Blogging is the branding component in BLiF marketing. BLiF marketing means using a combination of blogging, LinkedIn and Facebook to market your business.

Your goal with blogging should be to make yourself memorable. Creating or improving your brand should be the foundation of your marketing strategy. Blog marketing allows you to do this by communicating directly with your target market. Blogging allows you to reach a different audience than your website or your print ads.

Let’s continue with our real estate example. If your primary targeted customer is someone attempting to market their own property (FSBO), then you need to write about topics that interest these sellers. They will be searching for information on how to put their property up for sale. If your blog writing helps them, then you will be the real estate expert they will turn to when they are ready to list.

Using a keyword research tool, identify how your targeted readers search for their information. People preparing to sell their home will use terms like:

1. “how to sell your own home”
2. “should you stage your home to sell”
3. “home selling tips”
4. “home selling checklist”

Use these keyword phrases as ideas for blogs. Since you want local clients, always use city, community and neighborhood names throughout your blog postings.

When you write, use keyword phrases in the blog titles and in first paragraph. This helps your postings appear in search results. The blog titles should be catchy and memorable to attract readers. You should write regularly, about 3 times a week is ideal. Keep your blog postings to about 250 words in length.

How often has a customer called you and told you how much they have enjoyed reading your print ads? They will say this about your blog if you put energy, originality and creativity into your blogging.

Social networking and social media has been a hot topic lately because it’s becoming so hot in the real estate industry. BLiF marketing is a zero cost marketing approach using three forms of social media. BLiF marketing is a focused approach using blogging, LinkedIn and Facebook to promote your real estate practice. Over the next week or so, we will layout an overall social media marketing strategy for residential real estate sales and then show how to implement this in each of the three areas of BLiF marketing.

Remember that the purpose of BLiF Marketing is to communicate, engage and interact with your target audience. The purpose of your website is to be the advertising and promotion part of your marketing. They each are used in different ways, but they work together.

A Real estate sales has always been a trust based profession. It is the only industry where professional members almost always have their photo on their card. Trust is built up around personal branding and this translates well into social media marketing.

Overall Strategy
Before we develop separate strategies for Blogging, LinkedIn and Facebook, we want to develop a single cohesive strategy that will be used throughout.

1. Objectives: Set objectives for your marketing campaign. This could be developing a regular readership that will follow what you say as the local authority. You can use this campaign to boost your search engine rankings on your website. Personal branding as the authority is another excellent objective. You will want primary objective and then up to two secondary objectives.
2. Target Audience: Clearly define your market segment in terms of buyer, seller or relocation. Which geographical locations? What income brackets and other demographics. A focused campaign will get better results than a general and unfocused one.
3. Measurement for Success: How will you measure success? The measurement chosen should reflect the primary objective. This could be search rankings, leads or website traffic. You can shape your campaign around the results you want by working in a “call to action.”

Our next blog posting will focus on blog marketing for residential real estate sales.

Facebook is no longer a social networking website for the young college students. According to ComScore, the over 25 age group is the fastest growing age group.

Companies are marketing themselves on Facebook at an ever increasing rate. To be successful, the approach has to be very different than traditional advertising. Social networks such as Facebook are designed to foster human interaction, not to promote products. The idea is to engage your targeted audience with information that they are seeking. Is your targeted customer on Facebook?

Facebook Statistics

• 70 million active users.
• 6th most-trafficked website in the world (comScore)
• 2nd most-trafficked social media site in the world (comScore)
• Facebook is up 78.6% (year-to-year growth in unique visitors-Hitwise)
• No. 1 photo sharing application on the Web (comScore)
• More than 14 million photos uploaded daily
• Started in 2004

Demographics

• 34% of the visitor traffic comes from the US (ComScore Jan 2008)
• Gender (US) 45% male/55% Female (Quantcast.com)
• Household Income (US) 58% have a household income over $60K (Quantcast.com)
• More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
• The fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older

The small business owner is always looking for low cost or no cost opportunities to promote their business. The press release is an excellent way to do this. This can be self prepared and released to local media for free; as well as to online newswire sites.

Successful press releases should be a legitimate story that will interest a journalist and your targeted audience. Your press release should cover trends, issues and concerns for your niche or area. Stay away from blatant self-promotion, such as highlighting a new client or talking about how great your product or service is. A good press release answers all of the “W” questions (who, what, where, when and why).

Get to know your local media and the types of stories that they cover. Many of their stories may be dominated by wire stories; but look at the local stories. Who does these stories and what merits coverage? Get to know the editor what sorts of press releases he or she will use.

You should send your press release to journalists that cover your industry. Create a list of journalists that write about your market by looking at other news stories. Then locate their contact information by Googling them. After you send a copy of your release, follow up with a phone call.

If you want to promote your business to a wider audience, consider using the free and low cost online services such as Free-Press-Release.com, PRweb.com or PRzoom.com. More costly services include businesswire.com and PRNewswire.

Consider adding a press room to your website. Include resource materials including photos, history and other background info. Include links to other articles that have been published. This will help journalists easily make changes or additions to your press release.

There are quite a number of website statistical packages available and Google Analytics generally reports the lowest number of visitor traffic. Is it because Google Analytics is correct and the others are wrong? Or is Google Analytics just missing some of the traffic?

There are two types of web analytics technologies in use today.

1. Log File Analysis: This includes analytics such as Webalizer or AWstats. With these the web server records all transaction about visitors. Because the log files are on the web server, the data is logged no matter what browser or what settings the visitor is using.
2. Page Tagging involves a code being placed directly on the web page and reporting back to the analytics package the visitor data. This includes analytics such as Google Analytics and Statcounter. Page tagging works by using JavaScript and cookies (Google Analytics) or JavaScript / cookies (Statcounter).

So what causes the differences?

1. If the user has JavaScript or cookies disabled, Google Analytics will not report visitor traffic. It is estimated that  8-10% of users have JavaScript turned off.
2. Google Analytics will under report if the reporting is blocked by security software like Norton.
3. IP address based analytics will report the same person over and over if they use dial-up. This is because dial-up shows a different IP address with each connection. Since Google Analytics is cookie based, it will report a lower number.
4. Google Analytics has a very good ability to separate bots and spiders from actual visitors. Other analytic packages over report visitor traffic that are actual bots and spiders.

The true measure of visitor traffic is generally somewhere in the middle and is more than what Google Analytics reports and less than what the other web analytics reports. Use your analytics to measure trends and understand that the actual number of visitors may be somewhat different.

Within the last month, LinkedIn has added company profiles into their results. There are now profiles for 160,000 of the largest companies added onto the more than 20 million people profiles. These can only be viewed by members who are logged in.

Companies include the Fortune 500 to philanthropic organizations. The information for the company profiles is pulled from LinkedIn plus aggregated information that is pulled form LinkedIn’s partners, CapitalIQ and BusinessWeek.

LinkedIn selects these companies through finding trends in the work history of users and identifying connections between companies. Companies are not able to add their own profiles. In the next few months changes will allow employees to edit company overviews, upload logos, and add other custom modules.

These company profiles are resources for members to research and explore companies for both job and business opportunities.

Uses of LinkedIn Company Profiles

1. Locating contacts at companies that you are trying to network with.
2. View job opportunities.
3. Read latest company news.
4. See listing people that have recently joined the company.

Top 10 most viewed company profiles for the first month: source: LinkedIn Blog

1. IBM
2. Accenture
3. Microsoft
4. Google
5. Oracle
6. Hewlett-Packard
7. Cisco Systems
8. Pricewaterhouse Coopers
9. Deloitte
10. GE

So you have decided to enter social media with your business and publish a Facebook page. What kinds of things should you tell about your business to make it interesting for readers? You will want to focus on providing valuable information, tips and insights.

Your goal should be to attract and interact with “Fans.” A fan is the business term for a friend. Fans should be able to post reviews, comments, photos and comments about the company.

You will want to encourage visitors and prospective fans to interact with you and your business. After all… this is social media. You will want to allow and encourage participation.

1. Blog Feed: Include a feed from your blog. There is a feature in Facebook that allows you to grab the feed from your company blog and syndicate it on your Facebook page.
2. Portfolio: Include a portfolio of your work using photo albums, audio files or video. If you’re a home builder, include examples of your homes. If you are a musician, include snippets of your music.
3. Case Studies: Tell an interesting story of how you took your client’s vision and changed that into reality. What were the challenges and what did you have to overcome. People love to read stories and see successful outcomes.
4. Reviews and Testimonials: Include real reviews and testimonials that you have received. Allow fans to post their comments and reviews.
5. Location: If you have a physical location, include maps, driving directions and your address. Include a photo of your building so it is easier for people to locate your building.
6. Events: List any upcoming events such as workshops, special after hours gatherings or special promotions that are coming up.
7. Polls: Find out what your targeted audience is thinking by using Facebook polls.

As you craft your Facebook page, think about how you can involve and interact with your targeted audience. Consider how you will regularly update your business page to keep people returning regularly.

This is a great question. Many people have strong opinions and there is no single right answer. Should you keep a small trusted network of 30 or so connections? Or should you build an expansive network of thousands? It really depends on what you are trying to achieve. There are proponents of each approach.

I believe that the answer is somewhere in the middle.

It really is no different than face to face business networking. Is it better to network with a small group that you get to know very well? Or is it better to attend many networking groups and keep your name and your business in front of a larger audience? It really depends on your business and your goals.

On LinkedIn you can connect with professional colleagues from virtually any city in hundreds of different industries. Currently there are over 20 million people in the LinkedIn network and this is rapidly growing.

In selecting your connections, it should be quality over quantity. Before extending an invitation or accepting one, consider if this person will strengthen your network. Consider industry, location; are they potentially a good partner to give referrals to? Or receive referrals from? Quality should never just be someone with a lot of connections.

Develop your own criteria for building a quality network. Do you want like minded individuals with similar interests? Do you want to connect with people from a certain geographic area? Do you want people from specific industries or professions? You can include customers, people you work for, people who are working for you, and with you.

Connecting should mean that you are agreeing to collaborate. It is a gesture of trust. It should also be an opportunity for both parties. Whether you decide to build a small or large network, your goal should be to build a quality network that will help you meet your business goals.

Blogs will improve search rankings faster than almost any other method. Because of RSS, blogs broadcast new material faster than websites. Blogs are given more importance by the search engines. Links from blogs are given high importance by the search engines. SEO blog writing is a key part of business blog marketing and getting more website traffic.

How you write your blog posting is very important to get the best SEO results. These are the 5 important elements to a good SEO blog posting.

1. Keywords: Create a blogging plan that is highly focused for content and keywords. Choose no more than 5 keyword phrases and it is best if these phrases are selected around a single concept or subject.
2. Blog title: Use one of your phrases within the blog title each day. The search engines give high importance to the words in a blog title. Remember that when you craft a blog title, you want to attract readers and satisfy the search engines.
3. Prominence: Use your targeted keyword phrase at least one time in the first 25 words of your posting. The search engines place a higher value on text used near the beginning of the blog posting. Be careful not to overuse your your keyword phrase. Try not to exceed using it 3 times in the body of the posting.
4. Link text: Use your keyword phrase one time within a hyperlink. Use the exact phrase and link this keyword phrase to the most relevant page on the website you want to boost the rankings for.
5. Posting length: Blog posts should be approximately 250 words. Search engines prefer longer posting, while human readers prefer shorter posting. Blog postings of 200-300 words seem to satisfy both.

Businesses are using a combination of blogging, LinkedIn and Facebook to market and promote themselves and are getting great results. Businesses are using BLIF marketing to share information and network using social media.

BLIF marketing is an approach for businesses to make use of social media to market their businesses by spending time and not advertising expenses. BLIF is part of the Zero Cash Marketing approach where a business can market, promote and build a customer base without spending one dollar on marketing.

Melissa Ward of NewWard Development uses the combination of blogging, Linked In and Facebook. “I have been getting good results with the combination of the above. My web traffic has increased, more people are signing up for my newsletter and we’ve generated a lot of inquires. In addition, I’ve landed a few accounts with people that I otherwise would not have been able to reach out to.”

BLIF Marketing

1. Blogging: Creates awareness, generates traffic and is powerful for building search engine rankings
2. LinkedIn: Expands your professional network and is a great way to meet others in your market
3. Facebook: Use a pages (not profiles) to advertise your company and add a human face to the company.

You can use all of BLIF or only one or two of the tools and get great results. Others use many more tools in social media. Robert Dodson of BrookEdge Technologies says: “I work by using a cross-linked network of LinkedIn, Blogger, MySpace, Ning, Xing and several carefully crafted self-hosted sites. I am also on Facebook, ryze, naymz, etc., etc…”