Does blog marketing works in the Malaysian market? It sure does!

Before I proceed any further, you have to understand that there are many things a blog can do for your business. There are also a lot of things blogs cannot do.

What it can do is bring visitors’ traffic to you. The same visitors can then be converted to prospects and ultimately into customers for your business.

Let me show you a case study of the blog I setup for my father. My father was a driving school instructor for more than 30 years. He has vast experience in teaching new students how to drive a car and motorcycle.

Initial analysis shows that there are not a lot of web sites with information specifically about the driving school industry in Malaysia. The key phrases I was shooting for was “driving school Malaysia” because is has quite a good monthly search demand. I then purchased the domain www.driving-school.com.my and install a Wordpress blog on it.

Here’s what I mean about blog bringing in visitors’ traffic. As of today, the blog is ranked number 1 and number 2 in Google for the key phrase “driving school Malaysia“. There are more than 400,000 total results.

What kind of traffic is the blog getting?

From a period of January 19^th 2010 to February 18^th 2010, the blog has a total of 9,325 visitors and total page views of 21,791 times.

As you can see from the screen capture below, since inception until mind of February 2010, the blog has attracted 47,778 visitors with a total page view of 120,631 times.

Does the blog gets inquiry from students that want to learn driving? Oh yes!

Unfortunately I have to turn them down because my father is already retired.

In conclusion, a well maintained blog with regular content updates will get lots of visitors’ traffic. With the right process, the same visitors can be converted into hot leads for your business.

Do you want to know how you can use blogs to promote your business in Malaysia? If you do, click here…

Search engines, especially Google love blog. Blogs have many advantages versus a static web site.

A blog platform such as Wordpress was built with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in mind. Meaning, a blog web site will attract Google indexing program hence making your web pages being found and indexed by Google faster.

How do potential customers find your business? How do you tell the market about your product or service?

The Old Advertising Medium

The old advertising medium a small business has access to is the Yellow Pages directory. A company buys small text or graphic ad in the Yellow Pages and positioned it in a specific section of the directory. The Yellow Pages directories are sub divided into different location.

All the companies in the Kuala Lumpur locality will be placed in the directory for Kuala Lumpur. Companies in the Selangor state will be placed in the Selangor directory.

How does a person use the Yellow Pages?

A person looking for a certain product or service will look at the Menu section of the Yellow Pages, flip through the specific section and then browse through all the ads listed on the particular page.

New Advertising Medium With Blogs

The evolution of the advertising medium for small business owners is the web. To make use of the web, you have to utilize the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.

People are now using the internet to search for information. Here’s an example on how people search for information, product or service on the internet and how we can utilize the power of blogs.

Imagine a person staying in Subang Jaya, Selangor and he is looking to purchase a new fax machine. He goes to his computer and launches his Internet Explorer software. He then goes to the Google search engine.

With fax machine on his mind, he types in “fax machine” in the search box and press Enter. The following is the search results from Google.

Under the key phrase “fax machine”, there are a total of 34,100,000 results. The result is very broad and he has to narrow down his search query.

Since he is located in Subang Jaya, he types on the phrase “fax machine subang” and hoping to find some information nearer to his locality.

The follow is the search results from Google.

The search results have now been narrowed down to only 8,040.

The first result listing has the keyword “Fax Machine Subang Jaya” in it and matches very closely to his query.

Clicking on the link, he sees the following web page / blog.

The web page / blog was created specifically targeting the key phrase “fax machine Subang Jaya”. The person, staying in Subang Jaya and having an intention to buy a fax machine has just found your web site.

The next step is to make your contact details clear so the potential customer will pick up the phone and call you for a quotation. (Note: The blog above is one of the customer that subscribed to my blog marketing service).

What I have explained above is how you use the power of blogs and search engine to attract a lead or potential customer for your business.

To learn how you can use the power of blogs to get potential customers to your business in Malaysia, click here.

If you have a business, should you use blogs as part of your marketing medium? Personally, if you want to get the word out about your business and if you do not use blogs, you are missing a great opportunity.

How do you use a blog to promote your business? Simple, you use it to attract the search engine.

For some reason, search engine such as Google loves blog. If you are planning to have a web presence for your business, getting a static web site designed is not the way to go.

Most corporate web site in Malaysia is nothing but an online brochure. If you are a large public listed company (PLC), the web site has its own function, i.e. quarterly reports, directors’ information, business information etc.

If you run a small business or a professional service, having a brochure about your business on the web simply does not work.

Firstly, you will not get any traffic because no one can find your web site. Go ahead and check your traffic log, the amount of traffic to your site is pretty low. The amount of time a particular visitor stays on your time is even worst.

Why is this so?

This is because there is no or lack of engaging content.

It is quite hard to upload new content into a static web site. Unless you know html coding, you can forget about doing it yourself. Most probably you will get your web designer to upload new information or updates about your business. And every time you do that, there will be a charge.

A blog on the other hand is much easier to add new content. In the online world, good and original content is “king”.

If you were to surf the web about Malaysian businesses, very few use blogs as a content distribution platform.

There are a lot of social bloggers though. But you shouldn’t use blogs for “fun”, a smart business owner should use blogs for “fund”.

So, if you are planning to market your services online, go for blogs instead. Static web sites are stupid!

To learn how to use blogs as an online marketing medium to promote your business in Malaysia, click here.