Today I was asked to provide a brief statement for a Nashville Chamber of Commerce event coming up next week. The statement was supposed to give “three reasons why businesses should embrace social media.” I couldn’t think of three things. I could think of one. Then I thought of about ten. Then I wrote this:

Businesses only need to embrace social media if they’re ready to listen and ready to talk. There are many great tools that let you do this better today for less money than ever before. The tools are great but they’re not magical. The new technology can help your business but only if you’re ready to think and act differently. The talking and the listening are what make it social. When you take them away it’s just the same old media. You are the one who makes it social. The tools just help you listen to the right people, talk to the right people, and spread the message to more of the right people.

I think that’s pretty much social media for business in a nutshell.

If you have a blog I hope you see it as a strategic marketing tool for your business or organization because it is. One thing you should be doing is blogging specific keywords and phrases that describe you and your business, products, or services. If you have a Google AdWord account you have already identified the keywords you want to be recognized for, so why not use those same keywords straegically in your blog post titles and throughout the posts themselves?

The stats I continue to see pop up after doing a little research suggest that 70% of online searchers prefer natural search results compared to paid search results like AdWords. That’s why it’s important to be found on the left-hand side of the Google search page more than the right-hand side. You get more than twice the traffic.

Here’s how it can work…

Let’s say I want to be discovered as a new media marketing or social media marketing expert in the Nashville area (which would be nice but I personally don’t want to be too geographically fixed so I wouldn’t necessarily use these specific combinations of keywords). I would probably do a steady stream of posts over the course of several months where I would use the words “social media” or “new media” and “Nashville” in the post titles and through the blog posts themselves. I would also look for variations on these keywords like “social media marketing” and “middle Tennessee” or “new media marketing” and “Nashville-area.” I could even get more specific with phrases like “social media consulting” or “new media coaching” and then also tie that into the Nashville or middle Tennessee keywords.

As you can see there’s a lot that can be done here and it’s just the beginning. There are all kinds of alternative phrases I haven’t even gotten into like digital marketing, online advertising, interactive media, interactive marketing, etc. I expect if you just took 15 minutes to focus on the keywords for your business you would come up with a nice, long list too. Once you get your list, identify the top ten most important ones so you know where to put the bulk of your energy.

One more thing to do is to really focusing on tagging your posts with the same keywords as you’ll see I’ve done below with the same keywords that you use in your posts. Jeff, over at Mossy Creek Custom saw a great increase in traffic to his blog once he started tagging more specifically.

After a few weeks start searching the keywords to see if your posts are turning up. Also, check your stats and see if there are some specific keywords that seem to be sending a lot of people to your blog. You may be surprised

So, to recap, here are four things to do:

1. Identify your keywords. If you haven’t identified your keywords with a Google AdWords account, take some time to create a list of all the phrases you would hope to be found under in a Google search. After this, pick out the top 10 that are most important and start with those.
2. Post strategically and regularly. If you post four times a week, maybe one of the four posts every week will be a strategic post with your selected keywords. You should plan to do this for a few months to get good coverage because it may take that long before you see it show up on Google depending on how competitive your particluar market is.
3. Tag you posts. Tag well. Tag often. Tag like you marketing life depends on it…ok, not that much, but you get the idea.
4. Measure. Check to see what’s working and what isn’t. You may have some surprisingly high performing keywords that you didn’t expect. If so, you should consider blogging about them more often.