What's a Blog? and What Can It Do for My Business?

Answer: It's called a blog, a website filled with superpowers. Usually, comprised of two columns, one for content and the other for the owner's profile, a blog opens many doors to warm markets. (Given, this is an awkward word for such a technological innovation, but, since it's already existent, let's just use it and get used to using it.)

So, now that I have told you what a blog is (in abbreviated form), let me present to you the advantages a blog will offer you and your business. Blogs Will Increase Your Business Success Because They Will:

Improve Your Search Engine Rankings:

• Blogs will hugely improve your rankings for the most important search engines and at the same time, through blogs-specific search engines and directories, generate new traffic for your web site. 
• They will generate totally new traffic for you and help you increase the power of your existing traffic sources. 
• They will get you listed almost immediately, even at directories like Yahoo!, and will get you #1 positions for your most important keywords and phrases.

Provide 100% Content Delivery:

• Forget about spam filters that are keeping your content away from your subscribers. Blogs get 100% of your content delivered for direct marketing messages, e-zine publishing, and customer support. 
• With blogs you can even easily deliver daily or hourly news to your subscribers, and everything else as well. Blogs will help you expand your content delivery to daily content updates, content updates by interest, content updates for different target audiences and so on.

Help You Discover New Marketing Opportunities:

• Use them to increase the sales of your affiliates by providing the affiliate with blog feeds to better promote your products. New times bring new marketing opportunities, and blogs are the leaders in this area as well.
• Launch your own blog product feeds and digital catalogs (Amazon started publishing those not long ago) that bring your products directly to your recipient's desktops. Amazon is doing so, but not many other people yet. Be among the first and get a lion's share of your target market.
• Market through branded blog servers and establish a constant connection with your subscribers. It's just like having a branded e-mail client that your customers and prospects are using every day ... but much cheaper.
• Find innovative ways of delivering your ads and direct marketing messages directly to your audiences, making sure they are actually read.
• Autoresponders are a great marketing tool, but are becoming ineffective because your prospects just don't want to give you their e-mail addresses. Blogs give you this very same power, but without the fear people have with e-mail.
• Publish your own "podcast", a special blog that carries audio. Perfect for your own audio "radio station" or for getting your voice to your readers, without having to worry about too large e-mail attachments. Podcasting got so big that not only every respected Internet marketers is using it, but also huge corporations like GM and others. 
• Along those lines, you can also publish your own video show.
• Use blogs to market to your existing customers, affiliates, business partners and employees/team members.
• Use blogs to deliver latest posts and topics from your forums directly to your readers, to increase forum popularity and the quantity & quality of conversations.

Get Your Content Published On Other Web Sites:

• Get your content easily published on other web sites to reach new audiences and use their traffic to increase your own sales, as well as achieve greater recognition as an expert in your field. Again, it's easy and has the potential of bringing your content to thousands and thousands of new prospects, who are ready to buy now.

Help You Generate New Subscribers More Easily:

• Internet users are reluctant to subscribe to any more e-mail newsletters, but because blogs are so easy to control they don't have any problems with subscribing to new blog feeds that match their interests. That means that by having a blog you can raise your visitor-to-subscriber conversion easily. 
• Just imagine how converting more visitors into subscribers will improve your long-term sales ... every additional subscriber you get means a new potential sales and a long-term relationship that could lead to dozens of sales on the long-term, especially if you convert him in to an affiliate. If however you're not using a blog, these sales could easily be lost.

Allow Messages From Your Customers to Reach You Without Fear of Spam:

• E-mail messages, yes, even those from your customers and their business inquiries, are often lost due to spam filters. With blogs, no messages from your customers or prospects will ever get lost again. That means that you'll now capture every business inquiry and respond accordingly, turning it in to a real sale.

So, if you’re ready to take advantage of blog technology to help you with your customer relationship management and don’t know where to start, give me a call! I will show you a trick or two.

Remember: When you’re maximizing your business’ potential, we all win! When you don’t, we all lose!

Copyright © Etienne A. Gibbs, MSW, The Master Blog Builder

PERMISSION TO REPUBLISH: Although this article may be republished in newsletters and on web sites provided attribution is provided to the author, and it appears with the included copyright, resource box and live web site link, email notice of intent to publish is required. Mail to: execandgroup-consulting@yahoo.com