Tools for Becoming a Trusted Expert – Blogs
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As mentioned before (and probably will be mentioned another few hundred times over the course of this series) the key to your communications strategy is to think from the buyers point of view (which you know because you’ve developed personas) and to establish yourself as a Trusted Expert (by providing useful and timely information.)
So, now you need to know how, where and when to speak to your buyers directly. Which of the communication outlets should you utilize, and why? Well, only you can answer that question for your business, but here are the web-based communications that you can use to reach your buyers directly, and become a Trusted Expert.
For the next few posts, we’ll be going over the tools the internet has to offer, and how you can use them to brand yourself as a Trusted Expert. Today we’ll start with blogs, as they’re the natural first step.
Blogs
What can a blog accomplish for your company? While you may, at first, think of only of having your own blog, there are actually several ways to utilize blogs to the best advantage for your company. And, in fact, having your own blog is perhaps the last step in the process.
Before you jump into the fray, you want to understand exactly what the blogging landscape is out there. If you do it right, blogs can be the best tool your company has to promote your business, whether through your own blog, or by utilizing opportunities on other people’s blogs. Whatever your level of experience and utilization, blogs are your best tool for branding yourself as a Trusted Expert.
Here are the blog basics, for those of you who have been living in a cave, or perhaps in an area that still only gets dial-up (shudder): a blog is written using software that puts the most recent post at the tops of the page, in reverse chronological order. Posts are tagged to appear in selected categories and often include identifiers about the content of the post that will enable people to easily find it, both within the blog and also through the search engines.
A blog allows you to get a large amount of ideas out there, and because there isn’t a lot of risk or any cost involved, you can try out a bunch of different ideas and see what resonates with your audience, and what generates publicity for you. Your blog can also be one of your best tools for SEO – every word of every post is indexed by Google and the other search engines, so when people are looking for the topics you’re writing about, they will find you.
A blog has greater value beyond what you can calculate for ROI – publicity, air of authority, and new contacts are all benefits that you can’t assign a strict dollar value to.
Blogs are a free resource out there for you to use. You can get instant and unsolicited information as to what people are currently thinking and saying about you and your company. It’s like having a focus group that you can use – but for free. Every organization should be monitoring blogs to find out what people are saying about them.
In most product categories, early bloggers develop a reputation as being innovative. Once you’re comfortable with reading and commenting on other people’s blogs, it’s time to start doing it yourself. Later in this series we’ll get into how exactly you do that.
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& Revive Old Posts – This post explains how bloggers can fix and revive old blog posts, and make them new once more. 5 Ways To Become a “Media Junky” In Your Niche – How to aggregate information for use on your blog.Tools for Becoming a Trusted Expert– Blogging is competitive in nature, so it’s important to learn how to become an expert in your niche. 50 Ways to Take Your Blog to the Next Level – An incredible post on how to jump-start your blog. Blog Marketing Vs. Email Marketing Vs. Twitter Mar
i m interested to see a blog on how to become a trusted buyer. yes i think you are right we should always think as buyer point of view. This will make us more closer to buyer. your tips are great in this blog. thanks for sharing this information. good luck.
I agree. A blog is a great way to gain exposure and brand yourself as an expert in your niche, so when people are looking for information they are searching for you. As Malcolm Gladwell would say, you are positioning yourself as a Maven in this niche for people to get information. Same is true with Social media, people should be using it to further their brand and positioning as an expert or a maven in their niches and keep it building on that prospect.
Looking forward to hearing more of what you got to offer.
Using a blog to become a trusted expert is very smart.
Blogs are SEO friendly, so you can drive organic traffic while providing great content in order to convert the traffic into subscribers.
Igor
I totally stand together with you about using blog in online bussiness!It helps you to establish long term strategy and shows other contributor that you have some sort of plan and proper treatment of your online job.
Oh yes,
blogs could be very beneficial to any business.
You can imagine it by gmail blog is in the top 100 Technorati blogs..
A blog is a great way of getting your name out there and building quality and valuable content so that people can understand your story and what you are trying to achieve.
A blog has become a necessity in a home based business. It is also a great way to brand your name and not just the product you are promoting.
Blogs must be interesting, updates and full of content. Thanks for sharing this! A must read for blog owners.
Blog is great way to building presonal brand and communication plus relationship with the reader. thanks for the post.
David
Because the blogosphere is so vast now, it would take a few months to a year before you are trusted.
-Mike
Commenting on intelligent blogs with good concepts, a real good starting point for business purposes.
Any tips for generating ideas for blog content? Obviously you don’t want to continuously focus on your business using every post as an opportunity to promote yourself (and I have seen blogs where people do this). How do you maintain a balance?
Of all the statement in this article, I liked this the most providing useful and timely information.
Any company serious about getting their name out there should start a blog. With a blog, a company can state what they’re all about and learn more about their readers or potential customers.
Another aspect to consider is where you are, or the event you are both attending. Using location to open a conversation is already personalized because you are, visit this site.