Unleash The Power Of Your Business’ Blog

Want An Effective Digital Marketing Presence?
Keep It Fresh

Dan Kennedy is one of the foremost marketing experts of our time.  His track record includes taking entrepreneurs from, well, entrepreneurial dreams to seven-figure incomes and multi-millionaire wealth.  He edits six business newsletters, and influences more than a million business owners every year.

Kim Walsh-Phillips is the CEO of Elite Digital Group, and an award-winning speaker, author, and marketer. She makes her entrepreneur clients wealthy by insisting they focus – like lasers – on results.  On the all-important Return On Investment (ROI) of every marketing dollar they spend.

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So if these two highly-regarded experts say you should keep your web presence fresh by establishing and maintaining a great web log (or “blog”)… you probably should.

And in their blockbuster book, the No B.S. Guide To Direct Response Social Media Marketing, they say exactly that.

“A blog?” they ask.  “Yup.  It’s not optional,” they then answer.

“It is the core foundation of an effective (online) marketing strategy.”

First, Be A Friendly Resource

Does your website hit visitors over the head with sales messages… and pretty-much nothing else?

How’s that working out for you?

Not surprisingly, that’s not what the experts recommend.

“Start with value,” says the No B.S. Guide (emphasis added), “and only then ask for the sale.”

Engage your target audience.  Make them followers.  Build trust.  Nurture them.

“Raise your relevancy by offering great content to identify your target market,” the experts say.  “Only once they have been nurtured should you sell.”

In other words, if your site includes an effective blog – regularly-refreshed content your ideal prospects would find unique and useful (to them), your site’s chances of helping you turn strangers into prospects and prospects into customers go up dramatically.

The idea is to create a series of escalating “micro-commitments” for visitors to your website.

Eventually, you want them to buy from you, repeatedly, and tell all their friends and acquaintances how wonderful your business is.  Before that, they’ll buy just once.  Before that, maybe they’ll take a low-cost (or free) “trial” sample of your product or service.

And before that, all they’ll want is content.

Useful, free, happy-to-have-it content.

Written pieces that inform, involve, intrigue, and inspire them.

Content that influences them.

And that’s why you need to provide a top-notch blog on your site.

But how?

What makes for an effective, powerful blog?

The Experts Suggest These Best Blogging Practices

Kennedy, Walsh-Phillips, and other experts have a few ideas for you.

  • Have some goals.  Great goals for your blog content include getting folks to stay on your site longer (the search engines like that), establishing yourself as an expert, sharing case studies and success stories from others of your customers, and getting more leads for your business by giving readers the opportunity to sign-up for regular content updates.
  • Create a “voice” for your blog.  Think about your ideal readers.  (By the way, these would be your ideal customers… not your mom or your best buddy from high school).  What type of folks are these, generally?  Are they technically-minded, or more inclined to want a good story?  Formal (highly unlikely) or informal?  Informal, or downright casual?  Nobody knows the customers you’re seeking better than you do.  So write to that audience.  And write the way they talk, in plain conversation.
  • Plan ahead.  The best blogs have a “calendar” of content, and they stick to it faithfully.  After all, your blog may be what people read these days instead of a newspaper.  If you get your ideal prospects to expect regular installments from you, and to be curious about “what’s next” in your series, well, that’s a huge win.
  • Create a theme or themes related to your business.  For instance, a company in the health space might blog about nutrition every Monday and Thursday, about exercise every Tuesday and Friday, and about supplements or other health-related topics each Wednesday.  Within each theme, you might create sub-topics or article series which your readers can expect each week and which fit nicely into a monthly or quarterly content calendar.
  • Repost your blog content on social media.  Essentially, reposting your blog content on those sites is great for sending traffic back to your site… where readers might well start making those micro-commitments that form their journey toward your customer base.
  • Link to other sites.  There are many websites out there that your ideal prospects will find useful… put links in your posts to those sites.  And ask other bloggers to link to your site.  You might be surprised how often they’ll say “yes.”  After all, they want to be helpful to their readers, too.
  • And don’t be a windbag.  You’re not publishing novels, here.  Five hundred or so words… that’s a great length for each article on your blog.

Your website wants to help you sell your products and services.
But it can’t help you if you try to “set it and forget it,” leaving nothing there but the sales messages you added when you first published the site.  You have to keep it fresh.  If you unleash the power of your blog, your readers will appreciate it.  And they’ll be much more likely to become your customers, too.

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