Benefits of Blogging over Snail Mail
The United States Postal Service has announced that it will drastically cut back its services and lay off tens of thousands of workers. Businesses that have relied on post office services are groaning, how will they cope? While the loss of jobs for postal workers is a serious problem, the problems faced by businesses are rather insignificant. Important documents are never sent through the post office, FedEx, UPS and many other private carrier services handle those documents.
Paychecks which are important to all workers are mostly done by direct deposit. Though some are still mailed conversion to direct deposit is not difficult. Banks make it easy to do and payroll software does the pay calculations for most large payroll runs by payroll services and companies with complicated payrolls. Even the government pays Social Security benefits by direct deposit only!
So, who cares if this service cut is the beginning of the end for the United States Postal Service? It appears that some companies that market by direct mail do. They are under the impression that direct mail marketing is an efficient way to market. That is so 20th century! The truth is that the most efficient way to market is utilizing the Internet and its social networks to blog about brands, products and stores as well as offer coupons. Local search is eclipsing all other forms of marketing and for those who know their SEO the post office’s downfall has a silver lining.
Savvy Internet marketing companies know that local search marketing is far more targeted than direct mail. Groupon is a great example of local search and SEO. Printable coupons are another form given both local and national companies can use such coupons to direct people back to their website, if only to view the products for sale. Blogs on company websites are common, blogs can be enriched with SEO that returns high search engine rankings. Folks who blog professionally can incorporate other mediums such as photos, sound or even video into their blogs. The added mediums are indexed differently than plain text by Google and other search engines. A good meta description and tags will likely improve search engine results. As the spiders cannot read photos, sound or video they rely on the descriptions and tags – basically they take your word that the information is relevant. So, mastering SEO is more than keyword placement, it is understanding how video, images and sound can have well written tags that will enhance your search ranking.
Blogging platforms such as WordPress allow you to add these items already. In fact, WordPress adds your tags to their internal tagging catalog helping you get found more quickly on their site. As your traffic increases so does your ranking.
Blogging is a vital marketing tool because subscribers screen themselves. Say you are a book lover who buys books at the local book store for cash. To find a customer by direct mail and maybe offer them a coupon one has to mail thousands of pieces. Most of which are tossed in the trash or used as a coaster. But, if you are signed up on my book lovers site, and I actively blog there with posts that interest you, an online coupon will get your attention. Blog readers are committed to the blogs they follow and have a natural trust for sites they are involved in. Of course, this trust must not be abused. But engaging content, that provides actionable information will keep folks coming back. Moreover, they very well might Twitter their friends about your blog or post it on their Facebook wall. Your target market actually becomes your marketing partner.
While I do hope that the postal service can find a way to survive, after all its existence is a constitutional requirement, the encouragement it may give to businesses to look hard at SEO use in marketing will help some companies to recognize the overall superiority of Internet marketing and the importance of SEO.
