In what seems like the blink of an eye, blogs have risen to the forefront of the online landscape as a powerful and personal tool for businesses. Quickly and cheaply, a blog enables you to reach out to prospective customers, create buzz for products, services and ideas, and enrich understanding and appreciation for what you have to say and offer.
As easy as blogs are to set up, seed with content and update, using them to build trust, visibility and mutually rewarding relationships takes a host of ingrediants and techniques that add up to initial and ongoing success. Here's a few choice tips that can make the process of blogging to build your business more productive.
Make the title of your post a "grabber" that will get people to stop and take notice. "Canned Advertising Kills" was the title of our recent post on the low readership and recall of generic, recycled advertising. We could have called it "People Don't Pay Attention to Uninteresting Ads," but the "grabber factor" was missing in action.
As a rule, brevity is a blog's best friend. More people are drawn to blog posts that offer them something useful, entertaining or interesting in a "snack-size" portion than those that read like a State of the Union Address.
Write "open-ended posts." By not structuring every post with a beginning, middle and end, you encourage others to jump in and add to the discussion. This increases participation in your blog and the growth of an engaged community of potential customers and partners. Sometimes all it takes to open the lines of communication are ending a posting with a simple "What do you think?"
Link out to other blogs as often as possible and comment on other blogs when you have something to contribute. Nurturing relationships is one of the most reliable ways to expand your community and build traffic to your blog.
Be committed and consistent in your blogging. Blogging daily may not be a realistic goal, but once a week should be a minimum and more is better.
For more ideas to drive sales check out archives or visit Ambit Advertising and Public Relations.
Recent Comments