Blogging to Drive Business: Create and Maintain Valuable Customer Connections

2. Leveraging Your Blog with Marketing Tools

Blogs are not a panacea for your business challenges. You can’t just post a message saying “Hello, world!” or something to that effect on your blog and expect people to come beating down your door. Your blog should complement your other marketing tools to help drive business. For example, if you have a storefront and you want to announce a special sale, you can use the blog to offer a discount to blog readers only (who give the sales clerk a special coupon code found on your blog, for example).

Before you get started with creating a blog for your business, think about two things: creating an integrated marketing toolbox that includes your blog and creating a plan to leverage your blog with those ...