Blogging As Marketing Tool

Blogging is now a must-do in your marketing effort from the very start of your business. In the short space of a few years, it now ranks as an universal information disseminator of choice for marketing purposes.

The top bloggers can garner as many as 5,000 unique visitors a day. As blogs are usually niche oriented, it attracts a niche audience, which means 5,000 highly targeted prospects.

In case you need to know...
A weblog (usually shortened to blog, but occasionally spelled web log) is a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally in reverse chronological order). Although most early weblogs were manually updated, tools to automate the maintenance of such sites made them accessible to a much larger population, and the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of "blogging".

A good example of a product focused blog would be ones like www.LiewCF.com. The author writes about the latest technogy, gadgets, softwares, computing tips and tricks and product reviews. He has amassed quite a readership.

Here are some guidelines you can adopt for creating and maintaining highly effective blog...

1. Focus intently on a narrow niche, this increases the likelihood of very targeted readership and prospects.
   
2. Set up your blog so that each post gets its own permant URL or permalink, write descriptive and drop-in as many keywords in the headlines. Make sure all the homepage and all archives have links on every page.
   
3. Think of the blog as a database, this makes it easy to find on Google and Technorati. Cite authors, publications by name, use tags, categories and keywords consistently.
   
4. Blog frequently and regularly, be consistent with the posting. Preferably before lunch, when many people are free to browse and read.
   
5. Use striking images in your posts, breaks up the monotony of text posts.
   
6. Enable comments and interact with readers, cultivate your audience.
   
7. Make friends with other bloggers, link to their posts and they will do the same for you.