in your store, your customer feedback, your staff, new products and services you offer. There is literally an unlimited amount of content you can write about. You just need to “brainstorm” all the ideas on paper first.

2) The second way to generate fresh content is from other sources. The most common way that the most successful business bloggers do is to search the internet for other websites or other blogs that have content about your industry. Quite often these sites are good resources for you and your customers. You can “copy and paste” some of these articles as long as you finish the blog post with credit and link back to the source where you took it from. Never copy and paste and not give the originator of the content credit for the content. That will get you in trouble with the originator of the content. They will always “find” you out because there is a website called that everyone uses to search for duplicate and copied content from sites called copyscape.com

So, keep your content flowing and keep it relevant to the topic of your business. Search engines are getting so smart these days and are scientifically designed to serve up the most relevant and valuable content once someone makes a search for a particular business or product or service that they are looking for.

1. posting area
2. page area
3. link box
4. able to upload video and pictures
5. has a way to add plugins
6. able for visitors to make comments
7. able to change out blog themes
8. able to custom edit any part of the blog with html code
9. can time release content
10. able to attach social media to the blog

With blog technology constantly improving there will be even more enhancements that are standard in this platform. 

The best feature of the blog platform is that it is extremely user friendly. That means that if you, as a total non technical person, can learn how to blog within several hours at most. If you can learn to write and make a new blog post, insert a photo, insert a video, and moderate a comment, you have about 90% of the blogging process down!

What blog technology has done is also reduce the time and expense to get a website up. If a business owner wants to make a website, he or she can simply upload the software to a web host account, open up the program, select a blog theme, and within minutes can start filling the blog with valuable content.

Blogs have greatly replaced full HTML websites because programming them and re editing the content can sure be so time consuming, even with the most experienced of webmasters, it can be time consuming.

But there is much truth in that. Blogging is not easy. Blogging takes dedication, focus, belief, and most of all “elbow grease.” Once you have planned out the blog and how it will represent your business, you should from that day forward make it routine to manage it on a daily or weekly basis. The blog becomes a living thing on its own to help promote your business and to make sales.

There is no problem in getting excited to starting a blog, because everyone is saying to get one. What they don’t tell you is that the same people who suggest you get a blog quite often don’t manage their own blogs very well either. They can be inconsistent at posting which, in a previous post here is a big NO NO. If your blog stands a chance at making your business money, you have to be consistent it the frequency of posting, to the insertion of videos and pictures or events.

This brings us to the point of considering hiring someone to manage your blog. What’s involved in managing a blog? Here are several things that come to mind.

1. Blog posting
2. Adding pictures (important for search engine rank)
3. Adding video
4. Updating events announcements
5. Commenting on other blogs (for search engine rank)
6. Measuring viewer results (analytic software)

Blog posting is obvious. Every time you make a post, you automatically “ping” the search engines telling them you made a change or addition to the blog. When the search engine “bots” visit your site to see the changes you made, it then adds to your page rank “points” and help you rise in the rankings.

Adding pictures helps with making your blog interesting. Who wants to look at a blog with all text only? The bonus of adding pictures is that you can “label” each picture with a word or phrase that applies to the niche topic of your blog. Great for search engine optimization.

Adding video is even better because most people upload the video to a free hosting site like Youtube and then embed the video player code back to your blog. You get search engine “love” and you also get the bonus of having your video on other sites that link back to your blog site, which counts for higher search engine ranking.

Updating events is most important, especially when you have a physical location. You announce your specials, seminars, discounts, “house parties” on your blog and attract more people to your event.

Commenting on other blogs gets you known with audiences from other blogs and valuable backlinks to your blog that helps with search engine rank.

By installing visitor analytic software on your blog, you can measure just about every metric there is and then you can make the necessary changes or additions to help make your blog more popular.

So, should you hire someone to manage your blog? Yes. Eventually you should delegate the above duties to someone else after you get enough experience at doing these tasks yourself. In the end, you will be more successful with your brick and mortar business from getting a blog to help market your business.

Smart business people know that they have to spend more time on “money making” activity within their store. They know they have to have a business blog in conjunction with all the marketing efforts they do in store. But blog posting can be a tedius chore and can take a lot of time away from making sales.

Blogs are a marketing device that works along with other marketing channels. Blogging is all about branding and educating their customers and getting feedback from them so that the business can improve on the product or service it provides.

In our opinion, you should outsource blog posting if:

1. You are serious about using social media to generate new customers
2. If you don’t have time to post yourself to the blog on a regular basis
3. If you believe that blogging contributes to raising revenues in your business
4. If you believe that your customers are semi active online

Whatever you decide, just take note of the process in which you blog and make a training manual to give a step by step guide to give to your outsourcer.

We, at Blog Marketing Experts truly believes in blogs and how it is necessary for you to have one in order to better connect with your audience. Starting one now can go a long way into the future regarding helping your customers to be more informed about your business and your industry.

Blog writing is necessary to keep your search engine growing in rank, to keep growing your visitor count, and continue to keep your online brand going. We strongly recommend no less than two blog posts a week. If you are serious about your online promotions, you should post once a day. I have many students that are blogging several times a week. Sometimes they blog once a week, sometimes 4 times a week. It can get inconsistent sometimes with the ongoing task of running a store. But if you assign someone to dedicate time to write and post regularly, you will reap rewards many times over and over again.

When outsourcing your blog writing, make sure they have some kind of background in writing. If you choose an intern, a high school or college student will work out very well. If you choose someone who freelances writing, they are the best but it may cost you some money to get you a good writer.

When outsourcing blog writers, make sure you give them enough information about what your business is all about and have them do additional research in your industry. Quite often they can find out more resource information on their own that could feed into the content they could write about and it will greatly benefit you.

You want to also train your blog writers to pick and choose royalty free photos to insert in various posts. Remember that just posting text as content in blog posts are not as interesting to the reader as with text and pictures. It is a very simple process to insert photos in blog posts and a blog writer with no previous experience can learn how to do it within minutes.

An additional bonus when getting a blog writer on board is research skills. This is also “trainable.” Thank goodness for search engines, you can research anything with just typing in keywords of your research topic and out pops thousands and possibly millions of references to that topic. More than enough to find things to write about.

You would not believe how much time and effort bringing an outsource writer can save you. Don’t be afraid to hire someone because if you are serious about marketing your business online, you need a constant flow of good quality content in your blog.

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!

Since that time, there have been millions of new blogs put up on the internet and now it has become more competitive to get higher rank for the keywords you have. It is not impossible, but more planning has to be done in order for your blog to be seen by the target market you are going for.

Google has greatly affected what you put in your blog to make it rank higher as well. As you recall, Google implemented algorithm changes on what they require now for any site to rank high. The most important part is that for a website to rank high, there needs to be a variety of things to be done for maximum impact for Google. Here are some of the things that Google requires for high page rank:

1. Relevant keyword in domain name
2. H1 and H2 tags related to keywords
3. Insertion of high quality text content in posts
4. Insertion of videos with proper keyword tagging
5. Insertion of digital pictures with proper keyword tagging
6. Meaningful backlinks to your site from high page rank sites
7. Submission of your URL to meaningful directories
8. Insertion of privacy and terms of service of your site
9. Regular posting of content to your site to show updates
10. Tying in social media such as Facebook or Twitter to your site
11. Submission to the most popular social bookmark sites

This is just a part of what makes blog marketing successful in the eyes of search engines. The name of the game is serving up high quality content everywhere on your site.

Blog marketing is a learned “science” which, when implemented on a regular basis, can generate customers 24/7 for your business

One of the most popular blog plugins for WordPress blogs is a plugin called All In One SEO. What this plugin does is help to properly label title tags, insertion of precise keywords in posts, add important site descriptions for search engines, and to optimize tags for each post so that search engines can immediately identify and serve up your blog site to people who are exactly looking for what your blog is about.

Search engine optimization was once the exclusive domain of large and expensive SEO companies. They wanted to hold a veil of mystery over what it takes to make your blog site favorable with the search engines. The reality is that anyone, including you as the business owner have the capability to do your own SEO for your own blog site now.

With all the technological advances and so many free and paid software out there within reach to anyone, you literally can be a one man/woman SEO department!

Here is a complete list of  plugins available for WordPress users for SEO related tasks:

1. All In One SEO Pack
2. Headspace2
3. Sitemap Generator
4. SEO Post Links
5. SEO Slugs
6. SEO Smart Links
7. WP Backlinks
8. Social Bookmark Plugin
9. Add To Any Plugin
10. Robots Meta

These actual plugins can be found by “Googling” any of the exact spelling of each plugins.

The great thing about handling SEO on your blog by yourself is the money and time you save to outsource such tasks. It could cost you thousands of dollars in requests that only leave you guessing what these companies really did for you. When doing your own SEO, at least you know exactly what is being done and knowing that you are making a difference in getting your blog to the first page of the search engines.

With a blog, you have more variety to offer your visitors. Not only can you make timely posts to let everyone know what is going on in your business, you can insert video, pictures, coupons, get customer feedback in the form of comments, make product profiles, hold contests, sell your own products, sell other people’s products as an affiliate, display digital slide shows, to name a few.

It is no secret that we all have information overload. We have to “manage” social media, print advertising, TV advertising, develop in store promotions, and try to keep on top of everything at the same time. While it can be overwhelming for most, it CAN be managed.

What most businesses don’t think about today is how to do more time management of communicating with their customers and prospects. It used to be that all you had to be concerned with is place space ads in print advertising and maybe a TV or radio spot every now and then. Maybe a direct mail campaign just for grins.

Today’s advertising reach is so vast now that you have to have a full time staff to manage many outlets of getting the word out. The marketing mantra now is to get multiple channels of marketing going to cut through the noise of advertising everywhere.

We recommend to start with a business blog first. This can be your online brand. Remember to get a domain name with the actual name of your business. If it is not possible, then try to add a word either in front of your business name or after your business name. For instance, if you are a hair salon, you have a business called, Supreme Hair, and www (dot) supremehair (dot) com and it is already taken, then try www (dot) supremehairaz (dot) com if your salon is located in Arizona. Actually it helps to position your business locally when you insert your city or state within your domain name.

Remember that your business blog can be the most important investment you can make for your online presence. If you don’t have a business blog, you are certainly either not keeping up with your competitors or your competitors are way ahead of you in terms of getting online search for your business.