Earlier this week I was interviewed by Janet Beckers of Wonderful Web Women for her Online Marketing teleseminar program. It was a great call, I really enjoyed it. I’ve put together a summary of what was learnt; its a bit like a cheat sheet written from the call content!

I discussed my Three P’s of Online Marketing. A successful online marketing strategy needs:

• Presence - you need a place online, ie a website or blog. Simply put, you need to have a place where people can find you and you can start interacting with them;
• Promotion - use online tools such as search engine optimisation (SEO), and offline methods, like brochures, business cards and networking to promote your website or blog;
• Persuasion - use your blog to persuade people to join your mailing list.  It’s much easier to persuade them to join your list first and then allow them time to get to know you and become a customer - ideally through the medium of an email newsletter. 

So your blog may become your presence online and by fully taking advantage of the possibilities with the Wordpress software which runs your blog you can actually make your blog your primary website with pages and tons of other functionality.  A Blog will also provide the ultimate SEO tool, as Google loves blogs and they are easily optimised for search engines.

Your Email Marketing in the form of an ongoing newsletter becomes your persuasion tool. Your blog or website should ultimately capture visitors details so that through your newsletter you can turn prospects into clients.

This is how an Email Newsletter in combination with a Blog can be A Winning Mix.

A few other points about Blogging that were covered on the call;

• Blogging is an ideal medium for small business owners and solo entrepreneurs to market yourself online. A blog (short for web log) is a website where content is entered and displayed in chronological order, with most recent entries at the top of the page. Blogs can be simply text, or may include other media such as images, videos, audio and links to websites.
• Bloggers, or blog authors, write about anything and everything - both personal and business - which is why blogging is the perfect way to position yourself as an expert on your chosen topic. Some bloggers use their blog as their main website and even make money from it.
• I expect blogging is going to really take off and expect savvy business owners to get into blogging in a big way to market and grow their businesses online.
• Your blog allows you to have a two-way conversation with your target market, as readers can comment on what you are writing about. From a business perspective, this allows you to be in direct contact with your prospects and customers and, as an added bonus, search engines love blogs and rank their content highly for a number of reasons.
• There are several options to set up your blog: hosting on your own domain or getting a free blog, which is hosted by the blogging provider. As a business blog, I would recommend hosting your blog on your own domain because you have control and it provides better branding for your business.
• I recommend Wordpress or TypePad for blogs, and primarily work with Wordpress for my own and my clients blogs. Wordpress is free software that you can load up onto your own domain and hosting account. TypePad hosts the blog for you on your domain after you set up an account (there is a free trial).