Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Marketing Your Small Business with BLIF Marketing

BLIF marketing stands for Blogging, LinkedIn, and Facebook marketing. It uses three pillars of social media marketing that allows small businesses to market themselves for literally zero dollars per day, taking only your time. BLIF marketing uses these three powerful social media tools that when used together, produce powerful results.

Blogs are for Branding
Businesses are taking on Blog marketing as a mainstream marketing strategy and are reaping the rewards in terms of new inquiries, customers and business. Blog marketing can increase exposure, generate buzz, and create a global message to which individual customers can respond.

Blogs define you as the authoritative expert in your marketing niche. For blog marketing to be effective, the content must be fresh and interesting enough to attract readers and be good enough to get other bloggers to link to the postings.

Combining business blog marketing and traditional website marketing is especially effective when you start up a new business. Blogging is one of the fastest ways of announcing your business and spreading the word quickly about what you do.

The blog should provide interesting reading and resource materials to your targeted customers. The blog will much more quickly gain a readership following if the content plan is good and your blog should allow interested readers to find navigation links to your website.

LinkedIn is for Professional Networking
LinkedIn dominates business networking and professionals are joining the social networking site to keep in touch with colleagues and business contacts. LinkedIn allows users to create and maintain a list of their professional contacts to be able to network to grow your business.

One of the keys for successful LinkedIn networking is to spend some time building up a complete profile. Your profile is one of the central ways that others will seek you out to network with you. The more information you share on your profile, the more searchable you become and more chances you will be able to make a real connection with someone.

Facebook is for Social Networking
Facebook is the social networking piece and works at a more personal interaction level. Facebook is about building relationships. Facebook is one of the most powerful social networking services available and is very popular with small business owners.

Facebook becomes the social networking platform of choice for professional networkers. Facebook has a much wider range of services than LinkedIn because of the large number of third-party applications that people can install and use. It is a more flexible medium of communication.

Are there other areas of social media that can be used? Of course! But the premise of BLIF marketing is to establish a core strategies that can become the social media marketing foundation.

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