This tutorial is about “How a Blog, and Social Media, can help your business”. Blogs and blogging are part of Social Media, and Social Media is the only major marketing medium that has grown in the last year. All the others, TV, radio, newspapers, etc. have shrunk. The reason Social Media has grown is that people want to be heard. They want their opinion to count for something.

This is a Key Point = Social Media is best used to build trust and relationship with your customers.

The word “Blog” is an abbreviation of “Web Log”. Of course a log can be a log book that records are kept in, like a daily journal of your thoughts or what happened that day, or in this case, the log of your website. So your ‘web log’ is just a website where it’s easy to write your thoughts. “Web log” soon became shortened to the word “Blog”.

Blogging is part of what is called these days “Web two Oh”, along with other social media websites, like FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr.com, MySpace, and Bookmarking websites like Digg.com or Stumble Upon, or Delicious. “Web two Oh” just means that communication is more of a two way street now. It’s not just from the company to the viewer, like television or radio, or traditional websites. Internet “Web Two Oh” is also about communication from the general public back to the company, or the owner of the website.

So, a Blog is part of the new “Web Two Oh”, where anybody can talk back. And blogs are an excellent place for that to happen. You, or me, or anybody can go to any blog and write a comment on any of the entries on that blog. If the owner of the blog decides our comment is good, they can publish it on their blog right beside that blog entry, so anybody who visits their blog after that, will see our comment, along with everything else that’s on their blog.

This is how you can receive feedback on your products and services from your customers, by them making comments on your Blog. You should encourage your customers to give you feedback by posting surveys, or questionnaires. You could ask for volunteers for focus groups or product research. You could set up a function on your blog so they can recommend your products or services to friends.

When your blog is set up, there is a special log-in page you can go to, where you insert your username and password, and then make new blog entries, change anything you want on your blog, and you can also reject or approve comments that visitors to your blog have made. Only a person with your username and password can make changes to your blog.

Even if an unhappy customer writes a negative review, a negative comment on your blog, you should seriously consider posting it anyway, because it shows other readers of your blog that you are being honest about what people think. It will make the many other good reviews more believable.

In this tutorial we’ll be talking about WordPress Blogs. WordPress is the state of the art blogging software – It’s the best. It’s the most robust, which means it can do the most things, it’s the easiest to use, and it’s open source, which means it’s free. That means the basic software is free. But in order to use it effectively there are many modifications that should be made, both for security, and so your blog is found by search engines, and it’s usually better to pay professionals to do that for you. There are many free templates you can use for the look of your Blog, but again, generally it’s better to pay a little extra to have an expert make your blog look like your website.

WordPress is constantly coming out with new versions of their software and it’s a good idea to keep your blog updated with the latest version, because they’re harder for hackers to get into and cause problems. There are many small software programs, called Widgets or Plug-ins, that are made specifically to be added onto WordPress Blogs, and many of them are good, although it takes some knowledge and experience to know which ones are good to install and which ones should be avoided. There are also many things that need to be done to your WordPress blog to make it so Search Engines find it and index it properly. There are over 20 different things that we do to your WordPress blog to make it search engine friendly. We can tell you more about those things anytime you like.

One of the most important things about Blogs is that search engines love them. Google loves them. You have to understand that Google is always trying to provide better search results. If they provide better search results more people will use them to search. The more people that use them, the more money they can make from advertising. That’s how Google makes money, from advertising. Search engines like Blogs very much because the content is always changing. That means it’s more likely to be current. If it is current, it is more likely to be relevant than if it is “old”. If you make regular entries on your blog, and if your blog is on your website, it means your website is constantly changing. Google likes that and will give your website higher rankings for whatever your keyword phrases are. A keyword phrase is just a short phrase that people who are looking for your service would type into Google. For example, “office delivered water” or “home delivered water” would be keyword phrases for a company that delivers water to offices and homes. If Google gives you higher rankings more people will find your website when searching for your products, so you’ll get more qualified customers coming to your website, and more of them will buy your products.

To build more traffic to your blog you can search for other blogs that talk about topics that would be of interest to people that would be interested in your blog. Then you can make a comment on one of the posts on that blog, and include a link back to an article you’ve posted on your blog. These links serve two purposes – one is that they tell other people who might be interested in your blog where it is and how to get there, and these links back to your blog also help your ranking on Google. Google knows about these external links. They feel if a website or blog has many external links it must be an important website and they give it higher rankings.

So, a Blog can help your business in many ways - higher rankings for your website, increased traffic to your website, better feedback from customers, more loyal customers. And you could even get some of your loyal customers selling your products to new potential customers. Although all the steps in the process of setting up and administering a Blog are important, the most important is how to get the right message to as many people as possible.

First, you need the right message. Generally it should be about presenting your company as an expert in your field, improving customer service, and empowering your customers to be advocates. Then you need a strategy, a plan, on the most cost effective way to get noticed. Those ways can of course include your blog, posting comments on other blogs, producing short videos and putting them on your YouTube account and your FaceBook account, having contests, posting Tweets on Twitter, monitoring what other people say about you on Twitter, posting photos on Flickr, and sending out News Releases. The things you can do to attract attention are limited only by your imagination. 

It’s always a good idea to empower people who like your products and services to say good things about you. Ask their opinion. Earn their trust. Gain their cooperation. But whatever you do, it has to be done in the right way. If your message is not open and honest, or if it is too commercialized it will meet with resistance.

Another key point about using Blogs and Social Media is to try to provide genuine value to people. Find out what information they want and then give it to them. If you can give it to them in the right way they will respond positively, and your company will make tremendous gains. Blogging can be the best marketing investment you’ve ever made.

I’m Ken Lapp, President of Standard Marketing. I’d be happy to talk to you anytime.

Thank you.