The Internet is a very impersonal medium of communication. Anyone can put up a website and make outrageous claims. In order to build credibility for your online business or yourself, you have to assure your readers, prospects and customers that a real person is behind that site. A business blog does exactly that.
Well-known corporations like Cisco, Dow and Chevron spend millions of dollars in advertising to humanize themselves. Here’s one of Cisco’s popular TV commercials, “Welcome to the Human Network.”
What about you and I – the solopreneurs, coaches, work-at-home-moms and dads (WAHMs/WAHDs), how do we compete? The answer – blogs.
Are you blogging for business? Just about everyone is doing it now and as a business owner, you too could benefit from a blog.
There are many ways for marketing your online business and every marketer has a different opinion on the best method. But there’s one technique that most Internet marketers agree on and it is this — in today’s Web 2.0 world, you must have a business blog to be successful.
Doesn’t matter what marketing method you use, your goal is to drive traffic to your business blog. That’s where you can build stronger relationships with your visitors and convert them into paying customers. In other words, your business blog is the hub of your online presence.
Here is a list of key benefits of a business blog:
1. Gather free market intelligence: Use your business blog to gather free market intelligence. Large companies spend big dollars on focus groups and market research to gather information on their markets. You can do it for free using your blog by posing questions and inviting them to share their thoughts. Review every comment and reply with careful thought. Don’t be afraid of negative comments. Use them as important lessons to improve your business. How you respond to them will say a lot about whether or not you really care about your readers and customers. Wordpress blogs are notorious for having “noFolow” attribute turned on by default. You can encourage people to comment by using a simple plugin like CommentLuv that I’m using here. You could also try adding a short survey and allowing your participants to view the results instantly.
2. Share your personal journey: A business blog can be less formal and allows you to show your human side and share your personal journey. The best example of a highly successful personal journey blog is Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak, an entrepreneur from Australia. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time. Download Yaro’s Blog Profits Blueprint free report.
3. Guest blogging for loads of free traffic: Enhance your online credibility and drive lots of targeted traffic by inviting prominent Internet Marketers to be guest bloggers on your site. Your readers benefit from the wisdom of a seasoned marketer and the guest blogger drives traffic to your blog by promoting their guest post to his/her readers. One IMer who has literally written the book on guest blogging is Nicole Dean. Visit read her Blog Tour Success Stories here.
4. Become the star of your own talk show: Having a blog is like having your own a talk show. Who knows you just might become the next Oprah of Internet marketing. You get to write your opinions and allow your loyal readers to interact with you. It becomes like their daily fix to hear/read your thoughts and voice theirs.
5. Earn some money: You can monetize your business blogs by adding AdSense ads, affiliate products and promote your own information products. Make sure you comply with the new FTC guidelines for bloggers.
Out of all those millions of bloggers, the majority let their blogs die within a few weeks of launching because they don’t really know what to do or how to do it. They don’t have a plan. They don’t have a goal, or a purpose to their business blog. That’s where my 53-page “The Business Blogging Handbook” with the bonus report comes in. You’ll know everything there’s to know about marketing your business with a blog and avoiding the common mistakes that can kill it. Learn more about the Business Blogging Handbook »
Do you have a business blog? If so, how are you using it in your business? Share your thoughts by leaving your comments here. I use CommentLuv and have turned off the “nofollow” attribute. So you’ll get a valuable backlink to your site or blog.
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I enjoyed this! Well done!
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It’s truly amazing what you can learn, market-research wise, online. Smart niche bloggers take advantage of this to build their authority too.
How To Make money with affiliate programs Today. Affiliate marketing is the easier and probably the most effective method to make money from the internet. It is basically, a kind of selling technique where potential buyers from your website are directed to the websites of sellers. For every click, the website owner gets a small commission.
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China and Russia put the blame on some screwed up experiments of US for the earthquake that happened in Haiti.
Chinese and Russian Military scientists, these reports say, are concurring with Canadian researcher, and former Asia-Pacific Bureau Chief of Forbes Magazine, Benjamin Fulford, who in a very disturbing video released from his Japanese offices to the American public, details how the United States attacked China by the firing of a 90 Million Volt Shockwave from the Americans High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) facilities in Alaska
If we can recollect a previous news when US blamed Russia for the earthquake in Georgio. What do you guys think? Is it really possible to create an earthquake by humans?
I came across this article about Haiti Earthquake in some blog it seems very interesting, but conspiracy theories have always been there.