Blog marketing is probably an overused word these days. But that does not mean it doesn’t work. After going through a few marketing blogs, I certainly think they are effective, but it does take the knowledge and know-how accrued after a certain length of time in order to even get any results.
The general input is that you got to know what you’re marketing in the first place. Most people would think I’m referring to Internet Marketing blogs. But you can market in anything you want, provided there are goods to sell. Blog marketing just means using a blog to pitch a sale on any topic.
All things being equal, the number one ingredient has to be traffic. Targeted traffic to be more precise. So you need the search engines to deliver that traffic to you; and it’s a good thing that blogs were made for search engines!
Sometimes we tend to forget the basics of blog marketing, such as regular posts, getting links in a slow and steady way (risk of sandbox if done too fast), and submitting to blog directories. Then there’s the promotional stuff to do, like online social networking, link exchanges, and regular commenting on other blogs to build backlinks, which take loads of time (to do right).
Real traffic takes time and effort. Some marketing blogs in saturated markets probably need close to a year of consistent effort to even see any decent traffic, and that is why the drop out rate for blogs is equally as high as the number of blogs being born everyday. But blog marketing can be really rewarding if you do the right things everyday, without letup.
How much is too much in the way of number of posts? If you can do 15-20 posts a month, that should be fine, in my opinion. The reason is because blogs have a ping feature by default, which is one of the advantages of blogging. It brings not just people, but the spiders as well. Since a ping gets visitors; the more pings, the better it is. The real reason why the number of posts matter, is because the more content you have, the more chances you will rank for many keywords. More pages = more doorways to get visited.
Bear in mind, that too many posts could be annoying. The same goes for too little posts. If you want to do blog marketing right, try keeping your posting frequency somewhere in the middle, and use full RSS feeds that can be read in their entirety in the RSS readers. Even though the books advise on “forcing” people to go to your blog to read your posts by only using “summary” option, I think it only makes your visitors unsubscribe from your blog RSS feed!
Examining the traffic stats will show what are the hot posts on your blog, and what are the terms/keywords people used to get to your blog. Once you know them, just write more related topics to these terms.
I think link exchanges are losing importance in the search engines, so don’t overdo them or you could be spending a lot of time in the wrong activity. It works, but it doesn’t work as well as it used to. It’s better to use your time to produce better content rather than chasing link exchanges.
Blog marketing isn’t terribly complicated, but it does need patient effort or you won’t see any results to your bottomline. Although everyone now want to “do” blogs, it’s just as important to realize that you need traffic for this. Get traffic, and your blog marketing efforts won’t fail, even though you may promote the crappiest stuff out there.