Posted by Ray White on September 30, 2009 Comments (1)

People buy from people they know, or at least from people that they think that they know. The internet provides you access to the entire world if you know how to get their attention. One easy way to attract attention on the internet is with a blog. Blogs are like online journals. You write periodic entries, often called posts, about any topic of your choosing. Blogging is a fun way to express yourself and get yourself known by the online masses.

Now let’s say you are a small business looking for more exposure. You can easily write a blog about your business. Blogging is an excellent marketing tool that anyone can use. Here are some of the basics about blogging that you can use to start your own business blog.

Blogging requires dedication and patience. Posting at regular intervals will keep visitors returning to your blog to read more. The more often you post, the more often search engine spiders will visit your blog and index it. Getting your blog indexed is very important for its visibility online. If you have a website for your business, you can link your blog to it; that will let the ones that know about your business and business website know about your blog and vice-versa.

You will also want to become familiar with search engine optimization, better known as SEO. SEO will position your blog for better ranking with the search engines. If you are considering using Wordpress for your blogging platform, you might want to check out this free SEO plugin to help you optimize your business blog for the search engines.

Another important thing to remember when you are into small business blog marketing is that if anyone leaves you a comment on your blog, you should acknowledge it and respond. You will be building a relationship with your readers by answering comments. You should also comment on other blogs that are relevant to yours, and leave a link to your blog. This will help bring in more visitors to your blog.

You market a blog pretty much the same way that you market a website. You choose keywords related to your business, and supply killer content. You can write the content yourself, or pay someone else to write it for you. You can even go to free article directories and post relevant articles from there as long as you are willing to credit the original author. Whichever way you decide to do it, you want to be sure that the content is something that your readers want to read. Interesting reading keeps visitors coming back. Make sure that the content is written specifically to your chosen keywords.

What else can you do to market it? Link exchanges are wonderful for marketing your small business blog. You want to exchange links with sites that are relevant to yours, but not in direct competition. If you try to exchange links with sites in competition with yours, you are going to find that many of them will turn you down for fear of losing business to you.

Paid directories are a big part of small business blog marketing as well. You can pay some directories to list your blog URL in their directory under the specific category that it falls under. Each directory will have its specific qualifications that you must have to get in. Follow all of the application steps, and you should be ok.

Small business blog marketing is not rocket science. Just be consistent and persistent. And have fun with it, too!