Or to put it another way, an online journal. Blogs started out as a way an individual could record and share their thoughts and feelings online, but were quickly adopted by business as a way of promoting their products.
1. Keep in personal: nobody wants to feel like they are being sold something.
2. Make sure you choose an interesting facet of your business to write about and think about the person who might be reading it. If it's boring no one will want to.
3. Make it fun and interesting or offer your readers genuinely useful advice. People use search engines as a resource for finding information; so assuming the information you are offering is relevant to the service you provide then your target market is more likely for find your business.
Most blogs come with something called an RSS feed. In plain English this is a simple text version of your blog. It can be used in multiple ways to promote your article without you doing anything.
Be sure to post your RSS feed on a free web feed management directory such as www.feedburner.com or www.specificfeeds.com. This will allow individuals to easily subscribe to your news feed using subscription providing applications like Mail and Outlook, or RSS readers such as Feedly. That means they will see your info it each time you publish a new article.
Sending out newsletters is a hassle. Systems such as Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor automatically use your RSS feed to turn your blog into a monthly or weekly newsletter. The great thing about these systems is that the work automatically once set up is complete, and if you don't publish an article they. won't send out anything. If you want to do this on the cheap and you don't mind how your content looks www.specificfeeds.com will do it for free!
RSS feeds can also be used to automatically post, tweet and publish articles to all of your social media. This means that if you are publishing articles on your website you can avoid a lot of the bother of keeping your social media active.
Make sure your blog encourages people to leave their comments or personal details. This will help you build a mailing list of people who are genuinely interested in what you do. It's an important part of any good digital marketing campaign and a no-brainer if you're publishing a blog. It can be linked in directly to your email marketing system, for example MailChimp or Campaign Monitor.
It's also really important to use the right social buttons. One of the most popular applications for this is www.sharethis.com.
Another benefit of blogging is if done correctly it will organically improve your performance in search engines.
Now you're an expert you can progress to the next level, become a Vlogger and post loads of videos of cats and people falling over!
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