by Brandon Cornett
1. Better Search Engine Ranking
Search engine visibility is a big part of online marketing. Thus, it’s also a big part of blog marketing. The goal of blog SEO (search engine optimization) is to improve your blog’s ranking in major search engines, which will also increase your blog’s traffic, readership and interaction levels. These are the first steps to blog success and profitability. But it all starts with search engine ranking and visibility.

Fortunately, business blogs have certain characteristics that make them ideal for search engine option / search engine visibility. These characteristics can improve your blog’s visibility and traffic levels – key components of blog marketing success.

For one thing, blog’s are easy to publish, so you can create a large volume of quality content fairly quickly and easily. This “breadth and depth” of content is a fundamental building blog for search engine visibility.

Most business blogs are also, by default, well structured and easy for search engines to crawl through. Blog programs automatically archive content and allow you to categorize your writing into topics and subtopics. These category and archive links give blogs an easy way to access content.

2. Lead Generation Tool
Lead generation is an important part of business blog marketing. You can generate leads from your blog in a variety of ways. When people leave comments on your blog and include their email address, you could follow up with them on the blog itself and also by email. You can also feature “white papers” or other exclusive reports on your blog, and allow people to request them online. Of course, if your business blog is about a truly exceptional product or service, then your blog marketing (and lead generation) will be even simpler – highlight your contact info someplace visible, and people will contact you.

3. Collaboration / Joint Marketing
Business blogs can easily support collaboration and joint-author activities. Having multiple authors can increase your blog’s usefulness and popularity, while also increasing the number of people promoting your blog. With blog marketing, two heads (or three, or four) can be better than one, and blog programs make it very easy to collaborate. You just invite your authors, give them posting authority on the blog, and you’re off and running. Just be sure to choose the right authors and share the benefits accordingly.

4. Online PR Tool
The business blog is also an ideal channel for news, articles and other PR pieces. This can support your blog marketing efforts in a number of ways. These days, journalists use business blogs to stay informed about companies in their coverage area. That’s because they know they’ll get much more current information from a blog than a regular website, as business blogs are often updated weekly or even daily. Blogs also produce RSS feeds, which can be easily be republished onto other websites with links back to the source website / blog. This lets you use your business blog as a syndication tool for content distribution, which can further support your blog marketing efforts.

5. Buzz Generation / Word-of-Mouth
If you go the extra mile to make your business blog unique, informative, engaging or entertaining, you will eventually develop a strong base of readers. In time, blog readers can become loyal advocates who eagerly share your blog with friends or colleagues. This buzz factor can be a powerful tool in blog marketing, because it can spread like wildfire thanks to the speed and reach of the blogosphere.

Post Info: Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 | Blog Promotion | brandon