Starting out as an online journal, blogs have emerged into a cost-effective and easy way to build your brand online. An article from MSNBC introduced four constructive goals in addressing your site’s needs using a blog platform.

Goal 1: Provide Fresh Content

What types of content on your business website frequently changes? This is what you want to update regularly on your blog. Content may include upcoming events, sales promotions, press clippings, or informative articles about your products and services. Blogs will show your newest posts at the top while pushing older posts down the page, so you want to make sure what you post is more recent news than your last.  There are blog plug-ins that can serve your most popular or most viewed posts, above the fold to ensure relevance to your audience.

Goal 2: Stay Connected to Customers

Blogs aren’t meant for one-way communication. Just like in doing business, you have to attach another face to the scenario. Provide a comment area after each post where customers can provide input, feedback and opinions. Give the customer an area to comment on trends that you see in your industry or even submit their own testimonials about your services. The customer will feel more connected with your brand, and more likely to come back to read future posts.  Be sure to use a comment spam filter so your blog does not become a haven for spammers. A great filter is Akismet.

Goal 3: Be visible to search engines

Many SEO experts suggest launching a blog when concerning the improvement of search engine rankings for your business. Blogs effectively serve fresh content with keyword friendly URLs to your business site, which search engines love. These top keywords need to be what you want your business to be searched for, linking directly to your business’ site. This tactic will gradually increase search rankings, and potentially improve business.  Ongoing, relevant content not only educates consumers, but it also educates search engines about your industry knowledge, credibility and expertise.

Goal 4: Add new functions to meet change in technology

As technology is rapidly changing and growing, you will want to consider plug-ins compatible to your blog. To help maintain your brand’s reputation add video about the history of your brand or pictures from community involvement. These tools will keep you up to date with the fast-paced web technology and also provide variation to your site’s content.  Popular plug-ins that are now “must haves” include SEO-friendly plug-ins, comment spam filters, and other social media capabilities.

If you’re not comfortable with web technology or just have too much on your plate, you may want to turn to New Media Marketing & SEO professionals who have a strong understanding in how to execute these goals. Let Triangle Direct Media create and maintain a strong, growing social platform for your business.

Non-profit organizations are using online networks to aid in fund-raising. According to a survey, more than 85% of nonprofits around the country use social media. A particular nonprofit organization, Living Beyond Breast Cancer has recently won fund-raisers through Facebook, Blogging, YouTube, Twitter, and Flickr. Through online networking you can reach so many more people, and even people from areas around the world you never thought to reach. By increasing friends and followers on these social media sites, it can in turn increase funding and cause awareness.

With e-mail blasts, personal calls, and brochures fading out, social media marketing is becoming a trusted branding technique for fundraisers. Nonprofit organizations are drawing a special fondness to this strategy with the current economic situation, as being one of the most cost-effective means of promotion. With social networking also being the fastest way to get to people, Living Beyond is expecting to double their target of $100,000 from last year’s goal. This particular marking trend has continued to reach a vast majority of nonprofits in the last two years. Nonprofits call this process of social networking to raise funds as “social giving”.

Even with the current economic situation, 80% of retailers are claiming the web to be better fit for survival from the recession than offline retail. According to the 2009 State of Retailing Online: Marketing Report, e-commerce sales will increase 11% this year from $141.3 billion in 2008 to an expected $156.1 billion. Almost one-fourth of online retailers surveyed for the study have plans to spend more this year on their web business plan than had initially intended. Cutting back on areas such as staffing, retailers are now focusing on enhancing areas such as search and social media marketing in their online businesses.

Organic traffic was rated over 50% among effective marketing tactics to be used. To increase organic traffic, retailers are using high value marketing tools designed to help address and optimize their site’s performance. Improving areas such as site structure, on-page and off-page content, retailers can increase online exposure using highly-targeted links and social media. Such techniques will enhance performance, brand reach and usability for online customers, in turn, helping to maintain customer loyalty and generate incremental revenue lifts.

There is no doubt that online retail is making its shift from a surviving industry to a thriving industry. With the current economic scenario it has become apparent that traditional retailers must invest in their online presence in order to keep their retail business thriving during the economy’s down cycle. Even in a down market, there is still evident optimism for the internet marketing industry.