Marketing on Internet Road 

In the previous post we aimed to cover the benefits of a blog to your business, both for Search Engine Optimization purposes as well as your brand and overall marketing strategy. So, we have established that a blog is a great tool, so now what?

Now you should start a blog! As simple as that.
However, it is important to understand that a blog is not only for big companies. On the contrary - just like Internet Marketing in general is an amazing strategy for small and medium businesses, a blog is a must for such, even if they operate locally.

Any business owner of a small & medium business must start a blog. Should you not find the time and commitment to post regularly, delegate the efforts to others in your business, or outsource it to have the blog posts be written by someone else on your behalf (and on your blog). In any of the cases, the benefits you should expect to gain are enormous (but we have established that already, right?).

A blog is a type of Social Media marketing. Since it has its unique aspects, let's refer to having a blog and using it to the benefit of you marketing strategy "Blog Marketing".

Blog Marketing is exactly what it reads: using blogging (blog posts content) as a marketing tool and strategy to get leads and prospects. Risking a repeat to what we wrote in previous posts, here is a short list of benefits a small and medium business should expect from blog marketing:

• Becoming an authority and an experts in your specific industry (or even a niche)

• Establishing relationships with followers that are interested in your offerings (products, services).

• After a while, you can gain a flow of qualified leads into your business that should translate into an increase in sales (either directly from the blog's authority itself, or via the push to your site's SEO)

As a small and medium business you might be straggling with the question of "what to blog about"? Well, the answer to that is very simple: anything that you do, know and think regarding your business and industry that is (or should be) interesting to your prospects and customers.

And if your business is local, add a local touch to your posts. First, it should come out in searches with local flavor; secondly, it will connect better with your target audience, as you will be speaking the same local language.

Don't hesitate to post content on special promotions and other activities you are conducting. After all, isn't that what you audience should be interested in? If you are advertising it on other channels, why not use blog marketing for that? It's free!

WSI E-Services offers blog marketing assistance and can help you launch and maintain a blog for your business, no matter of the size of your company. Contact WSI E-Services today

Comments and feedback are more than welcome.

In the previous post we discussed the importance of Blog to your SEO efforts. However, a blog is valuable to your business in more aspects that just SEO.

Marketing by relationship: You are getting a place where you share your ideas, news and advise, while at the same time giving your customers a place to put comments, feedback and remarks. They will follow your blog and become more than customers - they will become fans. When any business is looking for long-lasting engagement with its customers, how great can this be?

Thought Leadership: Having a blog allows you to share your expertise with your potential as well as your existing customers. If those will read your insightful, knowledgeable and helpful resources about your industry, they'll be more likely to see you as a thought leader in your market which will drive them to do business with you rather than with your competitors.

Brand Awareness at the lowest possible cost: Any business wishes to establish itself as a recognized (positive) brand. The result of the relationship marketing and thought leadership benefits of a blog will result in making your brand more powerful, and at almost no cost.

Having a Web site is only a beginning toward creating an online presence that will generate more interest in your company. Incorporating Internet marketing tools such as a blog will make sure this beginning is the foundation to a successful online presence and all the way to your bottom line.

Comments and feedback are more than welcome

But it's not only the fresh content that counts. Here, size do matter: If you have a site with 10 pages and no blog, you have 10 pages that can rank in Google. If you have a site with 100 pages and a blog with hundreds of posts, you have hundreds of chances to rank. The number of pages is important also for the linking structure. If you employ your linking strategy correctly and embed links to your site's internal pages from your blog post, you are getting... well, more links to your internal page which will make them more important for search engine, will get your site more traffic and so on.

In conclusion, blogs are important for many reasons, but they are surely important for your SEO efforts.

Comments and feedback are more than welcome

Blogs are extremely important. They are valuable to you Social Media strategy and to your SEO one. We will devote some of the coming posts on this blog :-) to... Blogs.

While attending a 2 days training session on Internet Marketing and SEO in Paris, we got acquainted with this series of YouTube videos that is called "In Plain English" (search for them in YouTube - they are amazing). As such, I decided to post today this video: "Blogs in Plain English". Enjoy.

When considering your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts, ranking your site (actually - your site's pages) organically on the search engines is probably the most important factor, yet it could mean nothing. Confused? Let's try to clear it.

Ranking high organically for searches made for your business, services and products is obviously very important in order to get free traffic to your website. To emphasis it some more, researches on search traffic show that on average ranking number 1 for a specific keyword brings 27.1% of the search traffic to the web page that is ranked there. The one that is ranked 2nd should expect 11.7% of that traffic.

For comparison purposes, the Google Adwords add that is placed in position 1 for the sponsored links can expect 7.4% of the search traffic (somewhere between position 3 and 4 on the organic results).

These are impressive numbers and surely should drive you to put more efforts on your SEO strategy and to have as many web pages as possible rank as high as possible on the organic search.

However....

What we hear from the to time when talking to potential clients is something like:
"I am ranked number one on Google. Whenever someone is searching for me or for my company I'm the first thing they see."

Can you see the problem? Ranking for when people know your name (or your company's name) is nice, but this is not what you should be looking for. You need to be ranked up high for keywords that represents your offerings, so people that don't know you will arrive to your site (and will convert, but this is for another post in the future).
For most of the names (personal or companies), ranking as number 1 is obvious, but this should be the least of your worries. Make sure you are found when those potential customers of yours are out there looking to buy something that you are selling!

Another reason where ranking is somewhat less important, is that Google has introduced some changes in its search results algorithm. Without getting into too much of technical terms, they are aiming to provide each searcher with a customized search results page; one that should be more relevant to his/her profile (on multiple parameters). Therefore, ranking is important but it is not an absolute measure.
If you had set your goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) correctly, that you have your metrics to collect and to measure. The bottom line is that you need to get qualified traffic (as in those that are searching for what you are offering, not just volumes that will disappear the minute they land on you web page) and this is what you need to be focused on. Ranking is a metrics that could be tricky so look at it with the right filters in mind.

Comments and feedback are always welcomed