One of the very common questions that I get when I tell people that I do training in blog marketing, is that – “You mean you don’t need a website? Just a blog will do?”

Well, unfortunately, blogging and blog marketing is more often than not only part of a marketing strategy. Any business that aspires to build an online presence still needs a professionally designed website with proper sales copies and a mixture of other marketing methods like email marketing or pay per click campaigns.

What blog marketing outperforms the other marketing channels are in three areas.

#1 Search Engine Optimization

As illustrated with a recent experiment with the post on the IT Show in Singapore, a frequently updated (at least 5 posts a week) blog can easily capitalize on trends in search terms.

A carefully planned blog archive (not mine) will also be able to target search terms on a longer term, because of the sheer mass of the archive. If you just write five posts a week, you will find your blog will have over 250 different “pages” of pure text by a year! Perhaps the ease of posting a post makes it so much easier. You could do the same with a regular website, but creating the file offline and uploading sounds like a hassle.

#2 Social Media Marketing

Blogs are the core of user generated content and a key aspect of social media. Word travel fast in the blogosphere, especially when the blogger is in touch with other bloggers in the same topic. The use of RSS, tag and ping, as well as the advent of blog aggregation services like Technorati and BlogPulse make syndication and distribution of content easy.

#3 Relationship Building without Spam

Regular websites are normally passive and the marketing message is one way. Email marketing changed that, with the use of powerful autoresponder systems. However email is also now plagued with spam, and indeed spam is a very big problem.

The great thing about blogs is that blogs let you build relationship with people, minus the spam. Think of it this way – email marketing is a “push” technology. You have to “push” that information to your email subscribers. These people may have different tolerances for information overload, and while 1 email a day might be great for one subscriber, another one might think that is simply overload. Email also intrudes into their regular daily activities – your marketing promotions might lie within other more important email messages, like instructions from your subscribers’ boss! These are bound to be ignored.

Blogs on the other hand, is primarily “pull” marketing. Of course, you might argue that you can probably get more people to read your message with email, but the question is – how many of these people are targeted customers, at that point in time when they double-click to open your mail? When people come to your blog, or open their RSS readers, they are already ready for information to come in.

You can push emails, but you can’t push people to come to your blog. The strategy has to be attraction.

Blogs are an essential part of the total online marketing strategy, and it is one that complements other channels of marketing. Any business that wants to really capitalize on SEO, social media marketing and relationship building (without spam!) should start a blog.

And they should start now.