What is blogging and the role it plays in reaching the target audience?

Blogging is the new trendy buzzword in the internet economy and in business dictionary. Every entrepreneur is competing with other entrepreneur to get a piece of attention in the overcrowded world of competition. Suddenly the digital marketplace has become the new “P” of marketing mix where absence is not anymore feasible for you and your business growth. So let’s see what is blogging? Why it is gaining foothold among startups? What are the benefits of it? How to do it?

What is blogging and micro-blogging?

Blog is also known as weblog. It is a way of expressing you thoughts into words and jotting them down on a webpage or website. It shows your thought leadership and potential, passion, creativity and knowledge in domain of expertise. (Mashable.com)

It’s short variant is called Micro-blogging, which is posting of brief and frequent online updates. They are mainly published on the social media channels such as Facebook or Twitter. (techterms.com)

Business blogging:

Blogging can be done for various purposes such as personal, business, schools, non-profits, politics, military, private, sports etc (wordpress.com). But we are going to focus on business blogging in this article.

Business blogging is “the strategy of creating short-form content (blogs) to exist on one area of your website (blog) in order to drive traffic to your website and create brand awareness of your company” quoted by Dayna Rothman in her course “ content marketing: Blogs”.

Why blogging is gaining prominence among businesses?

B2B Markerters who use blogs gets 67% more leads than who do not use them (Huffington Post), blogs are rated as the 5th most trusted source for accurate online information (Hubspot), By 2020 customers will manage 85% of their relationship without interacting with humans (Huffington Post).

Blogging has become trusted companion to influence customer’s purchasing decision as it is mentioned in the Her Blog. It says 81% of the US online consumers trust information and advice from blogs. And the company with blogs gain more leads than who do not as it helps them to gain new buyers and prospects.

Some of the benefits of blogging

- It also helps to establish authority and educate customers.

- It creates voice for the company and helps to generate inbound links.

- It boosts social ranking and amplifies social campaigns.

- It helps customers to connect with the company.

Which Blogging platforms to use and why?

There are many blogging platforms available in the market and most of them are free. Some of them are Wordpress, Blogger and Drupal. One should be aware of what type of platform is feasible for him. For example, Wordpress is free and suitable for non-technical people. It also has a community of programmers which offer new features and plugins to make blogging easy and efficient. So find out which blogging platform suits your writing goals and helpful in the long run.

How to start it?

It is just like dairy writing but you are doing it on webpage and it is accessible to the world. Remember blog’s primary purpose is to connect with people and share your message. For example, when you are launching a new website people hardly know about it. So to market your business to wide arena you should start blogging about what you do, why do you do it, benefits of it. Further digging into the ideal customer personas can help you target them appropriately. Once you identify your customer profiles, then start writing about answers for the queries they have. Do not forget to write dedicatedly and define the content calendar what to write, on which day, and for which customer persona.

In essence, blogging is an effective tool to connect with target audience. It is not expensive like other marketing endeavors. Your time is the only investment it demands. Writing a blog is an art because filtering out the right idea for right audience is not as easy as it seems.

Are you looking to start blogging or already doing? Please share your experience or any new insights you gained from it with us.

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Author Intro:

Dushyant Sethiya is a Co-founder at  Distribute11 ( Influencer Marketing Platform)  and CEO of Mandsaur Buildcon Pvt. Ltd.

He runs podcast " Entrepreneurship with Dushyant Sethiya" and writes frequently on entrepreneurship on Yourstory, YouthKiAwaaz, Citispotter, YFS Entrepreneur's Magazine and NextBigWhat. He also mentors aspiring entrepreneurs and startups on the EverWise mentoring platform.

He is a social activist and involved with Malwa Keshari NGO to promote sports activities in rural India. He has also written many Op-Ed articles on Entrepreneurship and Micro-finance for the Newspapers and he expresses his personal views on prominent issues via blogging. He is the author of the Book ” Micro-finance: A Helping Hand”

He did his “Post Graduate Diploma In Entrepreneurship” from Judge Business School, University Of Cambridge (England) and “Masters In International Business” from Leeds University Business School, University Of Leeds (England). Prior to that he completed his Bachelors of Engineering in Information Technology from RGPV University, India.

You can connect with him via Twitter @dushyantsethiya or [email protected] or Visit him at www.dushyantsethiya.com