Blogs: Marketing Through Relationship Building - Blogs as conversation
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While it’s unusual to think of any form of website as being part of an interactive discussion between the business owner and the customer, blogs achieve that goal. Blogs are all about personalization and putting a human face on the company. In marketing, any time that a business can connect with potential customers and clients on a personal level, a sense of familiarity and trust develops as a result.
Without a blog component, many company websites are impersonal and uninviting to prospective customers and clients. The sites are often designed without the visitor in mind, and even with high search engine rankings, the business website translates into few sales. There is often simply no connection made between the company and the potential paying customer. The business takes on the persona of the proverbial faceless corporation.
Enter the business blog.
Written by one person, or even a group of writers within the company, the business blog takes on the character and personality of the bloggers. As the blog readership grows, the blog writer becomes the trusted human face of the company. Whether a large corporation or a small one person operation, the blog places a real person on the page, to whom readers can relate.
By enabling the comment feature almost universally available on all blogging platforms, a two way discussion of the blog postings takes place. The blogger writes a column or article, referred to as a post, and the reader often responds with a comment or idea in return.
Many times, an email discussion also ensues. Over time, the writer and visitor become well known to one another. A long term customer is created, who knows and trusts the business to be open and honest with their blog visitors.
Bloggers are free and generous linkers. Unlike the difficulty in attracting incoming links from traditional websites, blog links are frequent, one way, and often contain valuable keyword rich link anchor text on the clickable links.
Most bloggers are more concerned with providing interesting content for their readers than with the SEO and marketing aspects of their blogs. Ironically, their generous linking policies achieve precisely those results. Giving out links freely pays off very well in the blogging community. Generous linkers receive back one way incoming links many times over. Business bloggers should take note.
Next: Comments as an integral part of all good blogs >>
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