1001 Ways, Small Business•
on February 7th, 2009•
Putting up a blog on the company website is one marketing strategy that you can adopt for your company. Through a blog, you will be extending the usefulness of your website to your targeted visitors as well as give them a reason to come and visit your website again.
You should always bear in mind that your visitors will continue visiting your website if they find information there that are useful to them. Inasmuch as the purpose of your website is to help you sell your product, people will only buy from you if they believe in you. A blog can help you establish that belief and credibility that you need.
How a Blog Builds Credibility
How does a blog generate the belief and credibility that your company needs? Through a blog, you can build up your company’s image as an expert in its chosen industry. It is a time-tested marketing ploy for companies to name-drop experts or have experts endorse their products. Expert endorsement validates the product and lends the credibility of the expert upon the product.
For example, when Oprah Winfrey gives her blessing to a particular product, it usually sells. That is because Oprah has built credibility with her audience over the years. Her sudience believes that Oprah knows what she is talking about, so they might be inclined to buy whatever product she promotes.
That is what you should do with your blog. Through your blog, you should establish your company as an entity that knows the ins and outs of its business and can provide solutions to problems. Build up your company’s image as an expert through your blog and your products will sell.
The Words of an Expert
Since you have to project your company as an expert in its field, you should word your blog posts carefully. Your blog posts should be factual, insightful and easy to understand. If you have to state an opinion strongly on your blog post, back your opinion up with facts.
Conveying passionate belief in something is good when it comes to writing blog posts, but there is a line that separates the passionate expression of an opinion or an idea from the senseless ravings of a lunatic. This line is the proper usage of facts.
Find Support for Your Ideas
As much as you are trying to establish your company as an expert in its chosen field, you would be wrong to assume that you know everything or that every idea you have is original to you. Precious few is new or original on the Internet and whatever you may say is likely to have been said before.
Besides, there is strength in numbers, as people generally say. If you back up your idea with the word of another expert or two and provide a link to the blog or article of these experts that discuss the same idea, you are likely to generate more belief and raise your credibility. You would get your readers into thinking that if two or three other people have claimed so-and-so to be true, then it must really be true.
If set up carefully, a blog can be a powerful tool to promote your company’s products. As long as you have presented your company as an entity to believe in, you are more likely to convince your blog’s readers to buy from you.
1001 Ways•
on January 6th, 2009•
Let’s try to get real about animation here. If you have been doing SEO for so long, or have good knowledge about it, then you should know that animation is actually being discouraged. Here’s why: their file sizes can be very huge, which eventually slow down the download speed of your website. The attention span of Internet users, on the other hand, is very short, lasting only for few seconds. Thus, it means that before you can even show what your website is all about, you’ve already lost a potential customer. However, you cannot also deny the fact that too much content will make a dull website. You need to spice things up a bit to make it look good and appealing to your visitors. So where does that lead you?
You need to learn how to compromise, to establish balance between form and function. One way to do that is to use Flash animation.
What is Flash animation?
Flash animation is any film or cartoon created with the use of Macromedia Flash. It’s one the most favorite tools among website designers today since they never fail to attract considerable attention from Internet users—they add motion and interest to what could have been a very boring website.
Flash can be used to enhance the message of your website rather than having your pages appear to be text heavy or that your images remain static. If you haven’t got the idea, you simply need to look at the website of mobile phone companies. They can describe the many features of the phone, but what drives Internet users to buy them is the fact that they have taken a good look at them, perhaps by providing them with a 360-degree image of their chosen phone. Besides, in case you don’t know, information is understood a lot better when seen.
Do you have a Power point presentation? With the use of this new technology, you can actually convert it to Flash presentation, which will only improve the experience of your Internet visitor. Besides the texts that you can see in slides, you can also add videos and audio, which are both compatible with Flash.
Where can you use Flash?
There are a lot of elements in your website that you can convert to Flash animation. These include your headers and your logos. You can also animate your images to further add special effects. Nevertheless, one of the biggest contributions of Flash animation is its use in demos. You can help your Internet users save time by allowing them to really see or hear how something works rather than reading a step-by-step guide.
But how about SEO?
There are almost 100% of website designers that use Flash, so perhaps it tells you that it’s not harmful as other forms of media files. In fact, they can help increase the loading time of your website. You can just use GIF images as examples. And because there already plenty of web browsers that are compatible with Flash, you are sure that your website can be viewed clearly by your customers.
If you have a business, then you need a blog. According to Technorati, the blogoshere has grown from 100,000 blogs in March 2003 to nearly 73 million in March 2007. The numbers suggest that this is no longer ‘bleeding edge’ technology. Blogs have become mainstream as a valuable source of information for Internet users with interests that range from travel to computer hardware. Not all blogs are created equal however and there are a lot of, to put it mildly, sub-par blogs that offer little or no value. For that reason, companies that understand how important it is to connect with customers and prospects will utilize a professionally produced blog. Here are some important points:
- Hire a professional maketing firm to build your blog
- Utilize multiple authors to write articles
- Write articles about solving customer problems
- Use photos and graphic images to make your point
- Encourage feedback to articles
- Update blog as often as possible
- Find ways to connect to the blogosphere and extend your blog’s reach
Your business blog should offer solutions to customer problems, not just a sales pitch to buy your products or services. Update your blog at least once every week and cover a wide range of topics specially tailored for your target audience. And don’t forget to take advantage of the many methods for connecting with other blogs and blog aggregators such as; Digg and del.icio.us.
If this all seems ‘Greek’ to you, don’t worry. There are plenty of resources available on the Internet to help your busness create an effective blog. The great news is that the technology to create a blog is open-source (meaning free). And there are many other solutions available as well. Forget email, start a blog to move your business into the future!
