In Barrack Obama’s victory speech one week ago, he issued a sort of call to action, reminding listeners that in order to repair many of the problems we face, including, for example, our current economic woes, we need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and get to work. What if, though, you could help to bolster the economy while boosting your business as well? Our previous discussion explored how email marketing can do just that; implementing a carefully designed blog management campaign can do the same, though in a different manner.

That’s not to say that blog marketing isn’t targeted; in fact it can often be more targeted than email marketing, especially when blogs are approached from an in-depth understanding of search engine marketing and optimization. First we’re going to look at how blogs are an inexpensive way to market your business, and then we’ll examine how blogs can be targeted to increase efficiency. Finally, we’ll consider what that means not only for your business, but for the economy as well.

Why are blogs inexpensive methods of internet marketing? For one, owning a blog can be very inexpensive, especially because you can have a free blog if cash is tight. What can you expect when it comes to free blogs as opposed to hosting your own blog? When you host your own blog, you can use your own URL as opposed to using the URL supplied by the blog website. For example, your own URL might be something like www.yourcompany.com/blog or blog.yourcompany.com. A free blog might have a URL similar to yourcompany.freeblogsite.com.

Another reason that a blog is an inexpensive method of internet marketing is that you can tailor its frequency to suit your needs and budget. You can have new posts every day, every week day, twice a week, once a week, twice a month…While the most successful blogs post more frequently, you can always increase your blog’s frequency and start at a level with which you’re comfortable. With blogs, you’re not locked in. Even if you decide to move to another brand of blog software, so to speak, most will allow for seamless transition by importing your old blog into your new blog. Blogging allows for flexibility, and you can see the results of your alterations almost immediately, in real time.

Blog marketing campaigns can be targeted if you apply SEM and SEO principles. For example, if you’re blogging about caramel apples, you would want to insert that keyword into the text of your blog post the proper amount of times so that the text would be optimized. Anyone searching for the keyword phrase “caramel apples” might be led to your blog. SEM practices that can drum up targeted visits for your blog include PPC campaigns, or pay-per-click campaigns, which might lead prospects to your blog if they search for keyword phrases which you set to your blog. Visitors might bookmark your blog or put it into their RSS feeds, and perhaps even forward your blog to others. In this way, your blog can spread much the same way your email marketing campaign can spread, except faster in cases where your readers make their RSS feeds public.

Any element of internet marketing could be inserted into the scenario described in our last discussion about how email marketing could help improve the economy. However, with blog marketing strategies, that cycle can work faster and for less money. If you apply the money you save with your blog toward an email marketing campaign, imagine the benefit of implementing both types of marketing strategies with the guidance of your internet marketing agency.

One of the most prevalent mistakes made by internet marketing novices is to allow the belief that Google is the seo deity set in. Is Google important? As the most recognized search engine, yes. “To Google” is actually an accepted verb in our vernacular. But Google’s not the only house on the block. Yahoo and MSN also have leading search engines. Years ago, certain search engines were used for specific topics; Lycos was once highly-recognized as an ideal search engine for academic research.

So what happens to internet marketers who only worry about what Google is up to? Eventually, they find themselves left behind, coughing on dust and trying to find new tracks to follow. How do you avoid that potential outcome? Prepare your online content, be it video advertisements, blogs or website content, to provide seo value in the broader sense. If you focus only on Google, and Google shifts its algorithms (as they’ve been known to do in the past), all of your work goes down the drain.

How do you optimize your online content “in the broader sense?” The best way to accomplish this is to aim your content at your prospects. They are your audience, your readers, viewers and listeners. If you think of your prospects first, everything else will fall neatly into place thereafter. We’ve mentioned this notion in other discussions within this blog, but this topic deserves its own discussion in order to stress the importance of not falling into the “Google is the only search engine” trap.

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Recent drops in the stock market have many businesses rethinking their budgets.  The potentially frightening economical situation of the passing weeks which, even in light of recent legislative endeavors remains an element of concern, has businesses trimming costs everywhere.  But no company wants to give up marketing, because marketing is what draws prospects and hopefully new customers.  So how can you continue marketing in the face of necessary and precautionary budget cuts?  Internet marketing is the answer.

Internet marketing comes in all shapes and sizes, to match budgets of all sizes.  If you’re already using internet and email marketing to boost business, there are steps you can take to make your marketing strategies more cost effective, and most of this has to do with targeting.  Targeting exists in every facet of internet marketing and begins with the question, “Who do I want this to speak to?”

Is saying you’ll target your internet marketing easier said than done?  Not really…all it takes is a little time and elbow grease.  Here are some simple steps you can take to target your campaigns and save some money so that you don’t have to face the possibility of canceling them:

1.    Email marketing can be targeted with segmentation.  What is segmentation?  When you have a large list, and you send the same message to everyone on that list, your success rate will be very low because the last thing anyone wants to respond to is a message that reads like a formula.  Of course, everyone knows that email messages are mass-designed, but that doesn’t mean they have to read that way.  By segmenting your lists, you can target and speak to individual groups that share common interests or experiences, and maybe a common outlook.
2.    PPC Campaigns can be targeted by making your keyword phrases more specific.  Suppose you’re advertising a concert tour.  You don’t want people from New York viewing ads for a band in Florida if that same band is playing in New York at a later time.  Rather than waste impressions and even more importantly, clicks (as those cost the money you bid), you can target your keyword phrases.  If the band were the Rolling Stones, you might use keyword phrases such as “Rolling Stones New York” and “Rolling Stones Miami.”
3.    Online video advertisement can be targeted much the same as PPC campaigns.

Search engine optimization, is, in its very nature, targeted.  As for internet marketing elements such as blogging, blogs are also typically targeted toward a specific topic.  Your internet marketing agency can assist you in targeting all of your marketing strategies so that you can obtain the best results.  The current economic situation provides the perfect opportunity to make your campaigns specific.  They ought to be anyway, but now is a good time to act if you want to lower costs and increase sales.

In today’s market, it is becoming increasingly more affordable and profitable to employ internet marketing strategies in addition to, or in some cases, in lieu of, other options.  Before you choose an internet marketing agency, understanding the differences between SEO and SEM is important, so that you know what you should expect to receive with each service.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process by which your online content is made easily readable by search engines so that your content can be ranked and displayed to searchers when they enter a keyword or keyword phrase.  SEO prepares your online content, be it a blog, website or article, so that the search engine can understand the value of your content and thus determine its ranking.  SEO is more of a process than a strategy.  A strategy outlines a plan, while processes help to see that plan come into fruition.  It may be a goal to receive high rankings by a search engine.  Part of your strategy might be to optimize your online content…but the actual process of SEO involves many factors, including the balance of keywords we discussed yesterday.

SEM, or search engine marketing, is a collection of strategies designed to increase brand recognition and improve your virtual presence by strengthening it through the employ of various techniques that might include PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns, blog management campaigns or email marketing campaigns, to name a few.  Often times, these campaigns may incorporate some of the processes involved with SEO, but SEO and SEM are different.  The goal of search engine marketing is to drive traffic to your site through a variety of online marketing tools.

Understanding the differences between SEO and SEM is important; not only so that you know what you’re signing up for but also so that you can understand what sort of reports you should expect, so that you can monitor your progress.  An internet marketing agency not offering to report back to you is likely trying to scam you, so knowing what to expect is crucial to making the choice of which internet marketing agency you should work with.