by Lou Belcher

Created on: March 21, 2009

Why blogging is the new Internet marketing tool.

The Internet is growing. As it becomes bigger and bigger, it is easier for your marketing to get lost. It becomes increasingly difficult to reach actual customers. Your marketing might reach a certain number of people, but are they the right people?

Today, rather than sending out ads to an email list, businesses are turning to blogs to carve out their share of the market. Here's how it works. When you send out ads, you may find that many of them end up as spam and others reach the wrong population. With blogging, you write searchable content to draw people to you. This is a whole new way of writing.

Basically you repeat key words throughout the blog articles so search engines will find your site. For example, if you sell suspenders on-line, write an article for your blog with repeated references to suspenders and suspender-type words. When John Doe wants new suspenders, he searches "Google" for "suspenders." Because you wrote your blog article using great search engine optimization, your website will be listed as a result of that search for suspenders.

More and more businesses are using blogging as the new Internet marketing tool. Here's how to get started:

1. Create an interesting, eye-appealing site with the design in keeping with the product or service you are marketing. Make sure the site is easy to use. Provide excellent blog content. If you are not a skilled writer, hire a writer to write your blog entries for you. You want your entries to be informative, interesting, and entertaining.

2. Build a distribution list. Send out a short memo to your distribution list to alert them to your latest blog entry. Occasionally, ask the people on your list to forward your email on to others who may be interested.

3. The beauty of a blog is that it offers your customers free information about your product or service and subjects related to it. You will find that customers will seek out your blog even when they don't need a product or service. The opposite is also true. People who only seek your blog for information sake may turn into incidental customers later on.

4. The best part of blogging versus traditional means of marketing is that you will interact with your customers. Through quizzes and surveys, you'll find out how to better serve them. Also, you'll get some good interaction going by encouraging them to comment on your blogs and to add information of their own to it.

5. Add short articles to your blog several times per week and you'll soon learn why blogging is the new Internet marketing tool.

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