Using Articles in Blogs

There are several traits to a blog that make it an excellent marketing tool. It is:

* Immediate and personal. * Updated regularly. * Very casual in tone. * Flexible enough to include just about anything you want to discuss.

The "immediate and personal" may be the most powerful feature of a blog. People often mistake the candor and intimacy of a blog for a personal relationship with the blogger; it's very tempting to talk back to those who blog. And when you have a personal relationship with another person, you tend to trust them.

By keeping (or hiring someone else to keep for you, as many GM executives have done) a blog of your own, you are inviting readers to share your personal life and to trust you. This is a powerful marketing tool.

Information in Blogs

One of the useful side effects of this intimate tool is the tendency of people to trust what they read in blogs. This makes it a great place to spread information about your site and your niche market. For instance, if you say in a blog that you think a particular herbal remedy for pain has done you good in treating your arthritis, that's a very personal statement. Anyone who reads your blog regularly has almost certainly built up a trust for you, and talking about this herbal remedy in your blog is going to make them think about trying it.

Now, if your website sells paper dolls, this will have no effect on your bottom line (unless you are an affiliate salesperson for the herbal remedy, which is entirely different). But if your website sells herbal remedies, you may have made some sales. And if you've just introduced this remedy, or you've been talking about it in your blog for a while and would not sell the remedy until you tried it out yourself, this increases the level of trust customer have in this item.

Basically, you're bartering built-up trust (saved from long-term blogging) for sales of this remedy, which, if it works, will recoup for you the trust that you bartered for it and then some. Blogs and other intimate sales tools like this are all about the trust relationship, so be sure before you spend that trust that you will get it back.

Using Articles in Blogs

Blogs are in general an intimate tool designed for sharing personal thoughts with the world at large. But sometimes you might want to include an article in your blog for some reason perhaps the information contained will push sales, or you think the information is something that your readers should really pay attention to. Or perhaps you just don't have anything else to say this day and think this would be some good information to share.

Whatever your reason, there are three basic ways of using articles in blogs. First, you can just modify the article to read like your blogs and post it as an original blog. Second, you can say that you wanted to share the article with your readers and copy the article wholesale into your blog. Or finally, you can post a link to the article as your blog entry, and let your blog readers access it on your website.

There are advantages to each of these methods. If you treat the article like a blog entry, you should be prepared to expend some of your stored-up trust for it; if you are cynically using it to drive sales, you'll pay for it in trust, but if you really think the information is valuable, you may receive your trust back when it has proven to be of value to your customers.

The other two ways citing the article with a link or posting it wholesale and noting that it's an article you found are much safer as far as using trust. By doing this, your blog readers are noting that you are not the author of the article and if the advice in it fails, you won't lose as much trust.

Regardless of how you use articles in your blogs, remember that your ultimate purpose is to drive sales. You want to do this with a minimal loss of trust, but you should also be ready to stick your neck out if necessary.

Keywords: online martketing

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