Feb
25
There are not enough hours in the day for you to meet each person, to cover each networking event, to plan, to produce and deliver your product and service. Marketing may be at the very bottom of your list – and suffering from a dangerous lack of attention. And, if you’re a solopreneur, it’s all up to you. It’s a shame you can’t walk through a copier and make a few clones of yourself, right? Well, you can. You can speak to your customers through a blog while you’re also doing all the other things to get your business going and keep it flying. It’s like making a copy of yourself. The blog never has to sleep or eat or take a coffee break. It’s always there, waiting to be found, and if you’ve grown up with the Internet, it’s how you’re finding people and businesses and the things you want to know anyway.
So, how does one use a blog to grow their business? Here are 6 techniques I’ve found to growing business with blogging.
Deliver value before they buy
The most frustrating blog posts are the ones that begin with a compelling title, “How to Lose 5 Pounds in 2 Weeks” and then after a few paragraphs of why it’s important to maintain a healthy weight they end with a link to a “paid” report that you have to buy to learn how to lose 5 pounds in 2 weeks. Arghh! Especially in this day and age, customers will rarely buy from you if they don’t find you credible, and they will use the value you provide on your blog as a factor in deciding if they want to buy from you. And that means you need to deliver value to them before they buy. If you’re a business coach, you can provide useful articles like this one on how to grow your business. If you’re a chiropractor or wellness expert, you can provide articles about relaxation techniques you can do while sitting at home. If you’re a realtor, you can provide articles like how to find out about schools in the area and how they are doing. These are all examples of providing value before they buy.
Stay on message
Do you know your niche? Then write to it! If not, there’s no time like the present to decide what your unique offering is and who your ideal client is. This is important! Get some help with this if you need it. Get out the trusty old business plan and review it as often as you write. Use it to keep you on target. If you’re a realtor, your blog’s power is diminished when you stop offering posts of relevance to people interested in buying or selling a home. If you’re a social media marketing expert, your blog’s power is diminished when you write a post about the latest Tom Clancy novel.
It is okay and wonderful to use “off-message” concepts and ideas that you relate to an on-message topic, like a post on the “Top 3 Things Small Businesses can Learn from the Avatar movie.” But, you need to remember that the on-message topic is most important, and consistently writing on-message will build your credibility and authority with your future customers.
Blog consistently and frequently
A blog that is updated once every few weeks or once a month will simply fail to gain (or hold) onto readership. Google will not rank highly websites with stale blogs. Frequent updates are important to the search engine’s algorithms. Frequent updates are also key for the people that you want to attract to your business. Simply, it is the rare blog that can hold onto readership when the blogger posts irregularly and infrequently. To have an effective blog, with a growing readership, you must commit to a plan, you must make blogging a regular part of your marketing plan and campaigns. Several times a week is a minimum. Daily is best. Try an experiment. Switch to daily or nearly daily blogging for two weeks and then evaluate your site’s traffic and stickiness (how often people stay around) – I bet you’ll see a positive difference from frequent blogging!
Write a compelling title
Cute titles are fun to write (and I’ve written many) but they are unlikely to draw in new readers. The blog post title are some of the most valuable keywords – the search engines rank the titles highly – so when you choose a title, choose a title that you think your prospective customers might search for. Examples are “How to Use a Blog to Grow Your Business,” or “Which Mill Creek Schools are the Best?” If appropriate, include a placename (e.g. Mill Creek) since a lot of people have learned to narrow their search results by including towns and cities in their searches. Yes, the occasional play-on-words title is great to mix things up, but the meat and potatoes of your titles needs to be food for the search-engine.
Spread the love
Find and visit sites of related businesses and devote some time to staying abreast of what they’re doing. Use a aggregator like Google Reader or FeedReader to make it easy to stay on top of a couple blogs. And then, spread the love. Post comments to those blogs and provide feedback on their articles. Be sure to include your URL and avatar so readers of the blog (and the blogger themselves) can come find your business. It’s like networking without even having to be there!
Make Your products and services visible
You are not blogging for blogging’s sake. To translate all those wonderful visitors into customers, you need to make it easy for them, when they are ready, to take the next step. In a visible but not annoying way, the pages with your blog posts also need to provide compelling blurbs and links to your products and services, to your special upcoming events and promotions. Make it so when they are ready to buy, they can simply do so.
A Call To Action
OK, you’ve got some valuable information here. When are you going to act on it? How about today?! With these six techniques you can use your blog to build attention and following for your business and establish your credibility and authority in your niche. And with that, by having your product or service visible, you can convert those loyal blog followers into loyal customers and grow, grow, grow! Don’t put this off another day.
