Blogs are becoming ever more popular as an extra marketing tool on websites, and it’s easy to understand why. Not only do blogs provide constant fresh content, which is useful for attracting the attention of search engines, they attract regular viewers because they provide information on your business and industry. However, because blogs are promoted as a handy marketing tool, many businesses assume that a blog can be used bluntly for marketing. This is definitely not the case.

To understand the best way to use your blog, you first need to understand the history of the blog. This particular form of web communication grew out of online diaries, used by individuals to record their lives and discuss their ideas. Blogs are a strange mix of publication and social media networking, and the social side of a blog is important to its success. Blog readers are used to a form of personal, human interaction with blog writers.

This means that the form of marketing featured in a business blog must be sophisticated and subtle, and pay not just a little attention to blogging customs. The best business blogs work because they don’t overtly try to sell the reader anything.

Conversely, blogs are particularly useful for e-commerce sites. In 2008, a research study found that a full half of blog readers found blogs useful when deciding whether to buy something or not. More than half of these readers preferred blogs with a specific focus, and which showed some expertise on the subject the blog was about. Around one-fifth of those asked used their blog reading to narrow down their purchase choices, and another fifth made a firm decision on what to buy through reading blogs. Research shows that social media marketing isn’t even remotely as useful for sales.

Interestingly, one-quarter of the readers in the blogging study said they trusted ads that were on a trusted blog. Strategic advertising placement on blogs with good content can be of huge benefit.

Although ads around the blog tend to have good outcomes, don’t put pop-up ads within your blog. They are annoying, and they also put the trust you are trying to build with your readers at risk. This is because the ads around the blog are much like the advertising within a newspaper – the reader has a choice whether to read them or not. Pop-up advertising is disturbing to the viewer at the best of times. The intrusion is particularly unwelcome when a pop-up ad startles the viewer just as they are expecting an easy period of reading. This will result in them ignoring the ad and may convince them not to read your blog at all, killing the wrong two birds with the one stone.

The placement of ads within your business’s blog and on other blogs should be part of your SEO strategy. For some advice on the best way to design your advertisement campaign in conjunction with your site’s search engine optimisation, contact the consultants at SEO Consult.

The use of a blog for marketing purposes has to be done with subtlety. The main thing to keep in mind is that readers will stay, and come back, when the content has been written for them. If the main object of your blog is to push your business message, you will push your readers away. Draw them in by giving, and they will return.

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