Online Marketing Blog

With over 100 million blogs tracked by Technorati, there is a tremendous amount of momentum and motivation for businesses to take advantage of all the marketing, PR, support and revenue opportunities that business blogs can bring.

Sometimes it seems there are more “blog consultants” than there are business blogs due to the ease of using free blog software like Blogger or Wordpress.com/Wordpress.org. What’s easy to get into is also easy to get out of and many business blog efforts that started out with optimism have petered out like a car out of gas.

When talking with TopRank or M&O Account Teams about new clients, it is inevitable that I will ask if there is a blog involved. There are simply too many advantages to enabling a web site with fresh, themed content that is well structured for SEO benefits and that also offers a great platform for creative promotion, not to consider it in the online marketing mix. However, the mis-perceptions about what a blog is and is not abound, even with self-described “blogging experts”.

Blogs are useful for many marketing and communication purposes. They’re also useful simply as software that manages content. Businesses can use blogs to communicate a corporate vision, to build thought leadership corporate-wide or for subject matter experts. Blogs can be very useful in support of public and media relations efforts and they are certainly excellent tools for making a site more search friendly with fresh content that attracts incoming links.

Blogs have been one of the big buzz items in 2006 along with social media. It seems companies are still trying to figure out whether blogging is worthwhile for their business and where social media fits in within overall marketing strategy. The number of “blog consultants” also appears to be growing at a much faster rate than business blog adoption.

For our clients, we use blogs extensively in both our public relations practice as well as for search engine optimization. One of the most productive uses of blog software as a content management system is for an online media room.

Jim Boykin is taking a break from blogging and getting down to business, a very good idea worth exploring but sad because Jim puts out some excellent information.

Matt Cutts interview with eMarketing Talkshow

Jobs in Search turns 2 years old

New SEO candidate articles at Marketing Pilgrim

Putting Blogs to Work for Wall Street - CNET article on using blog and social media tracking services to give traders competitive intelligence on investor sentiment

Marketing Sherpa released findings of a Technology Marketing survey that include blogs and podcasts as two of the top 5 lead generation tactics for technology, hardware and software firms. Overall, the top 5 lead generation tactics were:

1. Free Trials
2. Webcast
3. White paper
4. Blog
5. Podcast