Leveraging Your Community in Blogging for Business

With this week’s Say It For You blog posts centered around marketing advice, I found a lot of value in Constant Contact’s Susan Solovic’s post “10 Ways to Market Your Small Business on a Shoestring Budget”.

Even though advertising can be expensive, Solovic cautions, it’s even more important, when times are tough, to keep your business brand front and center.  Customers have less money to spend, so when they do get ready to buy, you want to be at the top of their list.

Solovic goes on to offer a laundry list of ways to make that happen, including such tried-and-trues as networking, giving a speech, asking for referrals, and offering coupons. For me as a business blog marketer, though, the one piece of advice that stood out was “Leverage your community”.

“You don’t have to think big when it comes to your marketing efforts.  Think locally,” says Solovic. “What’s going on in your community?” Whether it’s sponsoring a local team or charitable event, she advises, “search for opportunities to get in front of local customers.

Getting personal is a huge element in the success of any SEO marketing blog. Indianapolis blog content writers must focus on personal anecdotes and on the personal values of the business owners and of the people delivering professional services. But, taking it further than that, the content should actually reflect and even allude to current community happenings and concerns.

When we bloggers enter conversations that are trending at the time and tie our blog content to current events, that serves the dual purpose of “playing off” already existing popular interest while possibly earning search engine “Brownie points” as well. Did we attend a performance or rally? How does what we heard and saw tie in with our own work in the community?

Marketing is all about leveraging your community, and blog marketing is really nothing more than “meeting” strangers and helping to turn those strangers into friends.  Blogging really is all about community!