Yesterday, I wrote about why small businesses should blog, and said that one of the primary benefits of blogging was the ability to reach specific consumers. Blogging also provides a great opportunity for small businesses because many big competitors don’t take advantage of social media. The opportunity isn’t limited to writing blogs, either. Blog advertising and blog commenting can play vital roles in any blog marketing campaign.

Unfortunately for them, consumers are reading blogs like crazy. I’m not talking about young consumers, either. Blogs have a distinct appeal to consumers in their 30’s and 40’s. If that’s the demographic you’re trying to hit and you’re not blogging, you’re missing out on a lot.

Aside from writing blogs, blogging provides the opportunity to reach your target market in other ways, too. You can advertise on blogs that reach your target market. Imagine what scoring a direct hit on your target market will do for your site. Blog advertising on an existing weblog that appeals to your ideal consumers could provide an immediate and high conversion rate, simply because you advertised in front of the right market for your product or service at the right time. Talk about highly effective advertising!

Commenting on other writers’ blogs can also put your product or service out in front of a ready-made audience. Try it for a few weeks and see if your traffic doesn’t increase. The trick with commenting is that it should be relative to the subject and shouldn’t be an obvious sales pitch.

Remember, the point of blogging is to provide value for your readers. Comments are only valuable if they’re topical and provide insight, opinion or other value to the reader. Your comments need to show the same characteristics as a dedicated blog post does to be effective in the long term: focus on the topic and create value for the reader. If you can do that, you can create a solid marketing position that will easily support your other marketing efforts.

Photo Credit: Piotr Bizior

Tags: adi, advertising, benefits, blog, Blog Marketing, blogging, blogs, Business, commenting, comments, consumers, content, conversion, deal, demographic, hr, im, IT, marketing, media, PR, reader, readers, reading, RSS, sales, sse, target, traffic, Weblog

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under Blog Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.