Blogging saves marketing dollars

Tinu Abayomi-Paul, a contributing writer to webpronews.com, found her overhaul business costs down 19% as a result of marketing via blog. She’s published a good article on how blogging can save you money.

I’ll summarize the simple reasons Tinu gave for the cost savings.

Attract search engine traffic without paying the big bucks

• If you want Google, Yahoo and MSN to pay attention to you, blog.
• Instead of buying links, get one-way links from blog search engines and directories, as well as getting your RSS feed content displayed at other sites.
• Linking is a great way to get search engine attention and click traffic. Some people get links by trading; others by including their links at the end of freely distributed articles. Others pay to be listed, or to get linked.
• When you blog, you’ll find plenty of search engines and directories that are willing to list you free of charge. For the most part you won’t need to link back – you’ll get a one-way link from site favored by search engines, often using text that you select yourself.
• If you update frequently, other sites may want to display your RSS feed content on their sites. To encourage them to do so, put a link on your page with instructions on how to do so. Ever since I put one on the front of my site, various feeds from my main site have turned up in the most unexpected places.

Cheaper way to study your audience

• As your blog gets more popular, you may start to find that on any given day, you have a representative cross-section of prospects and clients at your site. If you have a question for them, you can just… ask.
• You can post a link to a survey in your newsletter or on your site, but these are not as interactive as the ability for your audience to comment. They will comment, and you can reply to ask them to expand, or clarify. Conversation gets going and before you know it, a bond is formed, a much stronger bond than occurs in a one-way conversation.

Cheaper (and faster) way to establish yourself as authority

• If you want to be the expert, you want to start a blog.
• If you’re blogging consistently, you have a hub of information collected that will inspire return traffic. You have a collection of links to articles, sites, and tools. You can constantly write up your own opinion editorials on each of these items, as well as fact-based analysis of news and events that can help your audience make better choices.
• You can now categorize, and alphabetize your links, and with the ability to ping multiple sources as well as leave trackback links to other sites, you can send your readers through a ring of related, freshly updated information that ultimately leads back to you.
• Other ways of establishing yourself as an expert via the Internet are outdated:

• Five years ago, if you wanted to start an authority site, your best bet was to build a portal with a specialized directory at its core.
• Three years ago, you were better off starting a forum with a resource section attached to it.
• Last year, your top bet was a feed-enabled content management system, especially as more parts of content management systems began to have content feeds related to them.

Spend less money on advertising as your blog becomes more popular

• The amount of free advertising you get from having your blog link or RSS feed listed in dozens of search engines and directories, and popping up in feed readers is not to be underestimated.
• You’ll probably still want to do some other online advertsing. But you may not need to buy as much advertising or purchase as often.
• Many newsletters that are also published to RSS feeds have wider reach.

Save money by retaining visitors

• It is easier to sell repeatedly to an existing client than it is to find a new one.
• A constant stream of new information on a particular topic work is enough to keep people buying a daily newspaper, subscribing to a magazine or viewing a television series. Frequent updates can work the same way for your site.

So as Tanu says”[I]f you’re not blogging in 2005, you’re going to be left in the dust by other sites in your industry that do.” Plus you save money by blogging. What’s your reason for not getting started?