Blogs Are a Great Marketing Resource

Blogs are a great online marketing resource, with the right preparation. Frequent blogging can create a voice for your company, communicate the value of the products or services you have to offer, and help boost search engine visibility. Blogging is a foundational base for investing in social media connections, and a way to position an organization as an expert in their respective field.

A blog can also serve as an excellent hub for customers to interact with or speak to you or your company. Blogging can be an awesome piece of marketing collateral to help build brand awareness, and drive prolonged customer commitments. Benefits aside, blogging is an obligation.

It requires a real commitment to client understanding. To be a successful blogger you must employing these six components:

• Theme
• Voice
• Content
• Design
• SEO, for search engine optimization
• Outreach

Theme: When you're picking a theme, think of something that's bigger and better than your organization. Who would want to read a blog that's just about you or your company.

There needs to be a theme that embodies your value, your values, and have that be shown visibly to someone, so they really understand what the value of the content is about.

Voice: Who is going to write this blog?

Some organizations choose to have the creators write. Some blogs have many, many writers, sometimes clients become writers, and some company's choose to have just one person blog, but just decide what's going to work best for you.

Content: Content is king when it comes to social media, especially with blogging. So as you're thinking of content, look to your theme. Your theme is going to be a large enough cover to help decide what kind of posts you're going to include in there for your readers.

Think about content that's really going to give value to your customers. share links about great news articles that may help, educate, or empower their current and prospective customers.

Sometimes content could be things like an FAQ that customers ask all the time, and they become posted on the blog as a way to serve and support.

Design: The design is important to think about, because some blogs don't always live on a Web site. They may be on third-party sites, like blogger or WordPress.

The design should be done in a way so it still looks like your company's website, even when you click the blog link and leave your site. Colors should be similar, the logo should be included, and even things like social media widgets, like the Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube buttons; should be thoughtfully designed into the blog to become part of the overall strategy.

SEO; search engine optimization: When you are writing blog posts, take advantage of the opportunity to weave in your priority key phrases to help attract search engines. Blogs are the best SEO Tools, because they are full of key word rich content, the way blogs are construed should be clean, so search engines can read them easily, and when your content is powered with good key phrases in headlines, the content itself, and even links can multitask as a way to help get you a higher search engine ranking.

Outreach: If you build a blog, you want people to come. How are people going to find your blog?

Here are a few ideas. One easy thing to do is include a link to your blog in your e-mail signature,so as you're sending e-mails for business reasons, there's also a link to invite people to read your blog content. Add a link to the blog on your main Web site. There are also tools, like Twitter feed, that help automatically feeds your blog content into Twitter and Facebook.

You Should think about launching a press release. So think about different ways that you can help promote your blog, and get it out there, because if all of that content is going to be created, you certainly want people to read it.

When these six steps are used together, blogs become an online marketing asset to help serve customers better and can increase public relations potential and give you search and social media marketing visibility.