In part 1 and part 2 of this article series on marketing with blogs, I discussed reasons why blogs are excellent tools for marketing, and provided some tips on using your blog to sell your products and services online.

This article continues with more tips on using your blog to brand yourself and boost your reputation online.

Tip #4: Use Your Blog To Inform, Share and Entertain

The reasons why they read your blog is because they want three things.

1. They want information 2. They want to be entertained 3. They want to get to know you better

The reason why blogs are so popular with internet users is because they allow us to combine all these possibilities in a single medium.

Use your personality, opinions, expressions as a way of drawing readers to your content, and create good information to keep them coming back.

Multimedia blogs are especially good for this purpose – because they entertain and that adds a viral component to your marketing.

In part 1 of this article series on marketing with blogs, I discussed reasons why blogs are excellent tools for marketing.

In this article I outline some tips on using your blog as a good vehicle for your marketing communications.

Tip # 1: Choose The Topic Of Your Blog Well

Make sure you are targeting right audience for your products. You might love golf, but you can’t use it to sell your products unless they’re meant for golfers.

You generally wouldn’t write about something like golf on a marketing blog, unless you’re using it as a metaphor.

Pick topic that will attract right audience – people who are looking for your products, but more importantly, people who are willing to actually spend money on them.

If you’re not an expert on your topic, but are learning about it, blog about your learning process. There’s no shame in being a learner, in admitting that you don’t know everything.

In fact your journey could even teach others who are learning and help them relate to your experiences. Products you recommend would then be easy to sell to this group because you’ve established emotional connection that makes selling easier.

Tip #2: Spend Some Time Learning The Basics Of Blogging

You need to learn how to use your blogging software, and which blog engine or service will give you results you need. Decide how much time you want to spend on your blog.

Hire a blogging coach or buy a blogging tutorial. Spend some time learning about trackbacks, pingbacks, keywords and how to use them, linking, blogging etiquette.