Beating the Marketing Drum - Blogging (Part 1)

We briefly discussed some of the benefits of Social Media Marketing (SMM) in the August issue of our ETC newsletter. Benefits such as:

• Opening conversation with prospects.
• Keeping your business in the fronts of people's minds, so when they need your type of work, your business is the first that comes to mind.
• Improving search engine rankings for your website.

We mentioned Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, YouTube videos and contractor-specific forums. What we didn't discuss is blogging and e-zines/e-newsletters. Although the latter isn't necessarily social media marketing, it goes hand-in-hand with blogging.

Why should you blog? It took us a long time to realize the potential benefits of having a blog for Licenses, Etc., and you're probably thinking the same things. What do I blog about? How is that helpful to my business? We already do a newsletter, why should we blog, too?

If nothing else, blogging boosts search engine rankings for your website. Every time you blog, you're putting up a new web page with a link back to your main website. Google and other search engines pick up on those links as increased popularity of your page and, therefore, increases your ranking. If you use Blogger, which is owned by Google, your blog itself ranks high on the search engine results. People click on your blog, like what you have to say and either call you right away (assuming your phone number's on your blog!) or click through to your website for more information.

Like other SMM sites, blogging allows for conversation with your prospects and customers. See that Comment form below? That allows you to leave comments to us, replying to what we have to say in our post. Then we can reply to your comment and...voila!...we have a two-way conversation going (and when more people comment, it can be even more than two-way). Newsletters/e-zines are a one-way conversation - you speaking to your prospects and customers without the opportunity for them to chime in.

Newsletters are still plenty useful, however. Think of them as ways to create questions so prospects/customers must contact you for answers, giving you opportunity to solidify your relationship and close the next sale. You can make your blog and newsletter work together by including links in your newsletter that point back to info-packed posts on your blog. And every click-through on each one adds points to your search engine ranking.

Still not convinced? Still questioning what to do with a blog? We'll talk about it more in future posts. If you're ready to get started, though, and don't know how, contact Chrissi (chrissi[dot]jackson[at]licensesetc[dot]com) or Kristie (kristie[dot]cook[at]licensesetc[dot]com) at Licenses, Etc. about our new SMM services.