By Virain de Mel
Prior to examining how to use blogging to market a product or service, it’s important to provide an overview of blogging.
The term Blog is derived from the term “web log”. A Blog constitutes journal entries that are posted on a blog website on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. A blog can include text, images and links to other sites, and audio and video files. The authoring of a blog, maintenance of a blog or adding a fresh article to an existing blog is termed as blogging. Articles on a blog are called blog posts, posts or entries. A person who adds these entries is known as a blogger.
Blog sites are different from normal websites, and a webpage does not have any similarities with a blog post. Creating new pages on a blog site is easy. You can post new data in a simple form that constitutes the category, title, and body of the blog. After making the necessary entry, you click on the submit button. The templates make sure that the article appears on the home page, and enters the date and category based archives. The blog articles can be searched for date, category and author’s name.
Hence, with an overview of blogging, it’s important now, to make the connection between blogging and marketing:
The business environment of today is one that is highly complex and dynamic. Hence, in order to achieve competitive advantage, companies (businesses) are venturing into unorthodox paths. Among one of these unorthodox paths lie the marketing of a product or service through the use of blogging. Marketers in the corporate sector are increasingly being informed about the various benefits about this internet profit increasing resource (blogging).
At the moment, blogs are used and considered a very powerful marketing tool. In the words of the marketers, a blog is a precision marketing tool that allows for instant research, lead generation, image building, and more. It costs almost nothing, but is a very effective tool capable of generating a very high number of hits (visits) and provides excellent returns in terms of revenue. Blogs are considered a great source of money generation.
Any brand depends on the kind of image that a product or service can project. A brand with a high value image can fetch you a high price, while identical products and services get no returns if the image is missing or low-key. To survive in a tough and highly competitive business world, it is important to create an illuminating brand and image, which can be effectively done through blogs. Blogs helps to generate highly targeted leads. If a blog is managed efficiently, it can quickly generate traffic (visitors to the blog) from virtually nothing to hundreds of thousands on a monthly basis. In order to best capitalize on the higher traffic received, one could create opt-in email lists from this traffic to ensure a regular flow of repeat visits, which means higher sales/revenue, and profits.
Once the blog is created and when it generates good traffic, revenue-generating options such as banner advertisements, pay per click advertising and Google AdSense can be used to convert the blog post into a more profit-making venture. In addition, the blog can be used for promoting of your product or service. Not only promoting our own products but also it can be used for promoting complementary products of your product or service. In short, the blog can be used for the 4Ps of marketing (product, price, place and promotion).
Blogging has activated a whole new market for businesses. Its main characteristic of high growth potential will enable marketers to sell their products and services in high volumes which will generate high revenues and profits in the future.
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