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Market your business with a Blog

  • Thread starter Thread starter DarrenC
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DarrenC

I wonder how many of you use a blog to market your business?

Blogs are great marketing tools and can be used to promote your service or product, raise awareness of your company or build business brands. I write a successful travel blog, and have found by writing unqiue content, people have linked to me and the blog now receives avg 2,000 uniques per day.

Creating a blog is easy, but promoting it and adding unique content is difficult but having one could help your business.

Some other reasons for creating a blog

- Give your business a 'front desk' for customers to communicate with you
- Drive more visitors to your website

If you want more information about blogging let me know, I'm not one of these problogger types, but I do have a new blog which is helping people promote their blog.

Darren
 
I do it here. It's not something that brings in thousands of pounds a month directly - but what it does do is mean that people can get a feel of our style before they contact us. That means that anyone who contacts us is likely to be a much warmer contact.

The other advantage is that it means our homepage changes frequently (for google) by way of a free bit of PHP (called CaRP) that feeds the most up to date bit as part of the page. I've no idea if it works, but we're on the first Google page for "presentation skills training".

The getting to know you function seems to be the most important....
 
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Sooooooo, kindly tell me how a blog would help me promote my childrens enterainment site. I do pamper parties for children. I have always thought it seems like too much hassle, and if I am not very busy with business people will know.

AND, how do I promote the blog. Do I need to? I dont really understand it all!
 
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Richie01 said:
So it's best to have a blog on your website for SEO purposes, rather than with a blog spot or something similar?
Click to expand...

Blog spot and the likes are ok but not as much functionality as the better blog software. Also most of the spamlogs are blogger/blog spot type so I would expect to see a penalty made by the search engines in the future. Wordpress is the way to go.

IN answer to your question DarrenC yeah been using blogs for couple of years, done properly they can be a useful tool. www.realoasis.net
 
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I agree with the 'feel' description as above - I use ours to help give a bit of a sneak peak into the way we think.

Having said that, having run it for a few months now on Blogger, I will be moving the lot onto our website soon
 
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Richie01 said:
Hi Darren

I've just started a blog - http://premier-recruit.blogspot.com/

let me know your thoughts on how to improve things.

thanks :)
Click to expand...

Richie, add some images in between the content to make it more readable, also look at creating an RSS feed at www.feedburner.com so that people can read your content in an RSS reader

[let me know ifyou need more info on RSS feeds]

Richie01 said:
So it's best to have a blog on your website for SEO purposes, rather than with a blog spot or something similar?

thanks
Click to expand...

I'd recommend buying a domain name and hosting, and then use a free blog software like Wordpress.org its much more SEO friendly then blogspot and you have complete control of your blog.

shellie said:
Sooooooo, kindly tell me how a blog would help me promote my childrens enterainment site. I do pamper parties for children. I have always thought it seems like too much hassle, and if I am not very busy with business people will know.

AND, how do I promote the blog. Do I need to? I dont really understand it all!
Click to expand...

Shellie, creating a blog is another door into your business online. People search for a specific service like Childrens entertainment and find your blog and contact you.

You could write about what types of entertainment you offer, maybe post on the blog once a week, and cover a different topic each week. The first step is getting the blog set up, the 2nd is then promoting it.

Hope this helps
 
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Richie, much better. The photograhs break up the content and make it more readable.

Did you sign up with Feedburner? You can promote your feed on your blog and also create a newsletter so when you make a post on the blog the subscribers will receive notifcation.
 
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i have not created it yet but have bought the domain and am searching for blog software to install into to and need to add a gallery to it i will check out these sites thank you
 
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DarrenC said:
Richie, much better. The photograhs break up the content and make it more readable.

Did you sign up with Feedburner? You can promote your feed on your blog and also create a newsletter so when you make a post on the blog the subscribers will receive notifcation.
Click to expand...

Yeh I will sign up to feedburner. cheers :)
 
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No problem.

Blogs have been slow to take off in the UK, and they are over 55million blogs on the net according to www.technorati.com

Whilst there is no doubt that blogs can be a useful marketing tool for your business, I'd be lieing if I said it was an easy way to market your business. You have to write unique content, and people will link to your blog, which will help it increase in the search engines.

You need to write articles that people are going to get something from, rather than just news and events.
 
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Hi

Good advice and interesting reading! IMO, blogs are only going to do you any good if you've got a good writer knocking about the place - someone with a snappy prose style and an idea of the kind of things people might be interested in reading. Another thing to bear in mind is that this normally means having a point of view and being prepared for disagreements amongst your comments.

In general terms, a nice friendly blog about what your business is up to can do wonders in terms of making your site memorable. Although blogs are quite the "hot thing" few people do them well - and even fewer businesses.

If you're looking to use your blog as a tool for Search Engine Optimisation, you're better off getting some custom software on your site and hosting your blog on your own domain (instead of at blogger.com etc). Domain strength is Google's thing at the minute, and that means concentrating your links and content in one place.

Good luck though!
 
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Hi Mark

Just had a quick look at your blog. Obviously it's early days so there isn't much to go on yet. If you are going to blog, the first thing I'd recommend is making sure you keep it up - maybe set aside a morning every week to get a new entry up. The second thing I'd suggest would be to write about things that are less obviously promotional. So instead of articles about sales you're running or how good you are, talk about your customers - without naming names you can get good stories from the odd questions you probably get asked and so on. It's normally a bit more interesting if you write as "me" rather than "we" (a trap I fall into myself!)

Other than that - way to go!

Cheers

Paul
 
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Hi all,
Im a cheeky student here working for a company one day a week. I have been left to my own devices and my 'job role' is to advertise the company usings blogs and such things. I knew nothing about them before I started here. I had a bebo for my own use, just to keep up to date with my friends. With my time at printcartridgedirect, I have made many blogs advertising them on things like blogger, squidoo, blog.co.uk and bebo. I have made many mistakes though. I havent really appealed to anyone yet! I think this is becuase my content is wrong. I have set them up to simply advertise. How ever recently I have tried to use blogs as a place to share information on the related topic and then linking that page to my advert, so to speak. An example of the advert is
http :// printcartridgedirect.blogspot.com
and where I have tried to change my direction to provide information is seen at
http ://
print-cartridgedirect.blogspot.com.
I realise this post is very long and I apologize, but.......
I wanted to know what you think is important to include on the blog, when you are talking about the company, i ask this question becuase I want to talk about the history and where the company is going and I was wondering what kind of things the customer really wants to know.
Thanks to everyone who takes their time to read this.
 
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@DarrenC

You say "market your business with a blog" if we could all write so enthusiastically as you, we would all be rich. Nice blog.

I think blogging is a case of "if the glove fits"
I actually think that blogging and business should be kept a mile apart, and will be blogging about that soon, ..erm....
 
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This is a great post and timely too - cos we wan't to lauch a blog about general eco business issues as an outlet for my missus who has a talent for writing such stuff (as opposed to me who is pants!)

My queries are:

1. If I want to do it properly I assume I'm best to buy a domain, use wordpress and host it "properly" - I guess not on my own website server?

2. If so where best to host "properly" - any suggestions?

3. Is this a better way than using free "blog space" somewhere?

In other words - we wan't to create a blog that people will find, enjoy, and return to - if not what's the point?

And if that indirectly helps our business site then great.

Any help on this would be great!
 
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DarrenC said:
I wonder how many of you use a blog to market your business?

Blogs are great marketing tools and can be used to promote your service or product, raise awareness of your company or build business brands. I write a successful travel blog, and have found by writing unqiue content, people have linked to me and the blog now receives avg 2,000 uniques per day.

Creating a blog is easy, but promoting it and adding unique content is difficult but having one could help your business.

Some other reasons for creating a blog

- Give your business a 'front desk' for customers to communicate with you
- Drive more visitors to your website

If you want more information about blogging let me know, I'm not one of these problogger types, but I do have a new blog which is helping people promote their blog.

Darren
Click to expand...

Hello

I checked out your link and submitted our blog to Blogburst, and was accepted, so thanks for the info!
 
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blogs are useful, both hosted, and built into your website (particularly useful for seo). Article submission sites are also helpful - like go articles and ezine articles
 
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JustOneUK said:
@DarrenC

You say "market your business with a blog" if we could all write so enthusiastically as you, we would all be rich. Nice blog.

I think blogging is a case of "if the glove fits"
I actually think that blogging and business should be kept a mile apart, and will be blogging about that soon, ..erm....
Click to expand...

Thanks JustOne, I completely disagree about keeping blogging and business a mile apart. A blog should just be one of may tools you should use to market your business, build your brand and create yourself a communication channel with your potential clients, customers and buyers etc.

RayB said:
This is a great post and timely too - cos we wan't to lauch a blog about general eco business issues as an outlet for my missus who has a talent for writing such stuff (as opposed to me who is pants!)

My queries are:

1. If I want to do it properly I assume I'm best to buy a domain, use wordpress and host it "properly" - I guess not on my own website server?

2. If so where best to host "properly" - any suggestions?

3. Is this a better way than using free "blog space" somewhere?

In other words - we wan't to create a blog that people will find, enjoy, and return to - if not what's the point?

And if that indirectly helps our business site then great.

Any help on this would be great!
Click to expand...

Buy cheap hosting, which comes with a MySQL database, and PHP4+ and you'll be fine. PM me and I will recommend a good company for hosting, or visit the UKCB business directory

No, don't use Blogger, etc. Use Wordpress or any of the other blogging applications out there, and host it yourself. You have complete control over your blog then.

Lorna said:
Hello

I checked out your link and submitted our blog to Blogburst, and was accepted, so thanks for the info!
Click to expand...

Great news ;)

I hope it brings you tons of new visitors, it has to my travel blog, just featured in USA today this week and the Independent last week, over 2,000 visitors a DAY, imagine getting that traffic if you were using a blog to market your business ;)

netidme said:
blogs are useful, both hosted, and built into your website (particularly useful for seo). Article submission sites are also helpful - like go articles and ezine articles
Click to expand...

Article sites are a waste of time IMO, your just generating duplicate content all over the net and the search engines just hate that.
 
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I've been blogging in various places for years, so I didn't begin to blog as a means of marketing my business, which is fairly new. I think blogging does drive traffic to your business but it takes time. And if a blog is created purely as a means to attract traffic, then it is less effective in terms of building-up visitor numbers.

In addition to the blog on the Larkin & Catcher website, we also have the more relaxed 2planets blog at wordpress. I'm a bit of an insomniac and I usually write a post in the early hours of the morning. I haven't been to bed yet and I've just finished a pretty rambling 'Panties Week' post on the 2planets blog.

I enjoy blogging, and if it has any positive effect on business traffic, then that is just a bonus to me.
 
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Peter BreE said:
High Darren -what sort of costs are involved
Peter B
Click to expand...

For what Peter?

If you mean creating a blog, it'll be the cost of a domain name and hosting, but if you already have a domain for your business, then adding a blog is free, using applications like www.wordpress.org

Drop me a PM if you need any assistance.
 
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I've been doing mine mostly for fun, but after reading this thread I'm going to bite the bullet and get RSS up and going and market the dang thing.
Thanks for the kick in the bum!:)
 
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I write a couple of blogs. One which has evolved over time into my business and writing blog was originally hosted on Blogger, but is now hosted on my old wellversed domain, though still using Blogger technology. The other, purely for poetry, has always been hosted on that domain but also uses Blogger, simply because it's easy.

We'll probably use wordpress on our new site, though, as it looks more professional and is probably more versatile. We'll also explore RSS feeds then.

For the blog to boost the business it will need to attract visitors in the first place. Some of them will arrive via the website or your other promotions anyway, others via links from elsewhere or as a result of RSS. Your newsletter is a good way to gain visitors, by including a teaser that readers can only read by clicking onto your blog. From there, they may well go on to visit other parts of your site. Make the blog entertaining and useful, and a percentage will keep returning and may even link to you from their site.

Still, until you can reach a level where it begins to become viral, I'd say the benefits are quite small, but all these little things add up.

Roy
 
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Hi Roy

Our visitor stats are dramatically different if you compare our website to our blog. Traffic from your blog can be converts to your website if managed well, so it's worth looking at how your blog interacts with your website.

Blog traffic is much more technically savvy.
 
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I love reading blogs and when I launch my new website I'll be setting up a blog (and actually sticking to it this time). I think a great example of a blog is the 10 yetis one. As they update it so often and it's not just regular business stuff it's everyday reads that are interesting. FYI the yetis blog is here: http://www.10yetis.co.uk/yetiblog/

I'm also considering starting a private blog as I want to start writing again so thought it'd be a good way showcase my talents!

Rachael
 
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I use a blog to promote my primary business [not on my sig] and I've seen an increase of over 30% since I created the blog. I haven't created a new domain, just simply used my business domain and I have someone who writes on the blog daily, to keep the content fresh and unique.
 
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