Can Blogs Perform As Effective Marketing Tools?

There are a lot of well intentioned folk out there who insist that blogs are not suitably adapted to online marketing and that they are ineffective in finalizing the sale, lousy at capturing subscribers and that in general they perform as very poor seconds when it comes to conversion rates as compared to the ubiquitous squeeze or sales page!

Well I beg to differ with those folks and I am actually of the opinion that the blog makes for an excellent marketing tool. Here are my reasons:

1. Rapid Aggregation Of Traffic

Because of the fact that blogs blast up the search engines far quicker than normal/traditional websites it naturally follows then that a blog will start getting organic traffic for a particular targeted keyword from the search engines a lot sooner than a normal website that was set up at the same time.

2. Accelerated Post Indexing

A blog post for all intents and purposes is really a separate web page and that is how you should view and treat your individual posts assuming you are not already doing so. This means that when you write up a post you should search engine optimize it individually for keywords relevant to the topic of that particular post. That means that ideally the post title should have your most desired keyword incorporated within it, keywords should be liberally but tastefully sprinkled throughout the body of the text enhancing search engine attraction but not interfering with reading sense.

Now the fact that blog posts get indexed within minutes as opposed to days/weeks/months/never means that it is much easier to get a given blog post to the top of Google depending on the difficulty level of the targeted keyword.

For example I wrote a post targeting a keyword with an extremely high difficult level (the difficulty level is about 86%; to give you an idea of just how high that is consider that “make money online” in comparison has a difficulty level of approx. 82%). Now the really astounding thing is that within a week and a half of that posting my blog had already reached page 10 of Google for that extremely difficult keyword!

The point to take home here is that by treating each post as a separate webpage you can quickly have a number of specific niche-market oriented pages ranking high up on Google, attracting highly relevant traffic that converts extremely well. In other words in the existence of quality content found on your posts, visitors arriving there from the search engines via your niche keywords are far more likely to comply with your most desired outcome (be it to make a purchase or sign up to your subscriber list) than the in-your-face Buy! Buy! Buy! marketing style characteristic of squeeze pages.

3. Building Your Subscriber List

Blogs are actually beautifully suited for growing a subscriber list. There are two ways of going about it. Let’s say that you have a blog which has around 150 pages and you wish to insert a form with which to collect subscribers on each and every page of your blog. It is going to be extremely tedious, to say the least, to have to insert the code for your autoresponder collection form onto every single one of those 150 pages individually, but luckily with a wordpress blog you don’t have to do that.

Because of the unique way in which the WordPress platform is designed you only need to insert your autoresponder code once within your blog and that form will appear on every single page of your blog. Now try doing that with a normal static website! The beauty of this system is self evident. Since you have 150 posts (webpages) on your blog that also means that you have 150 different opportunities and portals to collect new subscribers. And as your blog pages increase so do the number of opportunities and avenues to collect subscribers.

Okay one could argue that seeing as each web page revolves around a specific topic then a generalized capture form is bound to be totally off point for a good number of your blog pages. Unquestionnably that is a valid point but the way round this issue is to design individual forms for each specific page and insert those topic-specific forms on the various different pages. This method is definitely more tedious but would probably increase the number of subscribers you get everyday.

4. Blog Interactive Marketing

Interactivity! Ah yes...the signature feature characteristic of blogs (amongst others namely their dynamic nature). This one feature alone is perhaps a blog's most powerful marketing advantage over normal websites. Savvy online businesses didn't take long in capitalizing on the interactivity blogs allowed them to have with their customers. Many businesses quickly grasped that the blog interactive platform performed exceptionally well as a means with which to obtain unsolicited customer feedback via comments and questions left by those very same customers on the company blogs. There is absolutely no reason why you can't mimic this strategy effectively too.

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