Starting a blog for your small business is not only logical, but also essential. Your small business blog allows you to reach more people and cut down hierarchical relationship between you, the small business owner, and your customer. This is extremely important for a small business that already has established ‘chain of command’ – e.g. CEO-managers-staffs company structure. Getting such structure distances you to your customer, and a blog especially written by you, the business owner, will eliminate such barriers.
A blog can help you in the following:
- Attracting visitors who are customers-to-be.
- Self-promoting your brand name, services and products.
- Build a community of evangelists – those who will spread the words for you.
Regardless of the advantages of starting a blog I mentioned above, you must not forget that a blog on its own can’t do much on your small business branding. You need ways to drive visitors in to your small business web and blog sites, as well as getting your sites to rank well on the search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!
How to achieve both?
There are plenty of ways to drive traffic to your sites and get your sites to rank well on search engines, but I specifically want to address one of the ways: paid posts.
Paid posts are, in essence, blog posts that are written by bloggers in return for a certain amount of payment. Why would you need to have bloggers to do paid posts about your small business? Some reasons:
- You need to write exceptional blog posts to get people to mention about you and link to your blog and eventually your business (usually called a link baiting strategy.) Unless you hire a super copywriter or a great writer yourself, you need to invest a certain amount of money to ‘get’ people to write for you.
- Paid posts are generally containing what bloggers think about your business. But you could also ‘direct’ bloggers to write good words or endorse your business – this is superb to build your business brand online reputation.
- The paid posts are written by exceptional bloggers and blogs (obviously, you should choose what kind of bloggers and blogs who will write the paid posts for you), and due to that fact, you can get more readers to mention and link to them – this promote viral effect that can give you exponential return of your investment in paid posts.
Where you can hire quality bloggers to do paid posts
There are plenty of blog advertising networks offering a marketplace where you can do your paid post campaign and bloggers to make money online writing paid posts and reviews on their blogs. However, I do recommend you to join networks that have strong reputation, such as ReviewMe.com, PayPerPost.com and SponsoredReviews.com
I personally use SponsoredReviews.com, and the result is wonderful. As a blogger myself, I don’t do much paid posting these days, as I focus on building my web properties more than I focus on making money online doing paid reviews, but I used to make hundreds of dollars every month doing paid posts for advertisers via SponsoredReviews.com (spoiler: They pay bloggers with good traffic and Google PageRank well.)
Paid posts success story
There are plenty of success stories in how paid posts can enhance branding and help bringing in customers. However, I have to note the effectiveness of paid posts in a unique case: Reversing personal brand’s negative reputation.
I remember the case of Jeremy Schoemaker (ShoeMoney.com) – one of the authorities in Internet business and making money online. He had his identity stolen (or rather, mis-used) by someone promoting a widely-advertised scam Internet business. Jeremy was thought to endorse such scam, and thus he need to clear his reputation for the sake of his personal and business branding. He did an explanative post on his ShoeMoney.com blog and also hiring bloggers on blog advertising networks to help him in his endeavour (I was also one of the many bloggers chosen to do the paid post via SponsoredReviews.com.) Jeremy won, case closed.
If you are looking for a more effective way to enhance your small business brand in the eyes of visitors/customers and search engines, I recommend you consider paid posting.
Ivan Widjaya
Paid post marketing
Image by zizzy0104