Heard about the impact blogs can have but not sure how to use blogs for business? In this segment from an interview between Dale Beaumont and Matt Freedman find some great tips on how to use blogs to generate exposure and traffic.
Matt co-founded Redback Solutions and has built the business into an e-marketing, web development and digital agency with offices in Sydney and Newcastle. Redback has worked with over 200 clients, helping them market their businesses online. In 2007, Matt and two other entrepreneurs launched Sticky Tickets, an online business that allows anyone to promote an event and sell tickets to it.
What are your top tips for using blogs to generate exposure and traffic?
Blogs are an essential part of the e-marketing mix for most businesses. They allow you to provide more in-depth and valuable information to your market than your website (which should be more commercially focused).
- A blog allows you to demonstrate your expertise and differentiate yourself from your competitors. As blogs have a lot of content rich in keywords that relate to your business, they are very search engine-friendly. When creating your blog you should:
- Post articles regularly – once a week is the minimum, but you should try to post something new every couple of days. If your blog is updated regularly people will keep coming back to read the new articles. If it hasn’t changed, they will stop checking it.
- Post articles that have information that is useful and relevant to your target market. While you don’t want to give all your secrets away, share what you can, because people who want to do it themselves are probably the clients you want anyway.
- Get your own domain name for the blog. This will be easier for people to remember and will remain the same if you decide to use a different blog platform in the future. For example, my blog is www.mattfreedman.com.au. However, you could have a domain name that relates to the subject matter, for example, www.makingwidgets.com.au.
- Contact blog authors with complementary topics and cross-link with their blog.
- Submit your blog to blog search engines, such as Technorati.
- Once a fortnight or once a month send an email to your database (friends and customers). The first few lines should contain the beginning of your most recent blog post and should link them back to the blog for more details.
For more of this interview and for tips on how to use blogs for business check out Dale Beaumont’s “Secrets of Internet Entrepreneurs Exposed!“.
