How to use your business blog content to promote your business

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The greatest benefit of your business blog is that it increases repeat traffic to your website — that’s why I advise my clients to host their business blogs under their main domain rather than using a separate, dedicated domain (even if the dedicated domain contains their keywords). If you regularly update your business blog with useful and relevant content you automatically cover the keywords you require to get targeted traffic from major search engines.

The key to turning your casual visitors into loyal customers and clients is, make them familiar with you, your product or service, and provide them all the information they require in order to want to do business with you, and you can easily achieve this through your blog. Although there is nothing particularly wrong or offensive if you occasionally publish your marketing or promotional messages on your blog (after all it’s a business blog), restrict them to one or two in a month. Don’t also make it highly personal unless people have become familiar with you and respect your knowledge and play close attention to your thoughts.

The basic purpose of your business blog content is to inform your visitors what you can do, convey to them how much you know about the product or service you are offering, and create a comfort level. Your business blog also creates opportunities for you on social media websites. If you want people from these websites (Twitter, FaceBook, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit…) to visit your website on a regular basis, you can’t just go on posting the same old links again and again; your followers and friends will grow tired of them and start ignoring if in the interesting stuff you may post occasionally. Post something fresh on your blog regularly, and then promote those new links using social media and social networking websites.

Engaging business blog content also encourages conversation and herein lies the true power of your content. If people talk about what you publish on your blog and share your links with each other, your business blog has crossed a major milestone. After this you simply have to maintain the momentum and keep feeding them with new thoughts. That’s the human side.

On the search engine side, maintain a certain frequency so that the search engine crawlers know when your blog should be crawled and new content indexed. I’ve personally observed that your website or blog gets crawled and indexed depending upon your frequency. When I publish on a particular blog multiple times a day for a couple of weeks the blog posts begin to appear in search engine results within 40-50 minutes of posting.

Quality business blog content encourages other bloggers, social bookmarkers and online publishers to link to your blog if they find something worth linking to. This doesn’t happen the moment you start publishing your business blog; it takes time because you need a certain level of presence for topics concerning your field. People in the first place should know that they can find good, reliable content on your blog if they want to link to it. If they are looking on the search engines they should be able to find your relevant blog posts for the related search terms. If they are sifting through social media and networking websites then your links should be present under appropriate categories.

Maintaining a business blog and generating quality content for it on an ongoing basis of course takes up lots of time. But when you see the results, it’s worth the effort.

Make an offer your customer or client cannot refuse

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The blog post I just read calls it The Godfather Guide to Direct Marketing: Make Me an Offer I can’t Refuse. Although I’ve neither read the book nor seen the movie (I know, I know) but I can totally relate to the expression and this should be consistently kept in mind while preparing promotional literature. Offer something great and highlight it. It should be bigger than your company name. It should be the first thing your customer or client see as soon as he or she comes to your website or unfolds your brochure.

Not everybody is dying to do business with you or awed at the marvelous things you’ve done with your products or services, but how do you solve my problem? For instance, I’ve been thinking of buying a slightly higher-end digital camera for a couple of months, I don’t want to buy a cheap brand and I don’t at the moment have the needed cash to buy a reputed brand like Canon, Sony, Nikon or Panasonic. This is my problem and I’ll immediately buy the camera if a vendor offers me a good solution. There must be thousands of customers like me and if the vendors are not addressing this problem I think they are losing a big chunk of sales. The answer to my problem would be being able to pay in easy, multiple installments and that would be an irresistible offer for me.

But what if you don’t have an immediate offer?

An offer doesn’t always mean giving something tangible. If it is not a direct consumable then it can be some emotional benefit. The point is, your message should answer the question “What is in it for me?” immediately. We’re all besieged with problems and consciously or unconsciously we’re looking for solutions. I’ll revisit my problem again with a new angle. Diwali, one of the greatest Indian festivals, is approaching fast and such festivals bring lots of moments that you would like to capture with your camera and you won’t miss them for the world. It’s a time when families get together and since we live in different cities and even countries, such gatherings are all the more special. Personally, I’d like to click my daughter enjoying a phooljhadi (a tiny firecracker you can hold in hand). An ability to click such moments can also be an irresistible offer for me. Make it so genuine and enticing that I buy the camera at the cost of another expense.

Of course this means you cannot target every customer or client under the sun with that single offer. There might be many who can spend the money but are not crazy about buying a camera although once they have it they can make good use of it. Then there might be some who despite having the ability, and a flicker of desire to buy the camera, are going to spend the festival alone or are not particularly attached to their families and friends. This is where targeting comes. Narrow down your target and you’ll sell more. Don’t worry about losing sales by not offering everybody something; you’ll compensate that by narrow targeting.

A good thing about online copywriting is that you can always perform split-tests. Prepare different pages for different targets and observe how they perform. With pay-per-click advertising it is even easier to see the results quickly.

Content strategy before social media strategy

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A major part of social media interactions involves promoting interesting and valuable content. Whether it’s blogging, Twittering, Facebook updates, Digging, Stumbling or simply forwarding email messages with engaging links, people are basically promoting content. That content can be in any format: videos, images, animations or text. If it’s interesting and useful, it is valuable.

In this post titled Social media starts with a content strategy the author has rightly stated that on social media nobody cares about you; they care about the content you can provide. People will promote your content if they find it interesting, relevant, topical or useful. So if you thinking about launching your social media campaign you better have some solid content production and content marketing strategy in place.

How do you formulate an advantageous content generation and marketing strategy?

Identify your market and recognize what it is exactly looking for. Does you content meet their requirement? Does it convey the right message? Do you promote your content in front of the right audience? Selling combs to bald people may be an accomplishment but in the long run it neither benefits your customers or clients nor it benefits you.

A successful content generation and marketing strategy involves three fundamental questions:

  • What?
  • Why?
  • Where?
  • How?

What sort of content should your website or blog have? What purpose does it solve and why you should publish it? Where should you promote your content – in front of whom? And what strategy and methodology you should follow in order to promote your content in front of the right audience.

Once you’ve answered these question, you can kick start your social media strategy.

How to never run out of blog topics

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There are torrents of ideas when you start a new blog and in fact you’ve got so much to write that you feel like publishing multiple posts in a single day. You have to forcibly stop yourself just to maintain a semblance of regularity. You start dreaming about featuring in the top 100 blogs of your niche and your traffic graph actually throws buckets full of encouraging numbers at you. It’s like a dream run.

And then you begin to wake up.

It’s not a sudden awakening. You toss and turn around, you try to keep the dream going. 5 posts a day get reduced to 2 or 3 and 2 or 3 get reduced to 1 and then, to your horror, you begin missing entire days. After sometime, it doesn’t even remain a horror, you have nothing new to write and you have lost enthusiasm. You wonder how come all those successful bloggers keep coming up with one killer post after another with phenomenal regularity and to add insult to the injury, they not only write great stuff for their own blogs, they also write awesome guest blog posts for other blogs. What are you missing?

First of all you have to realize that everybody runs out of topics, eventually, even the greatest of bloggers. So how do they get new topics? Here are a few things you can do to keep the streams of blogging ideas flowing:

Be a part of the community

When you work alone there is a far greater chance of you running out of blogging ideas. Visit other blogs in your niche and pay close attention to what people are talking about. You get lots of new ideas when you interact with people.

Give priority to building a community

It’s hard to run out of steam if you’ve got a vibrant community on your blog. It’s always very encouraging when people give feedback, whether positive or negative.

Encourage your visitors to ask questions

Once you’ve developed a community, encourage your visitors to post questions. If you write about a product or a service believe me, people will have unlimited queries, and every query can be turned into an engaging and useful blog post.

Get active on social media

Lots of interaction and stimulation takes place on websites like Twitter and Facebook. People are constantly posting interesting tidbits that can be easily turned into great blog posts. Even small exchanges can be transformed into full-blown blog posts with some effort.

Get ideas from your existing blog posts

Lots of sub-topics are hiding in your existing blog posts. Go through your old archives and try to revive your old blog posts with new perspective. A lot changes in a few months. You can also re-write your older posts with some new twists.

Add value to blog posts and articles appearing on other websites

Use websites like AllTop.com, Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon and PopURLs to find new content relevant to your field and see how you can derive new content out of them. Don’t worry about always writing longish blog posts. Even if you have one paragraph to add, link to the original content page and add your bit. This way it won’t seem daunting. Besides, sometimes when you think of publishing just a single paragraph, it’s easier to writing a long blog post.

Learn and share continuously

Learning doesn’t just help you blog non-stop, it also improves you as a professional, but that’s a different point. It’s great fun learning new things about your niche and them sharing them with your readers.

The key to NOT running out of blog post ideas is realizing that everybody does, and you constantly have to keep this in mind and plan accordingly. How do YOU make sure that you don’t run out of topics?

What does content marketing actually mean?

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Content marketing is one of the most popular buzz words these days on the Internet and surprisingly, it gets more traction than content creation, without which content marketing has no purpose to exist.

So what is content marketing?

It basically means promoting the right kind of content in front of the right kind of audience. Content is king is a clichéd expression but it has never been truer. Whether it’s the search engines or the social media websites, they survive and thrive on content: whatever format the content has. But is content marketing as easy as this?

Hardly. To create a solid content marketing strategy, you need to clearly define your audience, and have a lucid perception of what sort of content would tickle their buying buds. Whom do you want to target? Customers, clients, subscribers, advertisers or visitors who devote a fair amount of their attention upon your advertisers? Then you start creating content accordingly. If you are a web design company you want to attract prospective clients who would be interested in buying your services. If you are a content writer or an online copywriter (like yours truly) you would like to attract people who would want to hire you as a freelance writer.

In the early 2000s for nearly two years my website came on the first spot on Google for the word "web designing" because I had generated lots of content around this phrase. The problem was, my website mostly attracted people who wanted to learn web designing rather than hire me for their web design projects. The targeting was all wrong.

So when I started creating content for this website it was constantly on my mind that I shouldn’t end up attracting just "aspiring" content writers and work-at-home people who wanted to do something in their spare time. My content should attract prospective clients. Well-orchestrated content marketing can achieve this for you.

Once you have identified your audience and have created a significant number of blog posts or web pages, you must start promoting and marketing your content using the following methods:

  • Opt-in email marketing: This is one of the oldest, and still one of the best ways of getting your word around. When people are on your website or blog encourage them to subscribe to your email updates so that they can receive the content you publish without interruption.
  • RSS feeds: Encourage people to subscribe to your RSS feed by prominently displaying the RSS button on your website or blog.
  • Social media, networking and bookmarking websites: Such websites can bring you tons of traffic. These websites include FaceBook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc. They may seem to be bringing lots of random traffic (and increasing your bandwidth costs in the process) without generating much business but they certainly increase your visibility and help you strengthen your brand presence.
  • Online forums: Yes, they’re still popular and get lots of traffic from search engines.
  • Guest posting and commenting on other blogs: Find blogs in your niche. Write guest blog posts for them (something I have never been able to do actually) and participate in their comments section. Again, this may not bring you direct customers but it does generate buzz and this leads to customers and clients.
  • Search engine optimization: Some people believe in SEO and some don’t. The most logical thing to do is, produce highly relevant content using keywords your prospective customers and clients would use as search terms on search engines. This can draw lots of relevant traffic to your blog or website.

Content marketing is an ongoing process simply because there are always people competing with you. Ignore it for a few months and you’ll realize you almost have to start it from the beginning, unless you’re a celebrity.