Wow – that came out of nowhere.
I was sitting at my desk, and a low roar and shake started up, and I’m thinking, “What in the world?” We are in a fairly old building, so at first I thought it was something in the building, but then I realized EARTHQUAKE and Tamara and I head for the door and got outside. Continue reading

When people trust the blog and feel the connection they are more open to the marketing message and more likely to respond in a favorable way.

But first you have to get them to the site. You have to promote your blog. In a sense you have to market your marketing vehicle.

In order to promote your blog and make it a successful marketing tool you have to ensure three things…

1. People will want to view it
2. People will be able to find it
3. people will be able to pass it on.

No one will read your blog for long if it does not offer them something that they find useful or desirable. This means that in order to appeal to your market, your blog has to be interesting, insightful, helpful, and entertaining or, better yet, all of these things.

You cannot forget that your blog is the vehicle for your marketing message. Make it interesting and useful to the reader so that they have a reason to read or view it. People will watch commercials because they are sandwiched between segments of a television show. Use the same concept.

Create a captive audience.
I want to learn what this music producer thinks about a new piracy law and if reading his opinion means also hearing about a new artist he’s promoting then that’s fine, I’ll take in both messages.

Think about it like – they say that when you give you’re dog a pill you should put it in peanut butter or some other treat. They find the treat so desirable that they’ll accept the pill in order to get the peanut butter. Your blog must work the same way: Give people something that they find desirable and they will accept your marketing message as well. But use caution – do not over market.

To make your blog interesting you have to provide your audience with things that are the relevant to them. Pampers will talk about issues related to babies and new parents, Sony will talk about technology developments, what will you talk about to connect with your market?

Now, not only must the blog be interesting, it must also be findable. The greatest information on the entire internet is not worth a thing if the viewers cannot find it. Assuming that your blog will become part of your already existing site, those who visit your web page are going to be introduced to your new addition by a link on the homepage. In this way, the webpage is promoting the blog.

But it can also work the other way as well. Your blog can bring people to your web page if the blog can be found through the search engines.

This means optimizing your blog. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a strategy to get a web page to the top of the search engines list. Its goal is to make your site show up on the first page of Google’s search return.

Your blog should be optimized in the same manner that your site is, using the same strategies and techniques. However, there are additional, blog-specific search engines that will also help people find your blog. There are several of these engines, with Google’s being one of the largest.

You can also help people find your blog by promoting it through other avenues. Talk about it in newsletters, build a buzz on affiliated sites, put the domain directly on your product. Build your blog up until it is the authority in your industry. Until it becomes the place to go when people want up-to-the-minute information.

The final promotional consideration that you have to keep in mind is that those who view your blog should have a way to forward it to others. If you have done an effective job in creating interesting content then people are going to want to share what they have found and you want to promote this.

By enabling viewers to send a copy or a link to their own associates you are enabling them to do your promoting for you. They are sending your advertising message to other members of your target market.

This is one of the greatest benefits of couching your marketing campaign in an informative blog – people not only respond to it in a more favorable manner, they promote it for you.

Recap

For all of this to work, the marketing message has to be there and it has to be integrated into the blog’s information. You can’t just paste an ad in the middle of the article and expect it to be effective.

People’s eyes will skip right over it. You don’t watch a commercial if you have the option of fast forwarding through it and people don’t read ads if they can avoid them. So make sure that you are maximizing your blog’s marketing abilities by integrating the message into the content.

It’s much more effective than advertising on a pregnant woman’s stomach.

Oh did I say make your blog interesting?