Blogs for Marketers Like You
By Mark Widawer
Owning and running a blog has a bunch of fantastic benefits for marketers like us. You and I want a blog that will attract traffic, engage our readers in a conversation about our topic, and lead them to other resources that they’ll pay us for.
So if you have an ebook about tomato growing, you really should have a blog about the same thing — or maybe the more general topic of vegetable gardening.
You’re going to learn what it takes to do the same kind of thing for your web-based business.
But why a blog, you ask? In a nutshell, blogs help in these ways:
- Attract traffic to your website
- Attract traffic for your other websites
- Are very “Search Engine Friendly”
- Allow you to learn more about your customers
- Create or improve your relationship with your customers
- Create or improve relationships with other marketers
- Demonstrate your expertise or knowledge
- Make it very easy to add content to your website
- Help you sell your product or service
- Create the possibility of persistent and passive revenue
* The Power of the Long Tail
I recently received a question from one of my workshop members. “How many pages should be up at the same time?”
The answer is “All of them.”
You see, a blog isn’t something where you put pages up and then take them down. You put them up and they stay there. . . forever. It’s from this constant growth and constant refreshing that blogs become so attractive to the search engines.
Google, Yahoo, and the other Search Engines LOVE new content. They love websites with growing content.
They love websites that are authoritative in their field. They love websites all about different facets of the same topic.
As your blog grows, you build what is referred to as a “long tail” of content.
In his book “The Long Tail,” Chris Anderson talks about how marketplaces are changing from a “big hit” model, where lots of people buy the same things, to a “long tail” model, where few people buy many more of fewer things.
As an example, in the 80′s, The Cosby Show, the Evening News, and ABC’s Wide World of Sports were extremely popular. That’s because there was only a small amount of bandwidth (i.e., only a few channels) for people to watch.
Now, we’ve got thousands of cable channels to entertain and inform us. We’ve got cable channels devoted to the arts, nature, sports, women, men, race cars, golf, crafts, comedy, and countless more topics I’ve got no idea about. Plus, we’ve got several 24 hour news channels for you to watch. As a result, there will never be a TV show approaching the same popularity as those from 20 years ago.
Back to your blog. . . why does this matter to you?
The web works the same way. Not only is your website likely to be part of the long tail of the Internet, but you’ll have a long tail within your website. People aren’t always going to be searching for the main topic you write about. They’ll be searching for the specific, niche-y topic you probably think no one else cares about.
Every topic is very important to someone. Eventually, someone will search for that very obscure thing you wrote about, discover that your page appears as the number one listing for your topic, and be ecstatic at his miraculous luck at finding you.
So even on your own website, you’ll have the most popular pages, and then you’ll have a long tail of other less popular pages.
You’ll have your own long tail.
And over time, you’ll find that fully half of your traffic will flow to the 80 or 90 percent of your less popular pages. So, it’s important that you feed your long tail.
* Your Blog Strategy
Your blog has an important place in your marketing plan. Principally, you want the blog to do three things for you.
- Attract traffic
- Get people to know, like and trust you
- Feed your sales website
You do that by building your blog properly and using it effectively, always keeping those goals in mind.
Here’s how you can do that.
1. Write good original content about your topic
2. Have an open comment policy
3. Place an Opt-in form on your blog
4. Put a Question form on your blog
5. Link to your Sales pages from your blog
Having a blog can be a powerful marketing strategy for your business. By creating a blog that delivers solid content on a consistent basis, you can build trust, credibility, and make sales in the process. And that, after all, is the point.
This article is by Mark Widawer. Mr. Widawer has a FREE blog that shows you how to convert visitors to buyers convert more of your site’s visitors into buyers, but also shows you what makes an Internet business really work. Find out more at http://www.TrafficAndConversion.com
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