The whole wide of the web is teeming with blogs—Technorati has indexed 133,000,000 blogs since 2002 and according to Universal McCann, 77% of all Internet users read blogs regularly. But more than this influx of blogs on the Internet, what has got businesses interested is the fact that Technorati found out from their survey that out of 7,000 bloggers from 24 countries, 47.1% are influenced to buy a product or enlist a service after they have read about it in a blog. These are staggering statistics and only go on to reiterate the potential of blogs as marketing tools.

So how can B2B marketers brandish blogs to their marketing advantage? Here are some nifty tips:

• Make your blogs the voice of your employees. Encourage your employees to blog about the company—the products and services—and also share their views and express their opinions. Enhance your repertoire of blogs by requesting contributions from employees from varied business groups as well, like sales, marketing, Research and Development, and support. This will ensure that your blogs are never short on the uniqueness front—of perspective, content, and insight.
• Create riveting blogs. The popularity of a blog depends on how interesting it is to the readers. Let not your blogs assume the tone of a press release or a promotion copy and harp solely on the products and services that your business offers. Rather ask your employees to think of blogs as platforms to express their views and opinions. Encourage them to leave a slice of their unique personalities on their writings; there is nothing like a human touch to liven up things.
• Allow readers to comments. The immense popularity of the various social networking sites has stemmed from the fact that these podiums facilitate high levels of interaction and engagement between the users. So, to incorporate this feature of engagement in your blogs, allow readers to post comments.  This will also allow your blog to become a topic of conversation.
• Invite expert contributors. Analysts, executives, columnists, and technologists—these are the people with insider’s knowledge of the industry. Invite them to contribute blogs and you can be sure that their write-ups on emerging trends, comments on a raging debate, and perspectives on industry-relevant events will attract new readers and also enhance your credibility in the eyes of existing customers.

The above-mentioned tips will surely help B2B business owners harness the power of blogs to market their business.

Mobile devices are growing increasingly popular in the world and are forcing SMBs to become part of the online marketing game. Most companies are designing mobile versions of their websites to cater to these online customers. There are several trends that are expected to come up this year.

Real-time search is becoming more popular than search engine optimized pages. The year will also see the popularity of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook growing more. Many businesses have profiles in these social networking sites and are using them to stay in touch with potential customers, existing customers and employees. These companies are intent on making their presence felt online.

Companies are also creating their own content on their websites in the form of blogs, pictures and videos. Blogs not only help in getting a better search engine rank but also let companies share their knowledge and expertise with its visitors and employees.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is essentially a form of Internet marketing where a company creates brand awareness and markets its products through different social media sites. Social Media Optimization (SMO), on the other hand, refers to the attempt to attract more traffic to one’s website through unique content. There are several benefits of adopting social media marketing.

Brand Awareness:

The different forms of social media can help create better brand awareness and exposure through different communities. Traffic from social media sites is beneficial as you can target a large number of users and direct them to your site.

Links:

Links are an important part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search engines value the importance of links to your website. The higher the number of links back to your site, the higher the search engine rank that your website gets. Once your content is published on social media sites, the number of these links and the amount of traffic to your site will increase.

Managing your Reputation:

Social networking sites are good tools to manage your online reputation. Having a social media profile will give you better control over brand dialogues, which can be beneficial in the long run. As your content goes viral and gets promoted by site visitors, other people start noticing your content which will increase links and lead to a better search engine rank.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a form of marketing where you use search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing to market your products and services. There are almost 2 billion searches conducted online every day. SEM involves three elements- indexing, relevance and authoritativeness.

Search Engine Marketing is a broad field of advertising campaign that includes Organic Search Campaign as well as Paid Search Campaign. The purpose of both of these marketing campaigns is the improvement of the visibility of the ad campaign into SERP and to increase the number of targeted visitors. Organic Search Campaign is a free optimization technique where you need not pay anything to search engines. It helps improve your overall website quality and architecture. But the disadvantage of SEO is that it is time consuming and much more dependent on the right techniques and creativity. Organic search will give you more long term benefits than paid search. There are 4 major areas behind a successful Organic SEO plan. These are good quality, relevant keywords and meta title optimization, subject-wise user-friendly content, good quality and relevant inbound or back-links, and social media promotion.

On the other hand, paid search campaign like Google Adwords is a pay-per-click advertising technique that involves bringing about conversion through keyword bidding process; you pay and you get conversion. The fun part of this type of campaign is you have to pay your host only when your ad is clicked on. The higher you bid, higher the chance that your advertisement will appear at the top position in the search engine result page.

Authoritativeness refers to the popularity and the visibility of your site by search engines. You need to position your site as the trusted and knowledgeable resource of your industry. This way, it will be evaluated as more relevant and popular, which will help increase ranking. You can grow your company’s presence through social networking, blogs, publications, trade organizations, and associations. The idea behind this is to get as many link backs to the website as possible.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) includes Search Engine Optimization (SEO), paid advertising, and contextual advertisements.  You can optimize your website for SEM by following some of the tasks given below:

Research Your Plugins: Make sure that you choose software that has good SEM features and plugins that can be enhanced. WordPress has an All In One SEO Pack, which is a good plugin to optimize your website.

Understand SEO: Since SEM involves SEO, you need to have a basic understanding of Search Engine Optimization and how to make your site visible in search results.

Use optimized CMS software: You can consider using content management systems like Drupal or WordPress as they are optimized for SEM.

Increase Inbounds Links: Inbound links can help boost your website’s search results and give your site a higher ranking. Creating original and great content should be a priority.

Consider PPC Advertising: Pay Per Click advertising, or placing ads in search engines can help bring in traffic to your site. You can also keep track of site visitors using tools like Google Analytics and view which links, keywords and advertisements bring in most traffic.