Blogging has become an important element to most any business, especially for the small business. With 175,000 new blogs every day hitting the internet we are easily over the 3 million mark. So why would you want to add another to the mix? A blog is an opportunity for you to communicate your knowledge and expertise to your target market. The key is helping them follow you. Here are four opportunities for you to expose your blog to your market at no cost.
1. Keywords
This is an opportunity to create some great traffic. More importantly traffic that turns into sales. Most business owners focus on the top 10 keywords that they target and certainly they do provide a high rate of traffic. However, that traffic typically does not convert to sales. You will have more success in choosing keywords and phrases that are more specific to your postings. If you think about it as if your keywords are creating a dart board, each circle is a keyword that becomes better targeted for your market. The keyword in the center will be your bull's eye. That keyword may not attract as much traffic but it will have a higher conversion to sales.
2. Use Social Networking
OnlyWire is a service that allows you to share and distribute your online content to the range of social bookmarking sites, for increased traffic, increased backlinks and improved search engine index speed.
Don’t forget to make sure you twitter your new posts and request a retweet from your followers. This will also drive targeted traffic. And if you ask them to comment, most will.
Are you on Facebook or LinkedIn, how about a Ning site or other social networking site? Have your blog entries posted to your pages on those sites as well.
3. Leave Blog Comments
The easiest way to stay on top of this is to use Google Alerts. Set up a Google Alert to notify you when anything new shows up online related to your target market words. Each day review the new postings and comment if you can add something of value. Please don’t post for postings sake. You want people to be intrigued by your post and click through. This is also a good method to create backlinks and raise your search engine rankings.
4. Write Even More
Write even more about your subject and post those articles on article directories. The two most popular are Ezine Articles and Idea Marketers. Again this process is twofold. You will create many backlinks, instant traffic and additional exposure as others can place your articles on their sites as long as they include your resource box.
Four easy methods to drive traffic to your blog and the best part every idea is free. No money but they do take time. Set aside maybe 60 minutes per day to work on these strategies and you will see an increase in your traffic.
Donna Amos - I am a mom of three sons 18, 22 and 25. Married to the same man for 26 years. I have spent the last 22 years supporting small business ...
