Blogs and Online Marketing

One woman marketer's perspective. That's all this is so if you're looking for all the answers regarding blog marketing you're setting yourself up for hours, no make that months, of research.

Allow me to explain...

A blog is a website or part of a website. To learn how to market a website, or part of a website, cannot be accomplished by reading a 1,200 word article. Sorry.

How Blogs Differ From Other Websites

There are some aspects to a blog (and the marketing of it) that differ greatly from other website types.

• They are chronological. Newest content displays at the top of the website page.
• Blogs are often (but not always) more personality laden and opinionated.
• Blogs are created, managed, and maintained through an administration panel that is generated via CMS running on a website server. Now if that doesn't sound 'geek' enough to make you run for the hills, blogs are generally much easier to set up, add content to, and maintain than the more traditional website.
• Blogs, good ones anyway, generate an RSS Feed for the blog proper, every directory within the blog and even on a post-by-post basis (there's more to this that's beneficial, but too advanced to go into here).
• Search engines are naturally drawn to blogs for a number of reasons - the skinny amount of code, the organized content delivery, the consistently updating content, and the syndication aspect of a blog's RSS Feeds.

A Blog's RSS Feeds and Marketing

This, really, is all I want to discuss on this page. If you're here because you don't know how to set up a blog but want one I strongly suggest grabbing a $5 hosting account here: fast self-hosted blog setup. Your account will be cPanel access, you'll have 24/7 chat and phone support, but you only need to click a few buttons to install a WordPress blog.

As you read above RSS Feeds are the part of blogs that truly make them a marketing dream. After all, getting the word out is a huge part of marketing - both online and off.

While you're busy with your website (by adding content to your blog), your blog is doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes. A self hosted WordPress blog does this by dynamically generating the RSS feeds that run the blog and notifying update servers on the fly.

These RSS feeds may or may not be used by other webmasters, may be subsribed to by your website visitors, may or may not be picked up by newspapers or journalists.

Many people will tell you that your feeds being using on another person's site is a terrible thing. This is, after all, your hard-written content! Yet (to the untrained eye) the other websites are getting all the credit for it.

This is most certainly not the case. Your feed, when used by other webmasters, includes a link to your website as the originating source. As your feed is used on multiple websites you are gaining one-way back links to your website, thereby positioning you (in the search engines and in the reader's eyes) as the authority on the subject.

As with anything there are techniques to protect yourself, techniques to ensure that other website owners aren't using your content for their credit and not linking back to you, techniques to make a reader want to click over to your site from their site, etc. Those are advanced techniques I'll save for another article.

Promoting Use of Your Blog's RSS Feed

The final step to blog marketing, promoting your feed. You want to get the word out to the search engines and other webmasters that you have an RSS feed (or a variety of them). This step will ensure your content is indexed and frequented by the search engines. You can manually visit over 80 top feed submission sites today and add your feed to their lists or purchase a one-time service license and/or software to manage the submissions for you. Even though there are many more than 80 rss submission sites - only 20 deliver the lion's share of benefit to bloggers like yourself.