Using Blogs In Your Marketing Strategy

It’s been said many times before that blogs are a must have for proper marketing strategy. One thing search engines love, are frequently updated blogs. But do you really know the answer to why blogs receive such good rankings?

The reason is simple, search engines badly want new high quality content for their listings. If you can provide unique high quality information on a regular basis to the search engines they will continue to visit your site.

Through Blogging you have an incredible opportunity to generate highly targeted traffic to your products or services. You can point your blog to your salespages or include an opt-in form to capture subscribers.

The key to blogging is to update it often. By creating blog postings several times a week you’ll benefit from additional attention from the search engines. They’ll come back to visit more frequently. You’ll also have your content appear on search engine listings for keyword searches you’ve written about in your content.

Choosing your first blog platform.

You can start a free blog from many different sites on the internet. Some allow you to create your own blog that they host for you. Persoanlly, I recommend you always host your own blog.

I’ll explain both options so you can decide which is best for your particular marketing startegy. Sometimes cost is a factor when you’re first starting out so I’ll begin by providing the options for Free Blog Hosting.

Free Blog Hosting Sites

www.Blogger.com

Blogger is the most popular of the free blog hosting sites. It allows you to instantly create blogs and begin writing on practically any topic. In early 2005 Blogger was all the rage because they seemed to get an extra push from the Google search engine.

The benefits of using Blogger are that it’s often spidered and your blog title will be in the path of the seo spider. This helps your blog to be spidered quicker than usual. After your blog is spidered, search engines will continue to visit your blog new updates. It is easy to use and of course, free.

To sign up with Blogger: http://www.blogger.com/

www.Journalhub.com

JournalHub is a new site which is not nearly as popular as Blogger. However, it’s a good choice for blog hosting. Your account is setup instantly and there are 60 templates to choose from which is a definate plus over Blogger. You’re allowed unlimited space and unlimited website traffic so JournalHub has a lot to offer.

To sign up with JournalHub: http://journalhub.com/summary.php?op=RegisterStep0

www.Aeonity.com

A favorite with military families and socializing this blog site gives you the opportunity to create an instant blog site.

To sign up with Aeonity: http://www.aeonity.com/

www.Ebloggy.com

This blog host offers a simple blogging solution, blog groups and templates. Users find an easy to use point and click Link management system and point and click template editor.

To sign up with Ebloggy: http://www.ebloggy.com/

Another option is to have two blogs. My recommendation would be to create what I like to call a sub-blog, where the blogger.com blog would be a blog you update from time to time that discusses topics dealing with your main blog.

Have links point from your blogger.com blog to your main blog website. It’s a good reason to do this because blogger.com is often spidered. By default your main blog will also be spidered. Since your sub-blog will have links to your main blog it’s beneficial to getting your main blog site spidered quickly.

You can register with any of the above sites to start your own blog, but as I mentioned earlier a good marketing startegy is using your own hosting for blogging.

Hosting Your Own Blog

Hosting your own blog gives search engines a reason to revisit your website often. It’s very important that you update your blog several times each week. Below you’ll find some recommended free software for hosting your own blog.

WordPress

All my blogging sites use WordPress as I believe it is the best blogging script available. It’s very easy to install and you can go live within just a few minutes.

Download: http://wordpress.org/download/

By default with WordPress you have the ability to choose if you want Search Engine Friendly URLS for your blog.

Here’s a great Wordpress video that explains how to install the Wordpress platform and get started with your blogging in your marketing strategy:
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To find out more about why you should blog for marketing or how to use affiliate marketing and blogs check out these blogging strategy related posts.

Posted in Internet Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Website Tools