If you are in business, you’re in business to make money right? Presumably you’ll make more money when more people visit your website, and buy a product. Or maybe they call you to make an appointment; maybe they need to fill out a form. Whatever they need to do to become customers, you can increase the chance of that happening with a blog. Essentially, you can make money by blogging.
A big part of being online today is producing content. David Meerman Scott said recently when he came to Orange County, that no matter what your business is, you’re now a media company. And he is right.
You not only have an opportunity to share and produce stories, and information, but you have the opportunity to connect with potential customers like you’ve never had before. Just a quick tip though before we go any further: Whatever you do, please don’t blog about you or your product all the time. Instead, blog about the things that your customers are interested about.
A perfect example is a travel agency, or hotel, or another hospitality type of business. They should be blogging about the locations, people and attractions that their potential customers are interested on. NOT their rates and not their specials. A restaurant should blog about the local farming community and how the ingredients used in their food come from sustainable local resources for example.
This is how you sell things today. You must build a trust base and be the one the provides information when it is needed. Remember, people search online all day and all night. They’ll search from their computer, but many searches are now coming from their mobile device.
Many people will not wait until business hours to call you to ask you questions about a fancy destination (if you’re a travel agency like I mentioned above). They will go online and research it. They’ll find out most of the information they are looking for on their own. It just makes sense that you should be the one that provides it.
When you blog, you take care of two very important aspects of your business. The first is customer education. Always be providing the data, stories and information that is relevant to your customers when they need it; that means when they are searching for it. The second business benefit of blogging is that your online marketing costs can And number two, you will generally –if done right– outrank the competition in the search engines.
Blogging consistently is important too. Blogging on a regular basis will sharpen your skills, broaden the scope of your topics and remind the search engines to keep visiting your site to have it indexed and as a result it should show up on for people when they search for the stuff you talk about in your blog.
It may seem like a difficult task to get a blog up and running but it isn’t. First off, I’ll setup your blog for free. You’re reading this on Real Free Website anyway, so you know that I can setup your site for free. Then blogging is just a matter of finding an interesting topic and writing about it. From a standpoint of how-to blog, it is easy. It is very similar to writing a letter in Microsoft Word, then clicking the publish button.
If you’re not much of a writer, or writing doesn’t interest you, you can also blog in the form of video (vlog) using youtube, or audio (podcasts). Think of each blogpost as a page in a book. Or an episode on TV. It cannot and will not tell the whole story but it will tell you enough to keep the reader interested so it doesn’t need to be a huge task to come up with and produce a blogpost. After the first one, then you do it again the next day. After a few days of this it will get easier and easier.
Over the next few weeks I will share with you some of the best tips I have about blogging successfully. But I also wanted to tell you that you don’t have to wait. If you want to start learning today, my friend John Chow has offered all readers of Real Free Website, access to his Blogging with John Chow system for free. If you want to learn how to blog and how to make money from blogging, I recommend you check it out. Visit the the specials page to find out how to get access.
