Blog As A Marketing Tool

Blogs offer huge marketing potential. They are highly
strategic tools that can strengthen relationships, share
knowledge, increase collaboration, and improve branding.
Besides, blogs can represent the real voice of the website.

A weblog can take the form of a diary, a news service (or
summaries of and links to current news items on a topic), a
collection of links to other Web sites, a series of book
reviews or products, reports of activity on a project, the
journal of an expedition, and much more. Businesses can use
this tool to effectively advertise their products or
services.

One of the most interesting ways to use a weblog is by
allowing it to function as a discussion forum for customers
of your products or services. In this case, the webmaster
can give posting rights to other people – visitors and
customers, and their posts may or may not be reviewed before
they are published to the Web page. Customers, in such a way
can post favorable comments about the websites offerings.
Some weblogs are set up in such a way that only the owner or
the owner and certain other people have posting rights, but
anyone else can add comments to the posts.

Weblogs when used with newsletters present immense marketing
opportunities:


* Articles within newsletters can be linked to a blog,
extending life and creating a massive conversation.
* You can offer a bidirectional forum to customers to get
true, personal opinions on your products and services.
* Company experts can start a blog and become industry
experts, helping your company edge out competition and,
through this interactive forum,draw customers into another
exchange of information and thoughts.
* The beauty of this interplay is you can layer your blog
with editorial controls.