Leveraging Your Blog for your Inbound Marketing Efforts

In these days of social media marketing there are all sorts of tools that help you market but the most fundamental is your blog. It is funny that only six years ago all that everyone talked about was blogging. Now it has seemed to fade into the background and that is actually a good thing. A blog has become a fundamental component in an organizations communication strategy that if you do not have it included or have one running you will be perceived as behind the times.

But let’s face it, writing for writing sake can be fun in some cases but in this case you are looking for customers. The term inbound marketing is the opposite of outbound marketing (i.e. cold calls, email marketing) and it is focused on getting the customer to come to you on their own. One of the best way to do this is through blogs.

A few great ways to use you blog for inbound marketing are:

Forms for downloading content – You want to drive leads to your site and the best way to do that is give something away. These can be white papers and ebooks or other types of content that people want. One thing to keep in mind is that your content doesn’t have to be completely new. It can be repackaged blog posts in a new context along with some updated content.

Surveys and polls – This is a great and quick way to engage the reader. People that read your blog have an opinion and if you are looking to learn from them, do a survey or a poll. It can also be a great way to test new features or content types that people might want in the future. Don’t forget to make a blog post about the survey, it will bring people to the site to engage.

Most of all….provide fresh content – This continues to establish you as an authority and search engines love it. They see that as a site that is new and with linking and trackbacks it builds your search engine juice.

So don’t just look at a blog as a necessary evil you have to “deal with” and “write for” but a real communications channel that can engage and make new sales in ways you never thought possible.

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