Affiliate Marketing Tips : Why Running A Blog Is Essential for Effective Online Marketing
Learning effective affiliate marketing and online marketing really can be quite a learning curve. It took me quite a while until I really understood what it is that contributes to building traffic to my products and my own website. In this article I’m going to share with you why it’s essential to maintain a blog, even if you don’t have your own website.
To get started, I just want to share with those people who have got a website that having a blog will really help your traffic. There have been a variety of tests and studies on this from companies such as Hubspot who reported that small businesses get 55% more website visitors if they blog regularly.
With my own website, I don’t need to run a study, I can see for myself in my Google Analytics that I gain a lot of traffic to my website through the blog. People will search for information, quite often they will come across my blog posts and then will be on my site looking around. Without my blog, I would have far less traffic.
A blog won’t just bring you more traffic, it is an opportunity for building a community and it is also a fantastic marketing tool. It’s a place where you can show that you know what you are talking about in addition to providing you with space to showcase your products and services. Blogs can be used to build relationships – which is a prime piece that needs to be in place to make sales.
A two-way exchange is possible with a blog that has not been possible in earlier times. Think about the push style marketing that was under-way on television commercials, radio commercials and newspaper ads. Now business and affiliate marketing individuals can engage and interact with prospects, customers and even employees to share information and opinions.
Marketing has taken more of a relaxed approach since the internet started playing such a key part. The approach is less sanitised and less perfect. It’s more about connecting and being authentic as a human. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter have shaped some of this and the blog is the third part of the social media puzzle. It’s the space that you can write your message and then post it to Facebook and Twitter as a share. You’ll notice that so much of marketing is now written in a conversational tone as opposed to the more formal approach that was used pre-internet.
Posts should be about something useful, interesting or educational ideally. By creating a calendar with topics scheduled, a blog can have a powerful effect for affiliate marketing practitioners.
If you don’t have a website, then I would like to recommend setting up a blog on a site such as blogger.com or wordpress.com – you can add images, add links to your products, add links to reviews on your products and use the blog as a hub for all of your marketing activities. If you are a user of sites such as Squidoo, then you will be able to plug in your blog posts as links. Facebook has Networked Blogs application that will automatically post your blog posts up for you.
A blog really does pay back a lot of dividends and is worth the effort to maintain. Once it’s set up and ready – then a blog post can be put written and posted within just 30 minutes. Not a lot of overhead for the amount of traffic that you can expect if you do this regularly.