How Vertical Blogging Helps With Marketing
Blogs are an excellent way to interact with your customers, both present and prospective, provided they are informative. According to most expert bloggers, successful blogs are those that help the reader or customer find timely solutions to their problems. Solution oriented blogs are not only good for reading but contribute to sound business sense as well. Recently, however internet marketing and blog specialists concur that blogging has taken a completely different route - it has gone vertical. In other words, vertical blogs are the current blogging sensation making huge rounds in the business world.
In order to understand vertical blogs, it’s important to have an idea about vertical markets. Vertical markets, also called niche markets, are essentially those areas in a business that are closely connected to yours. Businesses that are closely aligned with each other, often share similar customers - if not the same and should be targeted using the same marketing strategies for successful promotion.
Given that aligned businesses are coming closer and sharing marketing strategies, it’s not surprising that they have adopted the concept of vertical blogs. Vertical blogs are nothing but blogs that focus on a particular niche or aspect of the industry connected to your business. In other words, vertical blogs talk about a specific aspect of your business, which is related to yours, although it is not your exact area of business.
The biggest advantage of vertical blogging is the direct increase in traffic to your website. In other words, when you write blogs on topics that are broadly connected with your area of business but not specifically limited to yours, you are targeting all those people who are interested in such areas. For example, if your business is kitchen décor and you have many blogs on that matter, a vertical blog could be specifically on topics like in-house lighting or recipes or even nutrition etc. Experts believe that people interested in any one of these similar topics will automatically link to your site, if only to find out more about you and your business. This results in more traffic to your website, especially to the interested category.
The first step toward incorporating vertical blogs in your marketing arsenal is to identify all allied niches. Identifying such niches is easily done by searching the kind of audience you want to reach out to and matching it with the kind of websites it usually targets. In short, make a list of the people who are likely to require and benefit from your services. Secondly, it is important to ensure that your message in such vertical blogs is essentially what the customer wants to hear or learn about.
Finally, focus on offering timely solutions in your blogs as this is the key to successful vertical blogging. Understanding your target audience and their needs and requirements will help you in developing these specific blogs. Furthermore, it helps in determining the kind of engagement you visualize and expect from your audience.