If you have been in sales or marketing for a while you probably have heard of the term "Relationship Based Marketing".

This type of marketing differs from other forms of marketing in that it recognizes the long term value to the firm of keeping customers, as opposed to direct or "Intrusion" marketing, which focuses upon acquisition of new clients by targeting majority demographics based upon prospective client lists.

Relationship marketing also relies upon acquiring the knowledge of what the consumer needs solely through existing customers in a mutual exchange. Relationship marketing is also dependent upon viral marketing for the acquisition of new customers. But as we have seen in very successful campaigns, viral marketing can have extensive effects.

What is viral marketing? Viral marketing refers to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet.

So how are people using the Internet to utilize viral marketing - in many ways.

Web 2.0 and Social Media



According to Wikipedia, which is a perfect example of Web 2.0, the term Web 2.0 is defined as "commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Examples of Web 2.0 include web-based communities, hosted services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups, and folksonomies."


Web 2.0 gives more tools to those who utilize relationship-based marketing to promote their product or service. With Web 2.0 you are not only reaching a large base of people but you are also giving more marketing power to your website through the spider web of connections behind each of these types of media. If you are promoting yourself through Wikipedia, you are getting a two-fold force of marketing, one, directly to your potential client and two, promoting your website's viability due to Wikipedia's highly spidered site.


Blogging



Blogging has probably been around longer than the other types of relationship based marketing techniques. What better way to promote yourself and your product then to sit down with a one-on-one conversation with potential clients? With your blog you can share your interests or passions with others who will then share that information and thus you have viral marketing.


If the idea of creating a blog scares you, this too has been made easier. Not only is there software out there making it easier and easier to blog but there are also people who you can hire to write blogs for you.



Comment on Existing Blogs



Once you write your blog, it does your blog well to have people comment on it. This has to do with the way search engines work as well as plain ole viral marketing. To bring in more people to read your blog and comment, become a frequent visitor to sites that are related to your professional expertise and you may find yourself becoming the go-to person for those in need of that expertise.



Facebook and Other Social media


It is quite possible you have heard or even used Facebook by now. And if you haven't used Twitter, certainly you have heard the term. These along with MySpace, and LinkedIn are common forms of social media. Sites like Facebook and MySpace have a broad focus while LinkedIn is more business focused. Sites like Facebook, provide the opportunity to add a customized page you can use to promote a business.


Relationship based marketing takes time and patience but is possibly one of the most viable and reliable forms of getting your name and company out to the public with the greatest long term value.

Pamela Ravenwood is a copywriter for ArteWorks SEO. She is an award winning writer, journalist, SEO specialist and strategic planning consultant. To learn more about this search engine optimization company, visit www.arteworks.biz.

Having a corporate blog is almost a must these days. According to Jupiter Research, in 2006, statistics showed that 34% of large corporate companies had established weblogs. Another 35% planned to do so by the end of 2006, thus bringing the total to nearly 70%.


Having a corporate blog is almost a must these days. According to Jupiter Research, in 2006, statistics showed that 34% of large corporate companies had established weblogs. Another 35% planned to do so by the end of 2006, thus bringing the total to nearly 70%.

So what is a corporate blog? Corporate blogs can be internal or external. An internal blog, which is typically used through the corporations Intranet for employees, is a way to help employees participate in ideas, discuss issues, stimulate communication throughout the company’s divisions and is meant to create a feel of community within the corporation.

The external blog is available for anybody to read and often reflects the company’s values and its spokespersons views. The blog can be a way to announce new products and services (or the end of old products), to explain and clarify policies, or to react on public criticism on certain issues. It also allows a window to the company culture and is often treated more informally than traditional press releases, though a corporate blog often tries to accomplish similar goals as press releases do. In some corporate blogs, all posts go through a review before they're posted. Some corporate blogs, but not all, allow comments to be made to the posts.

With that said, what are some basic rules about creating and maintaining corporate blogs? Here are the top ten:

1. Don’t Use Your Blog Primarily For Marketing – People won’t want to read your blog if it is just a bunch of advertising and marketing. A blog should reveal the real meat of your company, an insider view. The more personal you can make your corporate blog the better. As with all blogs, there should be a level of personality, sincerity and sense of respect for the community that is best kept real.

2. Have The Backing of The CEO – Blogging can reveal a lot of information, therefore you want to make sure your CEO is behind it all the way. Before starting your corporate blog, make sure you have explained to the CEO the benefits and risks. You may also want to check with your legal department on what can and can’t be said. Know your parameters.

3. Who Will Write The Blog – This is important and it depends on if the blog is internal or external. Because each blog serves its own purpose, you want the right people for the job. This may require training for those you choose. You may choose numerous people who you feel represent your company well, but these people also need to be trained in how to write blogs, how to convey their message, how to inspire others and more. Your bloggers should understand how blogs work, what blog etiquette is or how to deal with blog basics. There is also the concern of your bloggers dealing with intellectual property rights and information leaks. But don’t be afraid, a little training will go a long way.

4. Keep It Authentic – As mentioned before, the blog is not another source for marketing and advertising. You want to connect with your readers in a real way. This isn’t to say your blogs shouldn’t be in alignment with your company’s brand, mission and objectives, this is important too. But allow room for the bloggers true voice to come through.

5. Assign Subjects - Assign a person to oversee all blogs, somebody who has an overall knowledge of company policies and public relations. Assign bloggers according to the expertise in their field. These writers should then have to submit their work to the one person who oversees all of the blogs for review before posting. This checks and balance system will save your company a lot of headaches, just in case a blogger gets carried away and says something that could harm the company. Work with each blogger to develop an editorial calendar that keeps him or her on track and aligns with company events, releases, industry happenings, etc.

6. Throw It Out There - Don’t hide from the tough stuff. Be willing to admit mistakes.
The blogosphere expects that when a company joins the blogosphere, they should be honest about shortcomings, failings and issues. Members of the blogosphere are also willing to forgive companies when they admit their mistakes.

7. Use Your Blog For Company Crisis – Every company has times when they receive a big black mark due to some error or PR disaster. You can use your blog to help your company work through this. Create a plan ahead of time regarding how your blog will address such potential company issues.

8. Moderate blog comments. – People like to comment on blogs and some take their aggressions out on the blog due to its anonymity. This is why it is important to moderate comments continually.

9. Use Your Internal Blog To Improve Communications – If you find your corporation doesn’t communicate well across departments, a blog can assist you in bridging this divide. When you place a representative from departments in a position of blogging for their department, information gets shared and can help the company see the bigger picture.

10. Create Objectives – Your blog should have some sort of device for measuring its effectiveness before starting it. Design criteria that you will want as a measuring device, this criteria can include: Positive media mentions, Traffic to the blog, Incoming links to the blog, Increases in brand awareness, Increased attendance at company events.

Having a corporate blog doesn’t have to be complicated and scary, especially if you apply some of the basic rules ahead of time. In the end, you might find it an easy way to help your company.

There are millions of blogs online these days and with those blogs are people finding ways to improve their website’s search engine rankings. Yes, blogs have more than one purpose.

Sure they are informative and have lots of fresh content, but they also link back to corporate or business websites, which in turn helps those websites move up the search engine rankings scale.

So why are blogs so successful in increasing your website’s rankings? To start, blogs have no specific special powers of high rankings on their very own. What they do have potentially is fresh, unique content. Most search engines tend to like this, regardless of the format. If the search engines know any given site is adding new articles on a frequent basis, they will come around often to index it and indexing in turn means better ratings.

This leads us to making sure your site’s content is fresh and how to draw people to that content. Good content is probably the best thing you can do to draw attention to your blog and maintain a following. To do this, try covering topics that nobody else is talking about. By writing about niche subjects, you can grab traffic that is looking for what you have to say. Second, spend the time and effort to research and write about your subject, don’t just repeat what everybody else is talking about.

Another strategy in creating a successful blog includes the writing of quality title tags with two audiences in mind. First and foremost, you're writing a title tag for the people who will visit your site or have a subscription to your feed. You also want to think about search engines when you title your posts, since the engines can help to drive traffic to your blog. Once you have finished your title tags, now you will want to make sure all of your entries are tagged. Technorati is the first place that you should be tagging posts. Tagging content can also be valuable to help give you a "bump" towards getting traffic from big sites like Reddit, Digg & StumbleUpon.

Tagging posts is one method if getting your content out in front of your potential audience, another way is through Twitter. Although Twitter is a social media tool meant to create community and relationships, it does have an SEO value. For example, Twitter can affect positively your Alexa rankings by sending visitors to your pages. Usage data is a sign of quality for Google and all the other search engines. If you can make people come to your site via Twitter, then this is an SEO advantage you cannot afford to miss. When using Twitter, don’t worry about shortening your URL’s, the link will still have value. These TinyURLs are dynamically created URLs that redirect users to the real URL via 301 (permanent redirect). Search engines do not index TinyURLs, but index and pass PageRank to the actual URLs instead.

While we are talking about the backend, make sure you are pinging your articles each time you write them. An easy way for search engines to quickly find your new content is through the process of pinging. Using a tool like Pingomatic is very helpful in this process. Pinging seems to help get blog posts spidered and indexed very quickly.

Last, add social book marking links to the end of each blog entry. This helps your reader pick your article and add it to their favorite book marking software and simultaneously promotes your site. Having your blog’s articles submitted to book marking sites such as Delicious helps you also build links back to your blog. Backlinks are important because each time someone links to your site it counts sort of as a “vote” for it, moving it higher up in the search engine results pages.

These are just a few ways your blog can grow and along with it your website’s rankings. With a little time and some patience, before long your site will surely make its way to the top.

Pamela Ravenwood is a copywriter for ArteWorks SEO. She is an award winning writer, journalist, SEO specialist and strategic planning consultant. To learn more about this search engine optimization company, visit www.arteworks.biz.

If you are a new blogger or even an experienced one, it is important to check in with how your blog is doing and maintain it in a way that successful bloggers do. So what is it successful bloggers do? Here is your blogger checklist, which consists of eight items for you to consider.


If you are a new blogger or even an experienced one, it is important to check in with how your blog is doing and maintain it in a way that successful bloggers do. So what is it successful bloggers do? Here is your blogger checklist, which consists of eight items for you to consider.

1. Proofread Your Work - Misspellings and wrong use of words in a blog entry can turn a reader off in a real hurry. Make sure you type your original blog message in a program that contains spell check and then reread your work for errors. You can then copy and paste your work into your blog.

2. Publish Posts on a Regular Basis - If you want to maintain a following of readers and prove you are serious about your blog you have to keep your content fresh and updated. You may not have time to blog daily so the important thing is to just be consistent. Commit to how often you will make an entry, it may be weekly, biweekly or monthly. When you are consistent, your guests will know when to check back in with you.

3. Backup Your Blog - There is nothing worse than losing all of your work, especially if your blog contains numerous entries. Create an automatic backup system for your blog. Most blogging software companies have a Help file to assist you in understanding how to back your blog up or what processes are needed.

4. Link to Older Posts - If you have been blogging for a while, it is most likely that many of your topics will overlap, so why not provide your reader with reference to some of your older entries. This can be done with a link. When you do this, you are building an effective linking strategy and encouraging readers to stay on your blog longer. As we all know, a quality linking strategy can mean an increase your traffic and search engine rankings.

5. Answer Guests Comments - Take the time to answer anyone who makes a comment on your blog. Doing this will create loyalty among your followers and will help build community. If there comes a day when your blog is extremely popular, it is still important to maintain correspondence with your readers. Also, be kind and considerate when responding to your readers. A topic that may be obvious to you may not be to your reader and there is no need to make somebody feel bad.

6. Approve Comments - If you use comment moderation (and you should unless you get very low volumes of spam) you should approve pending comments on a regular basis. Having meaningful comments on your blog is important, so check pending comments regularly to make sure they are getting posted.

7. Remember Your Audience When Creating Topics – If you have a new blog, one of most overlooked items is being able to accurately define the audience that you will be writing to. As time goes by, you’ll learn what types of content your readers appreciate or don’t appreciate in that you will have little response. Sometimes creating a niche that very few people write about or understand is a great way to get your blog going and you will know exactly who your audience is.

8. Check for Dead Links – There is nothing more annoying than clicking on a dead link. If you’re like most bloggers you probably include a lot of links in your posts, both inbound and outbound. Those links may have worked at the time the post was published, but do you know if they still work? Dead links are especially common with outbound links. The blogs and websites you link to may shut down, changes their link structure, or remove a page, all of which will result in dead links. So make a date on a regular basis to check all outbound links on your blog.

Follow these eight simple rules and your blog’s maintenance will continue to grow successful.




About the Author: Pamela Ravenwood is a copywriter for ArteWorks SEO. She is an award winning writer, journalist, SEO specialist and strategic planning consultant. To learn more about this search engine optimization company, visit www.arteworks.biz.