by Jon Wuebben

Blogs are a great way of communicating interactively and directly with customers or those interested in your products/services by means of writing that is journalistic, informal, opinionated, sensationalist and/or unfiltered.

What’s the biggest advantage to writing a blog and updating it regularly? It could be a one way ticket to fantastic, free PR or “buzz” in the marketplace. You could get a ton of exposure from just one blog posting, because people will pass it on to others or see it through an RSS feed. I’m talking about the viral component to blogs. Before blog content, there was no way that you could write your way to such quick consumer or end user buzz.

Blogs have helped knock down the wall between seller and buyer or company and customer. Do you have a new product and want to get unbiased user reactions? Write about it. Have an opinion about a competitive service? Write about it. Have something you want to get off your chest? Write about it. There really aren’t any hard and fast rules about blog writing.

Tagging and Keywords

Like your website, keywords are really important for your blog. However with blogs, there is another important search engine categorization dynamic called “tagging.” Basically, whatever words that best define what your blog posting is about would then become the tags. If you are blogging about online lead generation, then “lead generation” would become your tag. Technorati.com, the blog search engine, uses these tags to find search results, or blogs that are tagged with the same words.

If you are a florist and have a well read blog that covers everything related to flowers including roses, your prospective customer can search on Technorati for “rose arrangements” and your blog will come up. See the marketing potential here? People that read your tagged blog can also pass it along to others, and all of a sudden, your words, your search engine optimized blog words, could be in front of thousands of people. Some of these people will be customers.

How do keywords come into play with a blog content? Very similar to a website – search engines look for them high up on your blog page, so you’ll want to use them in your blog entry title as well as in the entry itself. In terms of best practices, place the blog name at the end of the title, not at the beginning. In addition, your tag name needs to be found in the title on a tag page.

Also, you’ll want to put links like these at the bottom of your post:

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Having these in place will encourage the viral aspect of your blog writing.

Good luck!

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