I’m on a major blogging binge right now. Mainly a blog is a great to bring in web traffic who are interested in subjects related to your business that you cover. From there, you can begin generating leads with subtle prompts and promote your services or products in the sidebar. As long as you stay committed to providing value for your readers, it works.

I cover every aspect of blogging in assisting my small business marketing clients in their online marketing campaigns. You can email me at kurbprom@gmail.com

I blog because I use it to get into my head and get ideas out and established and processed. Bringing in traffic and readers is a happy bonus, but I still remain distinctly aware of exactly how to leverage my blogging to create income.

Obviously I’m moving away from music promotion as the largest part of the work I do personally, and that’s where I’ve been active building up content since about a year ago. As I’ve said before, my blog provided a nice platform to atttract highly targeted visitors where the broad net of myspace was beginning to provide diminished returns. Now, I rely on pay per click as my main marketing strategy and my blog and myspace presences provide a small feed into the leads I get.

I’m looking at what I am moving into and profitability in the short term is still a big priority for me because activities that generate cash won’t hinder any other project I want to get going.

But regardless, the concept is in leveraging content. On a blog, you’re leveraging content for attention and building a relationship with readers that create trust and authority in your brand.

But strong written content doesn’t need a blog to be leveraged, especially if you’re really only trying to generate traffic that results in sales. Article marketing is an excellent way to generate traffic and SEO without having to keep a blog updated and developing.

You do have to recognise though that strong communication through strong content is fundamental to success online, it’s just a question of how valuable blogging can be to certain businesses and their marketing requirements.

Sometimes, the value you place on your content is high enough that you may want to leverage it in a different way.

With my membership site, blogging is not an effective strategy because I want to leverage that content to create value for the paying members. In a lot of cases, depending on your product or service, building a relationship isn’t necessary if you’re qualifying the value of what you offer in very explicit terms - as in, you’re really providing a bargain and it’s not a product or service that is directly linked to you building a strng and trusted associated brand.

So here you can see, when I’m promoting my digital coaching and online marketing services for small businesses and entrepreneurs here, and the same services but directed toward musicians artists and talent, I’m using my blog to create the authority and trust you’d expect from a provider of this kind of service.

Where as if you take the approach I’ve employed with my youtube promotions there are far more defined outcomes - there’s production packages - you pay for a video, you get a video. There’s promotion packages, where we guarantee a certain amount of views.

This is not the greatest example. The best example is a product that does something once and then it’s done. The customer is happy that it does what it said it would, you qualify that outcome strong enough in your marketing to the qualified target, you don’t need to blog about it every other day.

Perhaps my cheap graphic design site is a better example. I don’t want to write about cheap graphic design on a regular basis in order to build SEO or authority or anything else.

I just want them to get in touch with me personally so I can order the work and start the process. That is done best by targeting people who need the work done, not by doing the extensive groundwork it would take to build authority and maintain a community around a blog that would generate warm fuzzy positive branding word of mouth traction.

Don’t get me wrong, blogging is a great strategy, but there are times when you may as well just put more money into pay per click and save yourself the hassle.

If you need small business marketing strategies, I’m your man. Whether it’s blogging, pay per click advertsing campiagns, building and promoting websites, graphic design and print, social media - making money with ideas, basically. My rates start from $100 p/week and my email is kurbpromo@gmail.com