blog

Using a blog to market your IT VAR business can be incredibly powerful. You can get in front of your prospects and clients as often as you want, put your thoughts into the market quickly and take the space to explain ideas that just won’t fit on a one-pager. And, you gain access to new leads … which take the trouble to find you (e.g., via Google) and take an interest in your content.

Since this form of marketing is still new, many companies are still feeling their way … and are making plenty of mistakes. If you’re thinking about launching a blog – or have one already – here are five common missteps. Just by knowing them, you’ll be able to enter the blogosphere informed and ready to demonstrate your company’s capabilities.

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One of the top concerns we’ve heard about blog-based marketing is scope. Most IT manufacturers and VARs do everything they can to build targeted lists and zero in on exactly the audiences they want. Blogs, it seems, go in exactly the opposite direction, giving you the entire web, even if your needs are limited to a company of a certain size, industry or region. A marketing blog can deliver on this, though it might not seem intuitive. The difference comes in how people use the web and find sites.

The fact that the web is worldwide doesn’t mean that everyone in the world is looking for your company or your blog. In fact, depending on how you write your blog content, the visitors who find it can be rather specific.

There are basically three ways to find a blog (or any website): direct access, online referral and search. The first, direct, means that the visitor either knows about the blog already or has learned about it offline (e.g., by word of mouth) and has decided to take a look. A referral occurs when a visitor hits your blog by clicking a link to it, either from an e-mail message or another website. Finally, there’s search. You top a few words into Google, Yahoo! or another search engine to find information or a particular website.

Let’s take a look at what this means for the people who come to your blog:

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