Blogging. For the purposes of today’s article, I’m assuming that you already know what a blog is. If not, give this a quick watch to learn the very basics:

Not having a website is no longer an option. Once you have that website, you then acquire 3 new goals:

• Drive targeted traffic to your website
• Create a marketing “touch” with your potential customer
• Foster a relationship with your potential and current customers

A blog helps you accomplish all three goals. Here’s how…

A blog drives targeted traffic to your website

The are three ways that websites are found:

1. Direct navigation (the user types in the HTTP address directly into their browser or they had you bookmarked)
2. Following a link from another site
3. Through a search

In most cases, traffic you receive from direct navigation will come from people that have already found and know your website well. Only very mature websites enjoy a lot of direct navigation traffic - this is probably not you, unless your Amazon.com.

The next biggest source of your early-days traffic will be links from other sites. If you have a static website modeled as a brouchure for your company or an eCommerce site, good luck getting links from other sites. Think about it from the other website’s perspective. Why is your 20-30 page static website worth linking to? Who’s going to be talking about your company that they’d want to link to you? Right. Nobody.

Blogs on the other hand are much more conducive to being linked. In your blog, you’re not going to just blather on about your company. Instead, you’ll be engaging in conversations about your products, how to use them, other related topics. In short, you’re going to be providing a resource to people - not an advertisement. Other blogs will start referencing your articles and you’ll be leaving comments on other blogs - creating conversations between blogs.

Links are critically important for another reason, and that’s directly related to another important source of traffic - search. Modern search engines (Google et al) LOVE blogs. Search engines go crazy for websites that have constantly updated content (like you find in a blog) and lot’s of inter-linking to related content within the website and to other sources. Finally (and most importantly), search engines rank the importance of a website for a set of keywords based on the amount and importance of other websites that link to you. In other words, if “important” websites link to you a lot, then you must be “important” too.

Creating a marketing touch with your customers

What do you think your customer would rather read? Do you think they want to read about how long you’ve been in business? How about your manufacturing process? Do you think they even want to read about your products? Maybe - but probably not.

A blog gives you the opportunity to cater to the true product that your company markets instead of merely babbling about the commodity that you push. What do I mean by that? Simple. Don’t talk about the Wizbang 5000 and all of the cool things it does. Instead, talk about the underlying emotional reason your customer buys the Wizbang 5000. An example….let’s say you sell skin cream. Nobody cares what’s in it. Nobody cares how it works. Even if they did, how long can you talk about that stuff? Besides, just like the founder of Revlon once said…”we don’t sell cosmetics, we sell HOPE“.

A blog gives you the perfect vehicle and opportunity to pound your emotional theme home with your customers. You don’t need to be overt about it. In my example, you can talk forever about ways to beat back the clock of aging with your skin cream customers….and occassionally, you can mention how your product helps in that effort.

See the difference?

Staying Top-of-Mind with your target market

You can do direct mailings. Most likely they’ll end up in the trash. You can do cold call campaigns. There’s all sorts of ways to try to reach your target market. But wouldn’t it be ideal to have continual access to your target market? What if there was a way you could slowly and surely build trust and a relationship with your target market?

Again, blogs to the rescue.

Since blogs are like the periodicals of the web, they have ways that allow your readers to subscribe (for free of course) to your articles. They can have the articles emailed to them or they can have the articles pushed to them as RSS feeds.

So, we’re providing valuable information that our target market wants to hear on an emotional level and we’re doing it with their permission and we’re pushing that information to them on a regular basis.

When crunch-time comes and that customer is ready to buy, who do you think they’re going to buy from?

If you already have a blog - great, get writing! If not, start thinking about what you write about and how it would look and feel to your target market and then start blogging!

Welcome back again!