One powerful marketing tool which benefits from a blog is running contests. If you hold promotions or like to engage your customers with prizes, a blog can be quite a powerful tool for extending your reach and increasing the excitement. Here are a few ways to use your blog to run competitions or contests.
The first use of a blog is quite simple. It can be used to advertise. While informative blogs can be great for engaging customers who go searching for specific information, your customers are unlikely to share these posts with their friends unless they happen to know that their friend needs that specific information. However, if you are doing giveaways or contests with prizes, you drastically increase the likelihood of your posts being shared through social networks. This means that instead of sweeping selectively for people who are interested, you cast a wide net, in the hope that some of those you reach will be interested. At the very least, a larger audience can be used to market to. Therefore, the use of the blog as a site for contests means that you will be able to double dip: exposing people who are interested in your blog to the contest, and exposing people who are interested in the contest to the rest of your content.
This use of social media networks is a key component of a successful business blog. The more that you can incentivise your readers and your customers to share links to your site on social media, the better opportunities you will have to reach broader audiences. This will improve your SEO, and improving your ranking on search engines will have far reaching and powerful effects on your success. The greater the number of keyword filled pages indexed, the better your chances are for finding interested parties on the web. So keep building up that library of pages, and find ways to encourage sharing.
Finally, contests can be a tool for encouraging action and interaction. One of the most difficult things to do online is to get people who are browsing without commitment to take some action. Every business owner would love to be able to get their readers to transform interest into action. Contests can be the tool which encourages action by giving them an incentive. Once you give someone something to gain, you can greatly increase the likelihood of them putting some time and effort into your system.