Our guest author Ian Gibbins provides some tips on how to use a blog to promote your business.

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Using A Blog To Promote Your Business

Author: Ian Gibbins

Using a blog to promote your business is an extremely effective marketing tool used by internet marketers. An advantage of using a blog to promote your business or service you offer, is that it can all be set up and ready to go without costing anything at all, which is a bonus when you are just starting out and watching every penny.

So, just exactly what is a blog? Well,to put it simply, a blog is a type of website that is usually arranged in chronological order from the most recent ‘post’ at the top of the main page, to the older entries towards the bottom. Blogs generally fall into two categories, either an authority blog, or a marketing blog.

An authority blog is where you establish yourself as an expert or authority in your chosen market. The visitors to an authority blog will often comment on the posts you make and interact with the blog owner through the comments section.

A marketing blog is used to help you market your site and is not really intended to become an authority blog in the market. This is done by using highly targeted blog posts, that are tightly keyword focused, therefore producing a page of information that is very relevant for the search engines to rank.

When using a blog to promote your business, you should aim for around 300 to 500 words per post. (500 is really the target to aim for).

When creating and posting to your blog it’s a good idea to include these points:

1. Include the keyword/keyphrase your post focuses on within the title of the post.
2. Include the keyword/keyphrase within the first paragragh of your post.
3. Use the keyword throughout the body of your post, but ensure it is used naturally.

Another way of promoting your business is through ‘blog-commenting’. Many internet marketers believe that the only way to get traffic to a blog post is to frequently ping,and optimise for natural search engine traffic. In fact, one of the most effective ways to generate traffic via blogs doesn’t involve any of this.

The approach I’m talking about is simple: get direct traffic from other blogs by commenting frequently. Of course it’s important to understand when I say ‘comment frequently’ I don’t mean spam other peoples blogs with irrelevant information. Rather, I simply mean you should look for relevant conversations in niche blogs; and then make a useful, intelligent comment that links back to your blog. If you spend a lot of time making useful comments, there’s a good chance you’ll redirect some of the traffic that lands on the big name blogs to your own. You can then pass this traffic through the sales funnel.

You must always post valuable content on your blog. Don’t put something that your audience won’y be interested in. One of the easiest places to get information from is your product itself. If your product is a book for example, take small snippets from it and add further content or comments. Groups and forums provide you with a wealth of information to write about as they contain a lot of questions from people in the market themselves. Questions such as ‘how do I’ or ‘how can I’. These questions can be answered on your blog focusing on each topic mentioned. Also, by visiting other peoples websites or blogs in your market, you will find information and topics to stimulate your ideas.

Using these techniques with your blog will surely assist in the positive promotion of your business, website or service. Hopefully, through your blog you will be able to expand and really dominate your chosen market, and become the authority that people go to for information on your subject.

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Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/blogging-articles/using-a-blog-to-promote-your-business-3446859.html

About the Author

Ian Gibbins is a successful Internet Marketer, specialising in the use of social media to promote business.