BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

Many resources recommend having a blog and creating content in order to position yourself as an expert in the field. Blog attracts attention to the product you are selling giving it a contextual boost from the content you are writing. In most cases, people who know the most about the product or service are those who run the business. They are so busy creating the product or service, dealing with clients and suppliers or whatnot that they simply don’t have time to create quality content.

Sure, you can hire a blogger, ghost writer or just an English-major intern to write stuff for you. Problem is - he doesn’t know the product. He doesn’t have the feeling for the product, like the owner has. There is no passion, no interest (except for being paid) and no understanding of how to present your product to the readers. Those readers, who later may become customers. It’s all about presentation, after all. So blogging becomes new sales tool that the owner doesn’t have time (or some times skills) to use.

What we recently started doing is we offer our clients to keep their blogs for them. We know the product, since we worked on presenting it for so much time. We know the target audience, since we’ve been talking to them since the launch of client’s web site. And we have interest in promoting clients’ businesses, since it means more business for us.

Everybody wins. Except for the guy who’s hands are full already.

Popularity: 20%

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Short and comprehensive guide - how to create a link bait on your site. Thanks to members of SitePoint and DigitalPoint forums this all have been gathered.

1. Put together a list of web resources (forums, blogs) that are relevant to your topic
2. Put together a good post or article or eBook or anything of the real value. Give it out for free from your resource
3. Write a brief about your value post. Call it a press-release and submit it to proper catalogs (they called press release web sites)
4. Contact blogs you have gathered in step one. Give them the link to your content and press release.
5. Register or open new thread on forums you gathered in step one. Provide link to the content you have created. Answer questions. Be a good forum member. Don’t forget to put a link to your content in your signature.
6. Write couple of articles about whatever you have created. Use title of your free content as anchor text. Submit these articles to article directories.
7. Stumble, Digg, Reddit, put it on del.icio.us. If it’s a video, can be shown on video or can be featured in video - put it on YouTube. Don’t waste your time on Netscape, by the time you read this it’s probably long gone dead.
8. Guest-post on other blogs. Explain what and why you have created your content. Create buzz.
9. If you have ties via social web sites (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, etc.) promote your content there.

Most of these bullet points are very obvious to anyone who ever tried to get a decent amount of traffic to the web site. Still, not everyone manages to follow through these simple steps. In any case - this would be a good reference point.

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Interesting note on generating leads from Patrick Schaber. I would just like to add that prospective clients, while registering, are - conciously or subconciously - suggesting a way you should contact them. For example, if someone wants you to e-mail him, he will almost inevitably mess up his phone number. If another one wants you to call her, she will garble the e-mail address.

Subliminal messaging is just like the body language. Once human species moved on to a new living environment (that is - internet) they immediately adopted their body language habits to new setting. Instead of real emotion we are using smiles. Now, instead of body language we alter the information about us that we transmit.

So while advertisers are trying to come up with ads with subliminal messages built in - we, regular human beings, are being subliminally back to them. Neat, isn’t it?

Technorati : PR, entrepreneur, marketing

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