We all know now blogs are becoming the favoured form of marketing in a company’s online marketing strategy but many companies fail with their blogs because they don’t see the results that they want. I am going to fill you in on a few websites you need to know about that are crucial for your blog to become successful.

Firstly, if you have not already chosen a blogging software, I suggest you use Wordpress. If you have already chosen software and it is not Wordpress I suggest changing to Wordpress (it’s the hard truth). Wordpress is open source software and is completely free for all to download. They offer plugins and various themes which you can edit with a little coding knowledge. It is continuously being updated because it is open source. There is just no other software that can compete against Wordpress and I am confident to promote their product.

1. Wordpress

Second on my list are blogospheres. I have specifically only chosen two local (South African) websites and one international website. Amatomu and Afrigator, both expose your blog posts to South African readers. There is a blog ranking system that they use, ranking each blog on visitors received. It is fairly simple to have your blog setup for both blogospheres to receive your feeds via RSS. You receive a simple code which you copy paste anywhere on your home page of your blog. You can either have it hidden or have an image appear on your web page. If you want to achieve global blogging status then Technorati is my blogosphere of choice. They offer a similar service to Amatomu and Afrigator but just on a much more competitive global scale.

2. Amatomu, Afrigator, Technorati

Thirdly, we have social networking sites. Social networking is the buzzword in the internet marketing circles. The one area of concern for me though is the fact that social networking sites are filled with marketers and do not have many actual visitors looking for a service which will convert to leads. So in my opinion, social networking sites are slightly over rated. Also, these sites are usually filled with Americans and maybe a few Europeans, so unless you are marketing a global product, you unfortunately are not going to be receiving many leads from these sites.

However, on a positive note some of these sites have been successful in terms of traffic generation and Google does reward web pages with a higher page rank if a page consistently receives traffic from a trustworthy (high page rank) website. For instance I have had great success with StumbleUpon, this website routinely returns the favour with large amounts of traffic for every blog post I submit. It has also been said by fellow SEO’ers in the US that when blog posts are submitted to Digg, Google indexes your site much quicker. Why? I am not sure, I have yet to confirm this with my testings but the fact that Google is rumoured to purchase Digg for an estimated $200mil I always Digg every post.

Twitter, I was skeptical of Twitter when I first heard about it but I am slowly warming up to it’s simplistic idea. What are the benefits for me?

• improve the quality of my blogs
• network with other bloggers
• widen my readership
• grow my profile
• drive traffic to my blogs

What I am enjoying about Twitter is that it restricts the user to only type in 140 characters so it keeps your posts concise and straight to the point.

And finally Facebook… Facebook has become a world wide phenomenon to connect you with your friends and family. So how does Facebook help with your online marketing strategy? Well, you can post your blog post within your profile for your friends to read. Because your post only gets exposed to your family and friends you probably won’t get many leads from Facebook (in the beginning) but it’s always good to inform your friends in what you are doing in a non-evasive way. If you are regularly posting into your Facebook profile your friends will know what your business is all about, so at any given time when a friend is looking for a service you offer he/she will contact you. Facebook offers an online platform for word of mouth marketing, which is excellent in todays untrusted markets.

There are many, many other social networks one can join but over the past few months I have found these to be the most successful (for me).

3. StumbleUpon, Digg, Facebook, Twitter

And fourthly, search engines. When I write or speak about search engines I am always referring to Google. They have the market share and about 98% of my organic traffic I get is from Google, so concentrating on other search engines is a waste of my valuable time…

Search engines love blogs, that is no secret. The problem we have with blogs is that a blog post does not maintain the high ranking which it receives. A blog post life span for a high ranking is about 5 - 8 days depending on the competition and it’s optimisation. Firstly, to get a blog post in the top five for Google the long tail URL and title tag need to be optimised (use a keyword research tool to choose a good title tag and long tail URL). Secondly, to maintain high rankings you either have to ensure the blog post offers significant value to the reader so they link back to the post or you or your SEO consultant must look for quality incoming links.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 11:46 am and is filed under Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.