Blogs as a Website Promotional Tool - Promotion Online with Blogs
(Page 4 of 6 )
The online promotional benefits of a blog are numerous and powerful for your website. The immediacy of your blog can provide up-to-the-minute information about your company to existing and potential customers and clients.
Your blog will develop a loyal daily readership over time. The importance of that readership is its business potential. Every one of those regular visitors is a possible future customer or client. By visiting your blog every day, many of them will be interested in checking out your main business website. In that sense, a blog is a customer attractor for your company and its products and services.
By means of the ubiquitous comments systems found on most blogs, reader feedback can be almost instantaneous. Don't worry about the potential for comment spam or abusive comments. While a potential annoyance, they are minimal compared to the benefits of personal interaction with your visitor traffic. Most blog platforms contain a built-in comment feature. If your blog system doesn't include one, there are many good third party add-on commenters available. E-mail spam doesn't prevent a business from using e-mail. Comment spam shouldn't stop you from having a commenter added to your blog either.
RSS Feeds
A powerful feature of blogs is the use of an RSS feed. RSS stands for either Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. Take your pick, as both are correct. What an RSS feed does, is send a blog's highlights to recipients instantly upon publication. Most blog programs have an RSS or Atom (or a combination) feature for enabling transmission of your blog to a wider audience of subscribers to your RSS feed. Many blogs have a sign-up feature right on the blog itself, making the addition of a feed easy for your visitors to read your blog as you update.
To read blogs, your visitors need to use what is called an aggregator. By attaching an aggregator, which is a blog collection and reading program to their web browser, customers can read your blog posts as they happen in real time. Some well known aggregators include Bloglines, Feedster, and Kinja. There are many more available as well.
E-mail newsletters are usually on a delayed time scale compared to the speed of an RSS feed. Because of this speed difference, e-mail newsletters will take on a different role for your business. No longer required to provide news, your newsletter can provide more in-depth information and special offers to your subscribers. The RSS feed enables you to utilize your e-mail newsletter in new and innovative ways.
Next: Promotion Offline with Blogs >>
More Website Promotion Articles
More By Wayne Hurlbert
/ 8 
