Keeping Your Blog Market-Fresh

It is not enough to just write a blog. If you are taking the time to create a good and powerful blog – and if you want your blog to be a good marketing tool, you need to be doing this - then you will want to make sure that you get something back for your investment. One good way to keep interest in your blog going – and to keep your blog a powerful marketing tool and not a time-consuming hassle – is to keep introducing fresh content.

Keep Your Blog Fresh
There are a few ways to keep your blog content interesting without a lot of hassle:
􀂾Get new readers by getting other bloggers to link to your blog. Blogging creates community, so that if you link to others sites, they are also likely to link to yours. Feel free to contact other bloggers with similar interests and goals and see if they would be willing to offer a link.
􀂾Update and vary content regularly. Schedule regular updates so that your blog does not get stale, but also introduce new content. If you have always offered fashion tips on your fashion designer blog, consider covering a fashion show. If you have always made personal comments, consider offering tips.
􀂾Offer new features and sections. Offering new contests and new sections (such as a jobs section or a comments section) will make it clear that you are working to make your blog better. It will also make blogging more interesting for you, ensuring that you keep providing customers with great content.
􀂾Blend your blog with other marketing efforts. Consider promoting your online contest through your blog, or link from your blog to your email, your web page, or your advertisements. Make your blog work with other marketing efforts and your blog will gain fresh contents with less hassle.
􀂾Change the look. Changing the colours, layout and images of your blog from time to time helps keep reader interest and makes looking at your blog more interesting for you.

Make Your Blog Sizzle

Simply changing your blog content is not often enough. You also need to increase the interest on your blog by creating more interesting content:
􀂾Don‘t be (too) afraid to get controversial. Although you will want to avoid offending customers by making too personal or off-colour comments, making some thought-provoking comments is a good way to generate discussion – and interest. Make a comment about someone else’s comment or on the state of your industry. A healthy debate can help you.

􀂾Keep it personal – and personable. Be wary of simply providing general and impersonal content on your blogs – that’s what other online writing is for. Do include some of your personality and interest in your blog and put your friendliest face forward to attract customers and readers.
􀂾 Consider what to do with older blog entries. Most blog entries are simply archived for a while. However, consider other uses. If your web host allows it, consider making older blog posts part of a booklet to sell or consider providing your old blogs as content on the Internet. In each case, link back to your blog so that readers can find your newest comments.


Build the Benefits of Your Blog
Blogging has many benefits, among them more publicity for your business, more hits for your company web site, and a better public image. However, these benefits will not automatically come to every blogger. You must work in order to build these advantages in your blog.
Step One: Make your blog a better publicity machine.
If you want to make your blog a publicity-boosting machine, you will have to make sure that you work at making your blog a marketing tool rather than a personal expression:
􀂾Offer something for the media. Offering free articles that web users can reprint elsewhere and offering media kits can help make it easier for the media and other online users to generate publicity.
􀂾Add pictures and ads to your blog that can promote your company. Small banner ads or promotions can let readers know what you are offering without bogging down your blog with sales copy.
􀂾Do not be afraid to enthuse about your company. You can easily talk about your business without sounding like an annoying salesperson. For example, note the challenges you faced to start a new project or service in your business – this will help sell the new division or service without sounding too pushy.

Step Two: Create more hits
Some experts claim that many new blogs are created each second of the day. The sheer number of blogs makes it unlikely that others will find you unless you encourage hits:
􀂾Link from your website to your blog for easy access. Also, include your blog’s address on your business cards and letterhead, along with your email address and your web site address.
􀂾Offer incentives for reading. Whether it is a blog-readers-only contest with a great prize or a free ebook for blog readers, offering incentives is a great way to generate hits – and to please customers. Plus, you will get a sense from the responses how many readers you have.
􀂾Write and speak about your blog. Whether you are writing an article or giving a speech, you can mention your company blog as a place to get more information about your business.
􀂾Offer a newsletter. Many blog writers offer a newsletter to readers. This newsletter lets readers know when an update has been added – and ensures that the blog stays fresh in readers’ minds. It can also be a good way to keep track of how many readers a blog has and can be a good way to add more value-added content.

􀂾 Offer an RSS feed of your blog. Most blog software today does this, and it allows your blog to be “syndicated” in other online areas and often to cell phones, increasing your exposure and creating more readers.

Social Networks As Targeted Traffic Source
Without targeted traffic your super interactive website filled with superb content is nothing. So how do you bring that insane amount of visitors interested to read information you share?
There are many ways to get targeted-traffic, including commercial but this is not what we will talk about. Our goal is to get things done with as little expense as possible – free is preferable. Well guess what – social networks are perfect for that, as long as you don’t abuse it and actually contribute to their community value by providing information people are interested in.
If you followed my previous directions and installed social bookmarking plugins you are providing an easy way for people to share your information once they read it but first we need to bring them in. And we will do it by sharing first and let the snowball roll from there. Power of the word of mouth is still unprecedented and assuming your content is as good as you think it is – that snowball will quickly turn into avalanche!
Tip: I have shared above will save you from a lot of problems. Social networks were designed to allow its users to share sites they like with each other and posting too often or posting content unrelated will quickly mark you as spamer and get you banned. So make absolutely sure you contribute not only your own posts but also other sites related to your niche. With all above being said let’s move to services I found most useful and bringing most targeted visitors:
1. OnlyWire – a service that allows you to provide a login ID for 15 different social networks and by making one single post – add your bookmark to all 15 networks. Super time saver and quite worth the effort of initial sign-up for all services, so do take time to get it all setup and you will be greatly rewarded.
2. StumbleUpon – super targeted traffic driver if your post posted into correct category. Do make sure you know what tags you specify when bookmarking to this site.
3. Reddit – superb service that will allow you to post your articles and reward you for quality content.
4. Digg – a grand daddy of social bookmarking that will drive insanely targeted visitors when used correctly.
5. ShoutWire – similar in concept to digg this service will work its miracle for you, assuming your content is worth it.
6. MyBlogLog - one of the newer but highly recommended communities as it brings you greatly targeted traffic.

This is just a short list of services I use on regular bases and find most beneficial to my site. Within couple days of starting new blog I can easily get well over 200 unique targeted visitors to my site. Just have a look at the stats of the very blog you are reading - first post was made on 19th and first social bookmark on 21st: