This can be very effective for local businesses looking to do Interenet Marketing.

Here are some tips to improve the results you get for your blog writing with a local focus.

1. Use your local keywords – but do not ignore the other smaller keyword targets.  Things like neighborhoods, small surrounding towns, parks, local sites etc.
2. Add your address in the footer of the blog and also use the city name in some of your blog posts.  Having it more than once (but not too much) will increase the ranking.
3.  Write about local businesses that are not direct competitors of yours.  For example, if you are a realtor you might talk about home inspectors or home stagers.
4. Write about the community – If I am writing for a restaurant then I would write about what it playing at the cinema down the street and also local events.

These are just some of the obvious things that I would cover to hit a local market.  Local markets have a huge advantage (especially in smaller cities) because there is much less competition and much better keyword focus.  Your blog writing will be a great local content marketing strategy that gets results.

You give out business referrals, you get business referrals back, and some of those turn into great leads.

With blogging, you link out to people and some people will link into your business blog.  This then results in more traffic, more people on your email list and eventually more sales.

Much like referrals, your business blogging ROI may not be easy to measure because it could take months for that link to actually generate business for you.

What things can you meansure to know if business blogging is working for you?

• Lead Generation
• Inbound Links
• Blog Comments
• Email Subscribers
• RSS Subscribers
• Twitter Followers

Business Blogs are also excellent for SEO with Blogs.  This can be measured by your SERP Ranking in Google for your blog and your organic search traffic.

Keep the metrics simple and understand which numbers actually lead to more money for your business.  While measuring your business blogging ROI may not be an exact science, you can become closer than you thought.

If you want to get more lead generation with blogs you are going to have to know your target market and know what your target market is searching for.  To market to your target market with a blog, you need to know what kind of information they are searching for if they are looking for your product.

When Buzzoodle sets up a lead generation site that uses blogs, we begin by doing the niche keyword research figure out what words are being searched on and how hard it is going to be to rank well for those keywords.

SEO with blogs can be extremely effective.  And if you set up a blog as a lead generation tool, you are going to get a great Blogging ROI if your product is the kind of thing people do searches to find.

Your Marketing Target Market Profile can be a combination of what you already know about your target clients, a good look at your keywords that currently generate traffic for you, keyword research and even surveys where you ask your clients how they found you and what they would search for to search for your product.