Blog Marketing

What is blog marketing? It is essentially building up a blog for the purpose of marketing a product or service. What is essential for knowledge and understanding of how you can go about marketing the blog boils down to the fundamentals of online marketing. They will guide you to achieve the best results in blog marketing.

What then are these fundamentals that are building blocks to the marketing of your blog? Much serious thought and consideration have to be given to them. They are the pillars in blog marketing.

(1) Check out and confirm who will be your audience that you are targeting

Needless to say, this is the very first prerogative any marketer has to fulfill before embarking on the process of blog marketing. The product or service must be able to meet the need of the customer. This implies that the audience must be correctly targeted. In marketing terms, there must be correct customer segmentation.

(2) Search out the possible sources of online audience presence

After having segmented the target market, ascertain where and how can the targeted audience be found and reached on the web. A good suggestion would be putting up a survey on the web. Ask questions pertinent only to your product or service.

(3) Read the minds of the targeted audience

Delve into the minds of the audience target. Know what the targeted audience read. This will provide great support when it comes to studying their interests and understanding the different reasons for their reading blogs. This will be of great help when you want to find out in what ways blogs read by them have been useful to them. Plans can then be drawn up to revamp your blog for blog marketing success.

(4) Check out and confirm audience communication channel

Find out how to contact the targeted audience who is usually geographically dispersed. The norm will be via search engines. These will assist searches for your blog by the targeted audience. It is also possible to consider other communication methods such as the posting of interesting messages and the exchange of links amongst blogs. These alternatives will help in traffic growth for your blog.

(5) Determine ways to collect email addresses of targeted audience

The opt-in box will be needed to collect the email addresses of the targeted audience. This will help to grow the subscription list which can be the potential goldmine. Hang carrots to lure potential customers by giving freebies for instance free ebooks. The choice of opting in essentially means that the customers have the right to choose if they really want to release their email addresses and to receive future email marketing messages from you. To ensure privacy, insert a privacy policy which should categorically state that you as the marketer will protect all contact details and information given. The psychological fear of not knowing who they are talking to at the other end is overcome by the use of such a privacy policy. The building of your contact database will thus be made much easier.

(6) Know and understand the competition

Be armed with good knowledge and understanding about your competition. It is paramount to know the minutest details of the competitors in terms of who are they and what are they currently doing in their business. With the data collected, you will be able to write out a strategy to fine-tune your blog and blow your competition away.

In blog marketing, you can achieve the best results with the following steps:

(1) Careful selection of keywords

Your blog must be search-engine-ready. This means that even the brief description of your website must show up relevant keywords that are related to your niche business. This process of carefully selecting the best keywords may be tedious but it can extremely rewarding. Search engine optimization necessitates this action to be taken. Even the meta tag should preferably use description similar to that of the title. Search engine rankings can be affected by the title tag as well as the name of your blog. When selecting keywords, it is best to include the name of your blog into the title tag, not forgetting certain relevant keywords for the purpose of search engine optimization.

(2) Listings in search engines

To spread word about the birth of new blogs, it is usually done by listing with search engines. In submitting your blog to search engines, it is always useful to provide them with the brief description and keywords that you have specially selected. Of course, the operations of search engines do differ in their requirements for submission. Examples of search engines and directories that you can choose from include Google.com, Yahoo.com, Blogcatalog.com, Bloggernity.com, just to name a few.

(3) Get more links

The concept of links and reciprocal links plays an important role in blog marketing. Links must be relevant to your site; they must be speaking in same terms. The more links the merrier. Visitors will love to return as they realize your blog has become a valuable content resource to them. Undoubtedly, blogs are actually great link baits. There are several free tools designed specially to help out in the area of linking to other blogs. Examples include Blogroll.com and Del.icio.us.

(4) Use Feeds

When new updates are posted in the blog, it is strongly recommended to use blog feeds that will help to automate the important process of syndication of blog content by other bloggers. The concept of subscription to content from blog feeds enables members to monitor updates of blogs that they like. FeedBurner for instance helps to set up feeds.

(5) Use Pinging

Your blog must "ping" each time there is a new post written. The blog is being updated and notification must be sent out to your audience. This can be easily done with the help of blog search engines such as Blo.gs and Weblogs.com. for Typepad users. Ping-o-matic is another good choice.

(6) Place relevant comments on other blogs

Make many visits to related websites and place pertinent comments on those blogs. With rich and valuable content on your own blog, these bloggers would come to your site. This will imply more traffic from your targeted audience, especially if you have placed your URL in your post for the sole purpose of leading them back to your blog. In trackbacking and especially for blog marketing, the trackback feature will increase the awareness of your blog and blog content. This is simply done by putting a link to the page from where the post that you are referring to is taken from.

(7) Monitor and Identify shifting trends

It is imperative for the survival of any business to monitor what is happening with its competitors. What are the current changes taking place? What are the new trends that are appearing gradually? What will be your next course of action? It is no easy task but it must be done for the survival of your blog. The reason is that the blogosphere is always growing and getting filled with new blogs with new trends. Blogdex , Technorati and even BlogPulse will provide the much needed information on shifting trends and popularity.

Blog marketing is the new marketing era on the web. It provides a real hot source of revenue if given the strong setup and right impetus. It is a lucrative source of money. It can certainly be explosive.