Producing a blog is one of the quickest, cheapest and easiest ways to put your business’s products and services out there before a highly targeted consumer audience. As well, blogging is one of the most cost effective forms of Internet marketing and advertisement available. Below are five specific reasons why every online business should have a blog.

1. Publishing and maintaining a blog puts you (and keeps you) in touch with your customers. Think of your blog as an ongoing, casual and open conversation with your customers (and prospects). You are able to keep your customers informed as to the ongoings of your business and they, in turn, are able to leave feedback about your products and services. With a business blog, it is no longer just a relationship of seller to buyer, but rather a community, or at least sense thereof, begins to form around your products and/or services.

2. Publishing a blog encourages consumer participation and feedback (related to point 1 above). By stimulating discussion about your products and services (both the good and the bad) you are able to take action by responding to your customer directly, in the process reaching thousands of other potential customers.

This will serve you twofold. Firstly, by encouraging feedback, you get your customer’s likes and dislikes with regard to your products/services. This gives you the vantage point of seeing ‘what’s wrong’ (as well as what’s right) with your products/services so that you can fix any issues that need fixing and improve any processes that need improving. This shows customers that you stand behind your products and services and that you care about their experience as a consumer.

Secondly, it provides a venue from which potential customers can observe your interaction with present customers and thus inspires their confidence in you as well.

3. Having a blog for your business will also give you a certain measure of control over the discussion, complaints and questions about your products and services. Since you encourage feedback on your blog, most likely these will be funneled into your business blog rather than taking on lives of their own on other personal or consumer group blogs. This is a form of preemptive damage control.

4. Blogs also allow you the opportunity to demonstrate yourself as an expert in your particular field. If you want customers to trust you and to trust your business, you’ll have to earn it. One of the easiest ways to earn customer trust is by walking the walk that you talk- but you still have to get the ‘talk’ down first.

Write, and write voluminously on topics related to your products and services such that you establish yourself as an authoritative source in your particular field. Invite questions and feedback. Provide answers and solutions. In this regard, your blog functions in the role of perfect sales page by demonstrating the customer’s problem and then presenting your particular solution to the problem.

5. One of the most important reasons why every online business should have a blog is that blogs rank very highly in the search engine results. In this regard, a blog is a great way to optimize your website for better standing in the search engines.

Blogs rank so highly and this for several reasons. One is that blogs provide content – fresh content that tends to be updated on a regular basis. Second, blogs provide a platform for links, i.e., links back to your website, products, services, etc. which, as high quality and relevant links, raise your website’s overall standing with the search engines. Blogs are very useful tools for search engine optimization indeed. In fact, it is often the case that a business’s blog ranks more highly in the search engine results than does the business’s website!

If you have an online business, then you definitely need to publish a blog, if you haven’t already of course. If you don’t, then you are missing out on the many benefits of blogging. Get a blog started and watch a community form around your products and services, inspire customer trust and confidence, take control over the discussion related to your business, show off your expertise, and optimize your website’s ranking in the search engines. There are no real negatives to blogging – the only real negative is not having one!Подаръци

2. Write timely posts- ones on topics people will be searching for right now.

3. Write timeless posts- ones with information that people will always be looking for.

4. Provide links to resources that your readers that will find useful or very interesting.

5. Write long blog posts.

6. Get readers to digg your posts.

7. Allow comments to your blog posts (make sure you moderate them).

8. Post comments on other blogs with a link back to your site.

9. Encourage readers to subscribe to your RSS feed.

10. Search engine optimize your blog.

11. Make sure you are always writing high quality content.

12. Include your blog in forum signatures.

13. Submit your blog to all the blog directories, including Technorati.

14. Participate in blog carnivals; this is very similar to submitting articles (use a multi-carnival submission form http://blogcarnival.com/bc/submit.php).

15. Use Wordpress (use the “SEO title tag” plug-in to better optimize your blog for search engines).

16. Provide email subscriptions, this allows readers to be notified by email of new posts (use the plug-in “subscribe2″).

17. Ping the blog directories (pingomatic.com).

Under no circumstances should you ever purchase a CD of millions of email addresses. These emails have been harvested from the internet and if you contact anyone on these lists, you will be spamming them. Also avoid opt-out lists where recipients are placed on a list involuntarily and then invited to unsubscribe if they want to.

It’s important to note that the lists are always rented, never bought. The list owner is the only person who ever sees the actual list. You rent the one-time use of the list, send your promotion to the list owner, who in turn sends it out to the list.

Since you only get the one-time use of the list, instead of trying to directly sell the recipients a product or service, pull out all the stops to try and collect their email address. Since most people are unlikely to buy from the first contact, this allows you to contact them again and again until you eventually sell your product or service to them. Offer a free gift or ethical bribe, get their email, then sell to them later. This way, not only can you try and sell one product to them later, but over the span of their lifetime with you, you can sell to them again and again,

The average list rental will usually cost between $0.01 and $0.50 per name with an average of about $0.20 per name. Additional specifications, including postal/zip codes, ages, gender and job types carry an additional cost of about $0.05 per name. A typical response rate from a rented list hovers around the 0.5% mark; of course it depends on the list, the copy and the offer, but 0.5% is average.

List Brokers

It’s not always a simple and easy task to find the right opt-in email list to rent for your business. In fact, most of the time it’s a very difficult task and takes lots of research, patience and time. That’s where a list broker can help. Their job is to help you chose and acquire the properly targeted list at the right price. They will even sometimes negotiate for you with the list owner. And the great news is that it won’t cost you a thing. The broker earns an industry standard commission of around 15-20% from the actual owner of the list. Most brokers have a minimum order value of $1,000 (or 5,000 names at $0.20 a name) to make it profitable for them.

Since list sales reps usually work on commissions, they may sometimes try to sell you more names than you want or need, instead of the best names for your campaign. However, you should remember that it is list quality, not quantity that counts.

Here are some tips on choosing a list broker:

• Make sure you have a specific definition of your target audience for them to work with.
• Having a budget in mind will help as well.
• Find out if the list is single or double opt-in. How did they opt-in?
• Ask the list broker if they will review your offer / copy.

Although they will most likely not be a copy editor, they should have a good idea if it will be successful based on previous offerings.

It would also be worth it to insist that there be a warranty built into the contract that will protect your business should the rented list fall foul to spam or data protection legislation.

Perhaps the most important thing about purchasing email lists is to test them first. That means sending a test email to 5-10% of the list before purchasing it to test your response. Be wary of list owners that won’t allow you to test their list. Most will charge you for it (or include the initial rental charge if you do decide to rent the list) so don’t expect it for free. It’s also not a bad idea to send a couple of test emails testing different elements of your email before you blast it to the entire list.

If you’re just starting out, or looking to grow quickly, purchasing a list can be a very viable option. Always remember to research list owners to make sure they are reputable. If they have testimonials, or email/phone numbers of past clients you can call, all the better. Just remember, you’ll get what you pay for.

A blog is essentially a mixture of what is happening in the blogger’s life, and what is happening on the web. There are really no set rules as to what defines a blog, but it is generally accepted to be some kind of personal thoughts combined with any other number of elements. Blogs are sometimes refereed to as “web logs,” however this can cause some confusion as “web log” can also refer to a web server’s log files.

Blogs are forums for voicing opinions and developing communities with common interests. It is human nature to communicate. Each new form of communication and revolutionized the way the world interacts. Right from the day of when the telegraph was invented to the day when internet was made public, the way people communicated has gone through a sea of change.

To smart marketers, blogs offer more than the communication of thoughts on the internet. Blogs are becoming an increasingly popular advertising medium and another source of revenue for marketers. There are two ways to market with blogs, the first is to use your own blog to build relationships, customer loyalty, branding, and subtly mention your products or services in them. The second way market with blogs is to place ads on or in other people’s blogs.

One of the reasons that blogs are popular with marketers is that they often rank high in search engines because the content is usually updated daily.

Blogging

Since blogs are personal, a company or business can’t technically have its own blog. However, the president, CEO, owner, or an employee can have their own personal blog. The business that the blogger works for can use the blog to advertise their products or services subtly throughout the blog, or less subtly as graphical or text ads through the blog page.

A blog is also an excellent way to popularize products and services. It serves an informal medium for getting across to potential customers, and if they validate your product or service. And blogs are an excellent tool for viral marketing, or free word of mouth publicity.

To ideally achieve the optimum search engine ranking, you should really update your blog 4-6 times a day. Since that’s often not possible, you can settle for a couple times a day, or use an RSS feed to add content.

Rich Site Summary, or RSS feeds allows you to post content on your blog automatically from any website with an RSS feed or vice versa. Types of content include could be news feeds, events listings, news stories, headlines, project updates, excerpts from discussion forums etc. You’ll need to ask your website designer to do this for you, as it does get a little technical.

Search engines look for change. If the search engine sees that you have new information, they will see that they need to visit your website more often, to keep its listings current.

Blog Ads

Blogs ads work because blogs serve as watering holes for like minded people. Blogger’s are vocal and influential, and people read them with passion, and tend to give them more influence in their lives then they should. Blog advertising is appropriate for new launches, new products, newsworthy material, and other things or relevant value.

Blog ads require different creative tactics than most of the rest of the internet. There are 3 ad options: They can be graphical in nature, solo text ads, or text ads intertwined into the actual text content of the blog. Like the blog itself, successful blog ads rely heavily on content. Humor and sarcasm tend to work well, as do ads with a timely newsworthy hook and/or some thought-provoking text.

Some of the best blog ads are placed right into the blog, so as appear to be part of the blog itself. These types of ads don’t actually appear to be ads to the casual reader, so they have some extra credibility that you couldn’t get from any ad, no matter how good it is.

Blog ads pricing is all over the place, but is usually priced by CPM, but can be priced by PPC, and rarely PPA. Prices usually go up from $5 CPM to $50 CPM, or range any where from $0.10 – $1 + if you go the PPC route.

Getting started with a blog of your own does not take a lot of technical know-how, and almost none if you use a site like www.blogger.com. Today blogs are spreading across the internet like wild fire and there does not seem to be any sign of abating.