Blog = Web Marketing Strategy You Can Use!
The traditional strategy of building a web site and hoping that traffic will come is simply a bad approach for a lot of businesses. You can be pro-active and build traffic with sound web marketing strategy. And, a lot of it you can do yourself.
Let's look at web site marketing from the view of the major search engines - Google, Yahoo and MSN. Their goal is to return good and valuable information to users who are searching for information, products and services so that those users keep coming back to that search engine to search. This fundamental idea means that the content that you put on your site is the first and major key to being listed on the first page of Google, Yahoo and MSN.
How you put that information on the web is where Link 2 comes in. There are several options. Depending on your business and your marketing goals, you may choose to use a Blog to post information (Blog is short for web log).
The Blog - Not Just Another Web Site
Blogs can be very useful to businesses who sell products and services. Blogs really gained mass popularity during election times when a few blogs made the national news. Blogs are web sites that people usually post opinions and information. We generally use them for driving web site traffic. Blogs are well known to the major search engines as informational sites. Since returning good information back to their users is a major goal of the major search engines, you can probably guess that a blog is regarded in a better light by those same search engines. Beyond that, there are "blog aggregator" web sites out there, like www.technorati.com for example, that index thousands of blogs on the web. And, some of the blog aggregator sites can index a blog web site within 5 minutes of a new posting being added to a blog site.
For small business, especially those on a budget, we often look at a blog web site as a great way to launch a brand new web site presence. It has all of the advantages of any other web site with normal pages and of course the blog functions. Wordpress is the blog platform that we use most often. One major advantage is a built-in CMS (content management system) that can be a big advantage in cost savings. It also has several plugins that can be installed such as a calendar that can be useful to some.
Using a Blog to Build a Low-Cost Web Site
The Goals & Steps of A Budget Launch
1 - Launch the site with good content (copy and information that is useful to your market). Keep in mind that key words seeded in your copy are very important to building appropriate traffic. On a budget launch, you should not be so concerned with making the web site the most beautiful web site out there. If no one sees your site, there's not much point in making it gorgeous. Spend money on beautification later. You want to put your money and efforts into gaining web traffic so you can sell products and services. That will allow you to build the site up in other ways.
2 - After you know your site is productive, go back and look at the design. Link 2 can help you with developing the site into a better experience for users. This can mean changing functionality as well as aesthetics.
3 - Keep adding good information on your products and services. Continue to talk about new products and services as well as anything you haven't yet covered. Go to Google and type in search terms for the products and services that you offer. Are you listed on the first page for it? Are you on page 3? If so, what can you do to move up in the rankings? Link 2 can help you with your web site strategy. By now you have a solid base to build from. It's less expensive to market a well built web site rather than a poorly coded site. Blogs are coded well, so that's another benefit of using them for web site marketing purposes.
