Category: Article Marketing

About Blog Hosts and Blogging Essentials


The nature of a blog

Blog, which is an abbreviation for the term, weblog, is a piece of Internet technology which provides individuals with in a number of different forms; including text, video, audio (podcasts) and photos. The activity of blogging has grown tremendously over the past decade to include users (bloggers) from all over the world, many of whom utilize it to publish and update posts, crop up entries of personalized life snippets that are mundane or bizarre in nature. For most bloggers, however, a blog is personal, unedited and authentic in nature; a journal meant to be shared in an online community.

Blogsites are locations on the Web where bloggers can publish anything; from their thoughts, feelings and photos, to special events, experiences and comments on issues, in addition to many other types of content. A blogsite in its truest form is similar to an online diary to which entries are made in a variety of content types that might encompass videos, links, documents, newsletters and opinions on just about any topic the reader might have interest in.

Personal blogs are created and intended to welcome the insights, opinions and comments of all comers, and therefore should not be written in a way that could be thought of as intimidating, or in a way that readers might consider as too formal in context; because such a blog can turn off readers and cause them to turn away and never return. The basic blog should be conversational in tone and context, a format which would be more appropriate to reach desired audiences.

Blog functions and advantages

Blogging can reasonably be described as being all about individuals reaching out to other individuals, and as such, blogs have their own sets of advantages, some of which might include the following:

  1. Freedom of expression – If you want people to hear you out and give their own opinions, blogging is one of the best ways to create a line of communication;
  2. Networking at its best – Having a blog is a good platform for exchanging genuine ideas from your readers to you as marketer of certain products. Sound opinions and points of view are often better than simply showing the price quote;
  3. Excellent advertising platform – Blogging as a way to advertise products, is a refreshing change from the traditional advertising outlets, and it is cost-effective;
  4. Gauging public opinion on products and services – The key to this particular activity is nice, catchy titles with new ideas presented in your content. This will assure you of quick and repeated responses from your readers. Blogs are excellent locations for the exchange of ideas between sellers and consumers; and they’re good for measuring public opinion regarding products and services, and can even be effective in the political arena;
  5. Useful tool for internal communication – Blogging can help your company build a knowledge-based community of employees, as it is also good for harnessing employee relations and identifying human resource issues in advance;
  6. Other benefits like search engine optimization (SEO) will help your blog to be seen often by as many people as you wish. This is therefore very good exposure for your products and services.

Choosing a blog host

Many blog hosting services are available on the Internet, but perhaps the most important question in this regard pertains to choosing from the many Web hosting services to find one that will best suit your purposes when starting your business blog program. Business people are usually clueless to recent technological innovations which could help them maximize their marketing potentials. For blogging beginners, it is best to first study the services offered by blog hosts, because an ineffective business blogging program may damage marketing opportunities instead of enriching them.

A company might decide to do the following depending on its capacity and needs: 1) Host their own blog service, 2) Pay someone else to host the service, or 3) Setup a “blog aggregator page” and ask the employees to select their blog hosting services individually. There are paid and free services available for individuals. Business blogs are required to have ; if not, this will prevent them from maximizing their marketing, public relations and SEO potential.

Basic blogging essentials

COMMENTS. Welcoming comments provides the opportunity for dialogue; and for business blogs this is a good customer feedback mechanism. This helps based on loyalty and trust. So blogging is an innovative way to converse with your customers.

TRACKBACK. This helps to maximize company and product exposure in the sense that, your consumers can get back to you for more posts and updates without the difficulty of locating you all over again. If your blog is popular in a specific online community, chances are that links going back to your blog site are everywhere online, other blog sites or even websites.

CATEGORIES AND TAGS. These are helpful, both in classifying blog searches for ease of navigation, as well as on site searches. Categories act as libraries because they classify posts by subject matter which might include business, distance learning, eCommerce, online auctions and much more. Tags, help in classification, especially in the blog search engine Technorati. Possible customers and new clients locate blogs about certain topics of interest by just clicking the tags.

RSS FEED. Really Simple Syndication is the feed from your blog that is sent out over the internet, and collected through the various newsreaders and aggregators.

In order for your company to establish a business blogging program, considerable options should be made available by the hosting companies with the most compatible services. Free blog hosting services are popular but they are more appropriate for individual online journals. Paid blog hosting services offer unlimited packages which may be best for your company’s needs. You may want to take a look at some blogs that already use a particular host first, by simply reading and closely examining their layout and design. Another important thing to consider is whether or not the hos provides reliable technical support.

The blog: A reflection of the blogger

After choosing the blog host a team should be ready to plan the in which case the team should:

  • create a style that meets the needs of your audience;
  • establish an open, credible tone;
  • schedule weekly updating of blog – ideally, a few times a week;
  • include weblinks of other website and blogs;
  • blog post should be in the “first person;”
  • focus on the business blog objective;and,
  • maintain an honest, engaging conversational quality.

Remember, the look, style and content found on your blog is always a reflection of you and your company. Apart from the chat rooms, instant messengers and electronic mails created for communication and dialogue beyond the traditional methods of communication, blogs have emerged as the most innovative and convenient methods used by regular folks to build opportunities for interaction. The need for personalized and human elements of building online communities have changed the technological landscape of Internet life.

Email Marketing Combined with Other IM Strategies

Plurality of strategies

It has been a long held belief among marketing professionals that no single marketing strategy will be as effective as a combination of two or more such strategies; and this pertains to both online – Internet Marketing (IM) – and traditional offline marketing venues. This is hardly a recommendation for marketers to try and implement every known marketing strategy to promote his/her business. It is however, an opinion that various strategies can work in combination with each other; but only after proper market-based tests have been conducted, and resulting determination made, that it is worthwhile to market from a number of different perspectives to help the marketer achieve business-related goals.

In this article we will examine the importance of combining email marketing with other types of IM strategies to create an effective, multi-tiered marketing strategy, and also offer some ideas on managing more than one marketing strategy simultaneously. According to the old adage, “There’s more than one way to get the job done,” and this is certainly true in the case of marketing on the Web; because, while you may enjoy a great deal of success with email marketing, it certainly doesn’t mean that you should not try other types of online marketing such as website creation, message boards, banner ads, affiliate marketing campaigns and back-linking.

Of course it is possible that not all of these strategies will be effective for your particular business, but you are probably more likely to find at least one other option that will compliment your email marketing, which might also go a long way to help you achieve your business-related goals and ultimate success.

Online-offline approaches

That having been said, you can take a look at combining your email marketing campaigns with other, more traditional marketing strategies such as radio ads, television ads and ads in the print media. It is important to keep in mind that the absense of these advertising strategies in the online marketplace does not mean that they will not be effective in generating more business. In fact, advertising both online and offline can allow you to reach a larger target audience; since you will likely reach Internet users around the world, while also reaching potential customers who do not utilize the Internet for purchasing or researching products/services similar to the ones you offer.

Some popular marketing strategies that might prove effective when combined with email marketing include banner ads and message board participation. These are all online activities, and each one individually is fairly simple, but when combined with email marketing, these simple activities can create a powerful statement, in the sense that you may send out emails offering useful information about your products/services, while purchasing banner ad space on websites which may be of interest to your potential customers; and also participate in industry-related message boards where you can earn the respect of potential customers and pique their interests.

Test. Evaluate. Market.

But even if your potential customers are not currently in need of the products/services you offer, seeing your business name so often can have a powerful branding effect, since branding is also an important business process during which consumers see a company name so often that they are more likely to select a product from the particular company when they are in need of an item offered by that company. So the long-term benefits are just as important as any short-term gains you derive from your combination of marketing strategies.

If you are planning to combine multiple forms of advertising, you should be aware that this can make it difficult for you to evaluate the effectiveness of each strategy. This is especially true of the marketing strategies that are implemented concurrently. When you are only using one type of marketing strategy, you can generally attribute increases in sales or website traffic to changes in that strategy. However, when more than one type of marketing strategy is in effect, it can be quite difficult to determine which strategy is producing the desired effect.

This situation can be handled by not making changes to more than one marketing strategy at a time, an approach which will help you to pinpoint which changes produce an increase in sales or website traffic. It can also help you to determine when changes to your marketing strategy have a detrimental effect on your sales and website traffic. However, if you are having difficulty determining which marketing strategy is most effective, you can consider asking customers to answer survey questions and provide information such as how they learned about the products or services your business offers.