“How market a product or service using blogs as a marketing tool”

Marketing a new product or service and increasing the available market for existing product need time, money, skills and many more resources. Some of existing marketing tools such as electronic & printed media advertisements are very costly methods. Some time it is not suitable for products which are being targeted narrow community. World Wide Web is one of leading network which allow global to become a small community. This is a place where most of people gather to search information on entertainment, education, news and many of their other interests. So joining with World Wide Web is good method to let people to know about our products or services. The interface is to join our products or services to World Wide Web is a web site. It comparatively low cost method when we consider about the time factor & geographical coverage. A web site which is dedicated to one subject is visited by people who seek & interest on that subject.

Web Logs in short terms “blogs” is one kind of web site which is being used by many people to share news, comments, opinions, personal thoughts … etc. Blog is a web site which is updated frequently in chronological order and commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. People will see latest updates first and because of the continuity in posting on the site people like to trust the latest information on blogs.

Usually people search their interests by entering queries to their favorite search engine. These search engines show relevant web sites using their large database which is developed using web crawler. These search engines track our web site by sending their web crawler to read our meta tags & contents. Because of daily or frequently updating nature of blogs, web crawlers visit blogs very frequently & index blogs with higher rank. So putting information on our product or service in blogs is one of best way to inform relevant & interested communities very quickly. Our product or service details will reach right people at right time with an effectively & rapidly. I have practically experienced this while working with my web log (http://cpelanka.blogspot.com). It is frequently visited by web crawlers & let search engine users to find my articles very easily.

With the ever increasing number of blogs over internet now there are dedicated search engines for blogs only. This is also an advantage to bloggers to spread their information over the world. Those blog search engine allow users to rate, favorite and recommend blogs. This will also increase our blogs’ position over internet blogsphere.

The other importance with blogs is many people favorites & subscribes their interested web logs. Then our post will reach to their reader application or email box with no time. I have seen some professional blogs which are subscribed by near 12000 people. (Ex. http://labnol.blogspot.com/). There are blogs communities which are daily visited by many users. We can join our blogs with those communities which allow blogs community members to reach our updated information collection on new products or services. The important thing is blog readers spent more time over internet rather than other users. So blog readers will spend more time on our information about new products or services.

There are free or low cost blogging tools such as “wordpress”, “blogger” … etc. With these tools we can develop fantastic web logs about our products and services. We can use their available template or our own template. There are many venders who sell attractive blog template and we can buy them if we do not have time to invest on developing template. When we work with above mentioned blogging tools we can easily redirect that blog to our own domain name. It provide smart interface to set up custom domains to the blogs. Wordpress allow blog writers to develop their very similar to normal web site with many pages. With little additional cost we can customize our blogs in professional way. These days most of web hosting services allow hosting blogs. With these services we can publish our blogs in our own way.

Using blogs we can develop strong voice over our products & services. Readers can put their comments on our posts, so blogger will able to identify readers’ thoughts very easily. Other readers also have a chance to expose others feeling on our products and services. We can put element on blogs to collect polls on readers and gather views of readers very quickly.

I am very confident on blogs as a good marketing tool. It can be developed with minimum cost and comparatively less effort. But it is very powerful tool which is quickly indexed and ranked by most of search engines. It has greater potential to be a very effective marketing tool. Some of people have already explored this great potential and soon others will also follow.