Blogs are the hottest thing going these days when it comes to marketing on the Internet. A blog is a way of delivering your messages and articles to clients. A blog is a type of website, more personal, easy to create and far less expensive than traditional web sites.
Just when you thought you were mastering the tasks of websites updating, and creating an email newsletter, along comes blogging, and you have to ask yourself:
• Do I really need a blog?
• Isn’t an email ezine or newsletter doing the same thing?
• Should I do both?
• Are these two marketing tools going to eat up all my time, energy and money?
• What’s the best way to spend my resources to get clients and results from my marketing efforts?
Here are ten reasons why you should pay attention to the blogging revolution and do both and ezine and a blog.
1. Because a blog is web based, it is published instantaneously every time you post. This allows you to be spontaneous with issues that affect your readers/clients.
2. Because blog posts are spontaneous, they tend to be more informal, friendly, and conversational. Blog posts show your personality. Your readers/clients need to know who you are before they will invest in your services. Providing both an ezine and a blog allows your readers to get to know you better.
3. You can set up a subscription form on your blog and your subscribers will get a notice in their inboxes each time you post something new. This is a great way around the spam filter problem which blocks so many ezines and legitimate messages.
4. Blogs link to other blogs and people, which help you create a viral marketing system, increasing your exposure to search engines. Search engines love blogs because they are text based and keyword rich.
5. You have instant access to all your published articles on your blog. A blog automatically creates archives of previous posts. You see them in a side-bar for easy access. You put them into categories for easy finding. One clever person we know spent a day posting all her ezine articles to her blog, so that it would appear she has been blogging for a much longer time. Also, readers of her blog may not have had the opportunity to read all of her other ezine articles.
6. You can use your blog to become a trusted expert in your field by filtering content on the web for your subscribers. Readers don’t have time to surf and to collect information, but you can do it for them, thereby establishing yourself as a good resource.
7. You can set up links for ads, products, and for your affiliate programs in the blog side columns so you don’t have to include them in the body of your article. In an ezine, you have to be careful about promotional stuff in the article because it annoys people and causes them to unsubscribe. A blog is a non-intrusive way to do this, and an ezine can link to the blog where more information can be found.
8. Readers can comment on your blog postings, which creates rapport and with readers. You can ask questions, stimulate responses by being controversial, and survey readers. It is a great way to keep your finger on the pulse of what readers want.
9. You don’t have to mess with a web site, or pay a web designer to update your web site every time you have a new article or teleclass, or program or product. Blogs are user-friendly, and with a few instructions or tutorials, you can learn to use it yourself. It is less expensive than setting up your ezine in HTML.
10. Bottom line is this: using a blog and an ezine will help attract more visitors to your website, who become subscribers and who may eventually become clients.
Think of the World Wide Web as a big fishing pond. The more fishing lines in the pond, the more fish you are going to catch.
You have a web site, it is static like an online brochure.
You have an ezine, which you grow through subscription links everywhere.
And now, you should have a blog, where you can attract more readers to get to know you, where they can interact with you, and maybe take your bait!
Happy fishing!