All the stuff you can do to market your business is pretty overwhelming, even on a good day. You hear people making noises about blogs, about social media, about search and many other marketing channels.
How exactly does a blog fit into the big marketing picture? If you knew the answer to that, you could make decisions with more confidence, and that counts for a lot because better decisions means better money.
To see how blogs fit into the larger landscape, let’s forget about them for a moment and take a look at all the other channels a business can use online to market itself.
Social Media: What is It Good For?
Social media marketing is often treated as an end to itself or as the main driver for customer lead generation or conversion. This is risky and often fails. I believe it fails because it doesn’t take into account why or how people naturally use social media: to stay current with friends, family, news and to be entertained.
What kinds of activities take place in social media? conversation and sharing of links and media (pictures, video, text, games and more) and the playing of games and/or the use of game-like features. Seriously, that’s it: conversation, sharing and games.
You’ll notice that buying is not on that list.
Where Do These Links Go?
So social media can be used to share, say, a link with people who would find such a link very interesting. So interesting, they may want to share it with their friends. How could a link benefit your business? By pointing back to your website. Pointing back to what?
Ah… now we’re getting somewhere.
Sharing links on social media is a traffic driver. If you want some of that traffic—the right traffic—driven to your site, then what kind of links can you share on social media? Where would those links… link to? Content that your customers would find crazy interesting, right? And where, oh where could this content be found?
A blog, you say? Really! How very interesting!
Back to the Blog
Okay, okay I’ll remove my tongue from my cheek, now. Seriously: a blog is the best destination for shared links. Think about it: you’re constantly posting new content and sharing it. That sends traffic to the website. Potential customers are now on your website! Your content is making some kind of an impression: if it’s a good impression you could have a lead or even a sale soon.
This is the part where I yell in my “crotchety old man voice” about how you youngins have it easy these days. Back in the day there were blogs but there was hardly any social media like there is today. Getting traffic to your site was much harder than it is now! In fact nowadays you can build up a huge social media audience without even having a website of your own. Then, when your site launches you have this huge network of people you can announce it to and they’ll flock to it.
