Clicksharp Marketing

By now it’s no secret that writing a blog (and keeping it lively by continuously adding fresh content) is one of the best ways to generate visitors to your web site. This is no ordinary site traffic.

A high proportion of visitors to your blog are likely to be opted-in, having signed up for email updates or reading your syndicated blog via RSS (what is RSS?). This means you waste less of your visitor’s attention span on the front end (who I am and what do I write about, why I am a trustworthy source of information, why you shouldn’t leave my site immediately), leaving more time and energy to dedicate to issues of importance to your business. For more on the virtues of opt-ins and the overall push-pull duality of marketing, I recommend you read Seth Godin’s “Permission Marketing.”

And if you open your blog to participation from others, you then have access to the cream-of-the-crop thought leaders from your particular industry or category. People begin posting supporting or contradictory content, debates ensue, new visitors are engaged, and from a simple collection of entries spawns a living, breathing, dynamic source of fresh content. Your search engines love this, by the way.

But don’t take it from me. Bill Slawski’s article “Should a Small Business Blog?” was published in Search Engine Land last week, and in my opinion captures exactly why blogs represent a golden opportunity for a growing business to establish itself and take on larger competitors. Rather than regurgitate his ideas, let’s take a results-oriented view. Here’s what one of his clients accomplished by starting a blog and maintaining it over time:

• Having drawn repeated mentions in local newspapers and magazines
• Being profiled in national publications like USA Today
• Appearing as an example in a book on blogging as a way of enhancing a professional reputation
• Attracting business from local customers as well as national and international clients
• Providing rankings in search engines for a wide variety of keyword phrases ahead of firms with more than 300 members
• Engaging other practitioners in the same field to discuss and enter into consultation on a variety of topics
• Suggesting other services that he might provide to his clients

Time to crack those knuckles…

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 30th, 2007 @ 7:52 am on the category Blogging, Small business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


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