The Decades old journey
What started as a simple platform where people could add their personal accounts or anything else they would like to share, is today recognized as one of the very influential digital marketing or content marketing tool, for a number of diversified industries, by many visionary marketers and entrepreneurs.
Starting from what was considered nothing more than a personal diary for people, today blogs are used by a great number of businesses to draw in more audience, to provide their customers relevant information and to keep them updated.
A lot of times blogs are grouped together with social media in the account of both being interactive in nature. Before blogs become common for businesses, visitors would use website guest books or emails to have an online conversation with a brand. This was changed and made much more convenient with the popularity of blogging and its option to post comments.
However, it wasn’t until the late 1990s when platforms were developed that allowed blogging without the requirement of knowing coding or web design. Followed by the early 2000s when WordPress came along and it became few of the most popular blogging platforms. While the practice of businesses maintaining their blogs also became widely adopted in all kinds of industries.
Introduction of blog marketing
From its decade’s old journey, slow and steady, blogging grew into being a new, effective and influential element of digital marketing strategy.
Businesses today use the platform of blogging to try to reach their target audience by making sure the content they publish goes well with their blog marketing strategy. Furthermore, as the practice of blogging has increased in popularity and ease, a lot of people have even built their entire businesses from their blogs, such as food blogs.
Why does every business need to incorporate blog marketing?
The very nature and basics of blogging go hand-in-hand with the idea behind businesses making marketing efforts. Blogging allow businesses to publish new content, with the frequency of their convenience, to catch the attention of their customers and prospects while also offering their audience to easily interact and engage with the brand.
Here are few more detailed reasons for why businesses today need blogging as part of their digital marketing plan.
- Relatively inexpensive to start and maintain
There are plenty of blogging platforms available in the market that allow their users to build their blogs for no cost, while also allowing them to give their blog a professional appearance that makes it a unique brand of its own. However, if one would want they can also build their blog for only the cost of buying a domain and web hosting, to get a more customized appear on the blog.
No matter what method one may choose, blogging is still relatively one of the cheaper marketing tools when compared with some of the traditional and digital marketing methods that require big budgets.
- Easy to use
Most of the blogging platforms are indeed very simple to use to help users maintain their blogs rather smoothly. They only require users to do basic tasks like to type, copy, paste, upload and drag & drop. Today, with such little efforts people can enjoy their professional looking blogs.
- Effective way to get more traffic
Your blog is one of the most effective ways and today it is also one of the commonly used ways to get organic traffic on your website. Depending on your content, you can grab the attention of new customers, existing customers, old customers and new prospects.
The idea is to keep on publishing good, original, relevant, entertaining, useful and engaging content that brings people back for more again and again.
- Improves search engine rankings
Google is very involved in finding new content and ranking it. Hence, a lot of entrepreneurs and marketers use their blogging platform to improve their search engine optimization efforts. Regular blog posts provide SEO regular new content to optimize for search engines.
- Build trust and credibility in market
Its basic human nature to always want to know more and it is not uncommon for people to be curious about people they are doing business or any kind of transaction with. Having this information makes your customers feel a stronger connection with your brand and with right campaigns and strategies it grows into trust and creditably in the market.
Moreover, you can also build trust and credibility of your brand by creating your expertise and providing helpful content with tips and other valuable information.
- Connect well with your market
While many businesses today are shifting to social media channels, such as Twitter, Facebook, and others, over their blogs to reach their audiences. However, it may vary from case to case but blogs can also be an equally effective channel to have meaningful interaction and conversations for customer engagement.
Moreover, your blogs allow you to build an ongoing connection and trust while simultaneously getting audience’s valuable feedback and providing customer service.
- Smart blogging is a source of revenue, beyond business products and services
A popular blogging site with a decent fan following and strong credibility in the market can have a solid impact on buying behavior of its followers. Hence, every now and then one could earn a little extra from promoting affiliated products, getting sponsors and selling advertising space on the blog site.
- Demographic targeting of audience
One can enjoy as many benefits of blogging as much they are ready to be innovative and creative with their blog content and overall content marketing and strategies. One of the best ways to be creative with one’s blog is to ensure that the content published caters to the specific demographics of their target audience.
However, one of the great examples of this is the blog maintained by Microscope.com. As a lot of the audience and client base comes from educational and research institutes, their blog publishes nothing but engaging and real-life applications of microscopes and the relevant technology.
Hence, the idea is to find your own best balance between entertaining and informative.
How to go about with your blog marketing?
Starting your blog or building it on a blogging platform to publish content that helps you promote your brand or any other kind of content is easy and rather quick part of blog marketing. What takes real effort and is more of an ongoing process is the management and marketing of your blog.
Here are the initial steps one will need to follow to set up for their blog marketing.
- First step
The first step is to take your time and make a plan for your blog marketing. This plan will help you answer questions like what kind of content you should publish on your blog, would your audience prefer informative News format, tips or some other style of content. Furthermore, how often you should publish new content to stay effective.
- Second step
This is time to decision your blogging platform and start on setting it up. Try to customize your blog as much as possible while making sure it caters to your specific business market. In addition, make sure you are using your business logo, as used on your website, to maintain consistency over all medium of online presence.
- Third step
The next step is to start filling your blog by publishing content as soon as possible. It won’t help the reputation of your blog if your readers visit your blog and only find 1 or 2 posts.
Hence, it is a better strategy to post a couple of blog posts at once and then continue with your regular blog posts.
- Fourth step
Good content is of no use if it is not rightly marketed to the right audience. However, marketing your blog has become relatively easy with social media integration on the blogs. This allows you to easily share every new post with your followers on all channels of social media.
Hence, it is important that you include your blog posts as your marketing material to be used.
- Fifth step
Lastly, if you follow the other four steps, then up till now your blog should be established and now the last and ongoing step is to keep on replying to comments and maintain strong interaction with your followers.
While maintaining your blog, you should consider that blogs are very much social, so there will be questions, feedback, and sharing of opinions; hence, it should all be dealt in a positive manner just as on social media.
Conclusion
Even though it takes the time to see real results, it takes time and efforts to regularly come up with good content ideas and on some level, your blog needs to be marketed too; in long term, your blog is nothing less than your very own money making the product.
People’s love for entertaining, original and informative content is not going to go away anytime soon. Hence, it is only smart to make use of your blogging platform as it is only good news in long run.
Now you know all about blog marketing including how to get started and how to keep on benefiting from blogging. So get on with this rewarding, smart and influential tool of digital marketing and start creating new opportunities for yourself and your business.
So, what are you waiting for?
