Recently, we launched a new website titled www.coastalempire.com. It was designed using blog software and contains several blog articles. The purpose of this blog site was to "drive" traffic to our principal site www.savannahtraveler.com. We want to increase the number of visitors to this site by using blog marketing techniques.

Here is how blog marketing works and let's use a lawyer site as an example:

The main site is displayed at savannahlawname.com The law firm practices personal injury, workers compensation, family law and maritime law. In this case, we have four specific practices that we can develop a blog for each.

The first action is to secure a domain name for each specific law practice, such as: savannahlawnamepersonalinjury.com. don't worry about the length of the domain name, its the content that is important.

Each blog will be simply designed without a lot of distractions (flash, etc.)or slow-loading images/graphics. We want to emphasis each specific practice area and that is key to making blog marketing successful.

Each blog will contain great content that keeps the visitor on the site. Remember, content is always the most important feature on a website. Once we are satisfied with the content, we start populating the site with short articles, possible RSS feeds on the specific law practice and any other content that is relevant to the law practice we are blogging. Once we have added all of the features we feel are important to a visitor, we add a "call-to-action" button or statement that will encourage the visitor to go the "landings page" (main site) where they can request additional information or ask a question. sometimes, it is good to put a contact us or query statement on the blog but always use the forms that are the main site to capture the request. The reason for that is to capture the visit for statistical review. Most website hosting companies can provide a web tracker or statistical report that provides a lot of information on the number of visitors; what pages are they reviewing, etc. For a website owner, this important information because it provides the owner with clues on how to improve his/her website.

The final step is to properly prepare the page for indexing the site to the major search engines. this is called SEO or search engine optimization. Using a title, description and keyword(s)tags begins the process.

If you do all of this right, I can assure you that you will see a dramatic increase in the visitors to site and hopefully...buyers!