Blog marketing is marketing of a business with a blog, and it’s about the cheapest form of marketing you can do. You don’t need to spend any money on expensive print, radio, or television advertising where you have no idea of its effectiveness. With blog marketing, you don’t even need to spend money on internet advertising. Blog marketing is cheap marketing.
The Blog Marketing Breakdown
Let me break it down for you.
You’ve gotta have a website, anyway, right? So they say. What, exactly, is that website supposed to do for your bottome line? If you have a ready answer on that one (e-commerce sales, lead generation, etc.) good for you! You are ahead of the game. If you had to think about it for a moment, or if your answer was something like “to provide more information about blah blah blah,” no star for you! You are throwing money away on hosting and domain renewal fees. Your website had to help the business bring in money. Your old non-blog site (or no site at all) isn’t exactly helping you do that. You need to replace that broken thing with something that makes the needle on the money machine move.
Contribute to the Bottom Line
If you’re running a business, everything about the business should contribute to the bottom line. The purpose of marketing is to get sales. Your website is a marketing tool. We all understand the idea that you have to spend money to make money, but that notion is highly amplified by blog marketing: you get a lot for your money. And in these economic times when companies are slashing their marketing budgets, your dollars need to go farther than ever.
Having a blog really changes things. You are now the main marketing person, and what you write on your blog has a much better chance to attract prospects via search. Once you have them visiting your blog, you can move them towards a purchase.
You can create a blog with little technical knowledge, and there are a lot of book or internet resources to help you. You can save a lot of money by setting up the blog yourself.
Hosting, Domains, and… Time
The only cost involved to getting started in blog marketng is your web hosting and domain name renewals. Blog software, such as WordPress, is free to download and install on your web server. That is the best way to go, and many hosting companies have “one-click installs” of WordPress (pick a hosting company that has some kind of decent tech support service, like GoDaddy). You could use a free hosted service like Blogger or WordPress.com (different than the previous WordPress.org), but you really want the blog to be on your own site.
Writing on Your Blog
One the blog is up, you write a short article on it every day, called a post. What do you write about? This is hard at first, but here’s a great tip to get you started: write out the answers to the questions your customers ask you all the time. Use the questions themselves as headlines. There is certainly much more to it than this, but this is just a starting point. There is much information on the web about how to write a successful business blog that pulls in new customers and keeps existing customers happy.
Learning the Ropes
You will spend practically nothing but time. Be prepared to spend some time learning the ropes and writing blog posts. You will have to spend time trying to get your blog known to others. If you already have the email addresses of customers, tell them about your new blog. Tell everybody you know about your new blog.
Blogging is only part of the equation of pulling in customers from the internet. Another part is making sure you appear in search results (called search engine optimization), and yet another is interacting socially with people online (this is called social media). Blog marketing and social media go hand-in-hand. Neither of these need to cost any money, and they offer a huge payoff from a little learning and effort. I’ll discuss those in these next two posts:
