When it comes to marketing yourself and your online business you need a platform, a place to present your audience with the best content, assistance, recommendations, and offers as your marketing fan-out brings you the traffic and notice you need to get attention.
One of the best ways to build your platform is to start your own blog.
Not only is your blog simple and inexpensive to build, it is the perfect vehicle to house whatever form of content you decide is best for your market and your communication style – video, text, images or audio.
Here are 5 of the most important reasons you should be blogging right now.
1. Simple, Productive Framework for Developing And Sharing Content
Most blogging themes (Example – we use this one most often) allow for incredibly simple formatting of text, video or audio content – I still remember the days when you had to be an html specialist to code everytime you wanted to add text, video, images, etc…it was so time consuming that you were happy to get a piece of content a week out. Â With blogs, I can turn an idea into a piece of content and share it with the world in a few minutes without having to have specialized technical knowledge. Â That means you get to spend more time where it counts most – developing and marketing your content
2. Built-In Feedback
What I like about blogs the most is that you, the reader, can participate through leaving comments, bookmarking and sharing the content through social networks, permalinks and syndication. Â It’s all dead-simple and built into the format of most blog themes with little or no cost. Â Not only does this mean more eyes see your content but the search engines also like pages that have growing content associated with them.
3. Support For Multiple Business Models
Look, blogging is one thing, what you really want to do though is to share your products and services with your marketplace, make a difference helping them and make money in the process – right? Â Blogs allow for a raft of plugins that allow you to monetize your content through ads, building opt-in lists, promoting affiliate products (from ebooks at Clickbank to hard-goods from Amazon), and of course, are a great front-end when you sell your own products and services – even allowing you to include pages to help pre-sell and attract affiliates who can help drive more traffic to your sites
4. Allows You To Effectively Communicate With Your Marketplace
You could communicate with your market entirely through YouTube, Instgram, Facebook or whatever social platform you choose – the problem of course is that these platforms control your content and they do come and go in terms of popularity. Â A far better approach is to FIRST, use your own blogging sites to host your content and then fan out linking back to your core content via social networks – that way you get the best of both worlds and still maintain ultimate control over your content.
5. Authority And Notice
To dominate a market you want to be seen as a top authority in your field. Â Your market needs to get to know you, understand you and what you offer to them and then be able to take action. Â Your blog is the perfect place to gain their attention, share your best content, be of service to your market and then convert them to the offers that will help them most.
One final point, many people confuse blogging with the various social networks that continue to pop up out there choosing to believe it is either ONE or the OTHER when in fact nothing is further from the truth.
You want your own blog to house and control your own content, provide off-ramps to deeper content marketing and present your offers to your customers. Â We go through this in detail inside Information Marketer’s Zone. Â
THEN, you can branch out and using snippets of “context targeted” content re-use, you can bring people back to your blog where you now can engage with them, participate with them allowing them to gain the trust and confidence in you that will improve your conversion rates far beyond that of your competition.
Once you master this system, your acquisition cost per visitor can go up (allowing you to advertise and ramp your customer acquisition activity WAY up) such that you can completely out market your competition and dominate your market.
No excuses – get started now!
