Why Blogging is Essential to Your Business

Posted by Admin on September 3rd, 2006 — Posted in Internet Marketing

By: Chet Holcomb

In the ‘good old days’ – about three years ago – you used to keep in-touch with your customers using phone calls, email messages and face to face meetings. Nowadays the world has changed. People expect even more frequent updates, yet it’s nearly impossible to meet with every business contact on a regular basis.Thankfully, blogging has come to the rescue. Setting up a blog on your web site – and having an associated RSS feed – means you can keep in constant touch with your clients and potential customers. Plus you don’t have to email them and they can get your latest news without having to visit your web site.

So how does this all work? A blog is really a fancy name for a web page that gets updated regularly. It’s nothing special. There are several methods of writing ‘blogs’, but they are nothing more than computer programs which allow you to easily update a web page. Far and away the easiest way to start a blog is with a website called blogger.com.

However, for keeping in touch with your customers, RSS is the key. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. What this means is that your blog can be automatically delivered to people who want to read it – you don’t have to send it to them and neither do they have to come and collect it. All they need is the address of your RSS Feed and their RSS Newsreader can do the job for them. There are several RSS readers available and new web browsers incorporate the ability to read RSS feeds and keep them updated. Why Blogging is Essential to Your Business

Whenever you add new content to your blog, the RSS Feed automatically gets updated in everyone’s Reader program or web browser. That means you are guaranteed to be able to keep in touch with clients and prospects. You don’t have to do anything other than produce the content. Equally, you don’t face the problems of email filters and anti-spam programs blocking your email. Furthermore, people tend to read RSS Feeds because they have subscribed to them. Whereas they tend to ignore non urgent emails.

As you can see, there are several advantages to Blogs and RSS Feeds. But it doesn’t stop there. Search engines love them. That’s because blogs provide fresh and new content – precisely what searchers are looking for. Hence the search engines are actively pushing blogs higher up the search engine ranking. This means if you don’t have a blog for your business, you are seriously reducing your chances of a high search engine ranking. You need a blog nowadays to get noticed by the search engines.

So, blogging is essential. Not only does it improve your web presence, it also means you can keep in touch with clients and prospects more easily. And all the marketing research you can find will tell you that keeping in regular touch with your customers is an important component in gaining new business. So get blogging!

Chet Holcomb of http://www.internetpromotions.biz/ is a successful marketing expert providing advice for web marketers and webmasters on how to promote your website, or product using marketing tools that work.

Comments Off

Do I really need others to link to my site?

Posted by Admin on August 24th, 2006 — Posted in Internet Marketing

Yes,Yes,Yes, and sometimes No. Let me explain; to effectively market your website online, a link campaign is a good vehicle. That is, quality incoming links. When a quality website links to you in theory some of their quality flows through the link to your website. Given that, you might not want to have low quality websites linking to and from your website because that could affect your sites quality. Who cares, your visitors care and the search engines care, most notably Google since in my experience they usually supply 80 to 90+ % of the natural search engine traffic to a website. Google uses a ranking system for all websites, including yours. Many factors equate to your websites rank in Google’s eyes, including links. So, you will not only get additional traffic from a quality incoming link, you will build upon your rank and ultimately your credibility with Google.

Quality incoming links may prove to be difficult to get, but it is important you do just that. You should mostly be concerned with relevance and a websites authority. A good way to test relevance is to ask yourself “Is this link useful and beneficial to my visitors?”, if it is not, it’s probably not relevant to the content of that page. Dealing with the authority issue, try to find websites that are trusted authorities within their own industries. And to be most effective, good quality one way incoming links work the best.

So, yes, find good quality relevant link partners and additional traffic will flow along with a little bit of their good quality score, and no, shy away from low quality incoming and outgoing links.

Comments Off