How To Use a blog to promote your Online business
Thursday, March 5, 2009 at 03:31PM A blog is a great way to promote your business. This is especially true if you have an online business. It 
shows that you are tech savvy and gives people a chance to find out more about you and your business. The best part is that it is a cheap way to promote your business and if you do it correctly, it can be a lot of fun too.
In order to understand blogging and how it can be used to promote your online business, you should try to compare it to real life situations. The online world is just an extension of the real world and comparing it to appropriate real life situations makes it easier to understand and plan accordingly.
Let’s say that you’re a businessman who is trying to promote yourself through a series of seminars where you speak to people. How would you promote yourself?
First of all, you would find a place to speak. In the virtual world, this is the process of setting up a blog. You can use free software or pay for hosting your blog. Squarespace and Wordpress are two good examples of free software and a good place to start learning about the technical aspects of blogging. After you sign up, make sure to type in an appropriate welcome message, type in a full profile and your first relevant post.
Now that you have your location set up, you need people to come to your seminar. To do this, you promote your seminar to people in the appropriate industry. You do this through friends and professional contacts. If you have a budget, you advertise yourself in the local paper or even the internet. In the virtual world you would get in touch with your friends and contacts and let them know about your blog. You then start doing SEO. Directory submissions, search engine submissions, forum posting and blog posting. This would help to get your name out there.
Now, in the real world, when you have people coming to your seminar, you start to talk to them about the business. You have to look and sound professional and be interesting, relevant and original. People should not only enjoy what you have to say but they should learn something from you too. This will keep them coming back to more seminars as well as get them to talk to their friends about it. In the virtual world, your posts have to be interesting, informative and original. This will keep people coming back for more and linking to your blog as well. You also have to make sure that your blog has a professional layout and professional heading.
In order to keep people coming back to your seminars, you have to keep the material new, do seminars regularly so that there is a constant buzz about you and make your information accessible to people. Similarly, in the online world, you have to keep posting to your blog, keep the material interesting and make yourself accessible. You have to add RSS feeds and keep your archives organized.
A blog can be a good way for you to pass on your knowledge and build up a good reputation. If you do it successfully, people will look forward to your opinion and suggestions. You should always try to provide them with useful information and not try to just plug products. A blog is a good way for you to build your reputation and generate leads, but it isn’t done by trying to sell a product. It is done by building your reputation. You should always remember this lesson. Many people just try to sell things and end up loosing the customer altogether. People online are much more savvy about selling techniques than they used to be. They rarely fall for sales gimmicks.
Overall, a blog is a powerful, cheap and effective way to promote your online business. As more and more traditional advertising methods are being abandoned for online media and non-traditional advertising, becoming more knowledgeable about blogs and using it to promote your business has become more important.
