All Entries in the "Blogging As Pre-Sales" Category

Blogging, The New Telemarketing

Back in the 1980s it was widely known that telemarketing was the most cost efficient means of marketing for most businesses. That’s why everyone was doing it. For just a few pennies per phone call, you could reach your target audience at prime time when they were most available to discuss what you had to offer. Sure, you had hang ups, rude retorts, and lots of rejection, but for most companies, a single sell could pay for days or weeks of telephone calls. Not a bad ROI at all.

Telemarketing isn’t quite what it used to be. Even when the salesman called and people were rude in their response, they were talking to a real human being. Today, many companies are using automated dialers and computer-generated voices, which are ten times more annoying. I’d rather talk to the human telesales representative than C3PO.

Telemarketing’s Problem, Blogging’s Solution
Besides the automated dialers making telemarketing calls even more annoying, most people these days have called ID and screen their phone calls or just don’t answer the phone. With the don’t call list hanging over telemarketers’ heads, many companies have the additional expense of screening phone numbers in order to protect themselves from lawsuits or have diminished returns due to the cost of dialer technology, fewer results, and the higher cost of utilities. Telemarketing isn’t quite as cost efficient as it used to be.

Blogging, on the other hand, is. The advantages of blogging over telemarketing is that you can reach the right target audience for your product or service by allowing the right target audience to find you. It is less work to write daily keyword-rich posts that are found by people searching for information on your product or service than it is to buy a list, call the numbers, make the sales pitch, filter through rejection upon rejection, and then track your results and make sure the product is shipped to the right place. Spend $300 per month on a blog ghostwriter – compared to $300 per week on telemarketing in the 1980s – and you can get even better results. For many companies, one sale will more than make up for the expense.

One of our customers recently informed us that his company received three leads from their blog in one month. That’s a lead acquisition cost of $100. Multiply that by 12 and the cost of your leads is $3,600 for 36. Close on one of those leads on a product that will net you $10,000-$20,000 in revenue and you can see that the ROI is HUGE. And we’re talking about pre-qualified leads here. Blogging is targeted advertising at its best.

Telemarketing may not be as cost efficient as it was in the 1980s, but blogging, it seems, is turning into the most cost efficient means of marketing for the 21st century. That’s why companies are turning in their dialers for a blog ghostwriter.

The Importance Of Human Psychology In Blogging

I was recently notified that a client of ours received a sales lead through a blog that we write for them. I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I’m never surprised when I hear this because that’s precisely what a blog is supposed to do. This particular client is one who has been a customer for less than one month.

It’s important when blogging to think about what the customer is going to think when she reads it. A good understand of human psychology is essential. The thought process that goes into writing a blog post is one that requires a deep level of commitment to the human brain. And by that I mean simply that the blog post writer must consider the needs of the reader – the information and emotional needs – and meet those.

Great blogging is about more than search engine optimization. Of course, we always consider the SEO aspects of a blog post because if you don’t position your message in front of the greatest number of people within your target market as possible then it won’t matter how effective it is as communication. The message should communicate, but it also needs to be in front of a lot of people. That’s why SEO is important.

Conversely, getting your message before everyone in the world is not necessarily a good thing. If the communication is ineffective in drawing results then it doesn’t matter that 100,000 people saw it. Therefore, bloggers must have an ability to read readers’ minds.

That’s where psychology comes in. How will the reader receive the message? Will he be put off by it? Will it excite him or her? Will she pull out her credit card and make a purchase?

Closing the sale may not be the goal. In fact, for most blogs, the goal is not to close the sale at all, but to capture the lead. We want to drive traffic to your website so that you can close the sale. But to do that we must understand what it will take to get the visitor from the blog to your website. What will be the trigger that motivates the action? Bloggers who consider these things make much better bloggers than good writers who don’t.

Is A Blog A Good Business Model

Every now and then I see someone giving the advice to start a blog and use the blog as a business website to attract new business. In essence, the blog is touted as a good business model. But is it?

I generally say that if you are planning to go in business then you shouldn’t start a blog and use that as your primary website. There are several reasons for this, the chief of which blogs make great marketing tools but rarely succeed as standalone business ventures.

There are a few, however, that work quite well as businesses. If you are going to make blogging your chief business interest then you need to have a plan and that plan includes a monetization plan. How will your blog make money? On the whole, however, most businesses would do better to use the blog as a marketing tool to drive traffic to another website. But there is one way you can start with a blog and build a static website later and be very successful.

In this model, you use your blog as an Elijah, a forerunner to your website. If you know that you are going to build a website to cover a particular niche, don’t build the website right away. Instead, put a blog on that domain name and start blogging to it every day with rich, keyword-focused content. After you have achieved respectable first page rankings for the key phrase that you are trying to capture you can then build your static website right there on that domain name. But don’t ditch the blog.

Move the blog to a folder on that site and keep blogging every day, but build your static website on the domain name itself. You’ll get all the traffic and SEO benefits that you’ve already built into the blog and you can keep the blog active to continue building fresh daily content.

Ways You Can Monetize Your Blog

You set up a blog for your business, but you don’t see any visible signs of it making you money. Could it be that it is earning its keep, but you just don’t see it? Here are some ways you can make money on your blog without promoting the competition:

• Search Engine Optimization – SEO is a form of payment. Whether you are increasing your page saturation with the search engines or driving up your PageRank with links, you are indeed paying yourself with SEO benefits. By capturing key phrases in the search engines for your important keywords, you are keeping your blog in the limelight for years. Keep blogging and benefits will be there. Just remember, SEO is payment.
• Sell Advertising – But not to your competition. If you look around on your blog you will likely find some real estate that is just sitting there not earning a dime. Maybe you sell that space to a partner, supplier, or other industry player that doesn’t compete with you directly.
• Pay Per Click Advertising – It can be Google AdSense, Yahoo! Search Marketing, or one of the other PPC providers such as AdBrite. Contextual advertising is here to stay. Instead of selling ad space to industry players, just put up some ads that will pay you by the click. This is less lucrative, but easier to set up and less work. But make sure that this isn’t the main focus of your blog. You still want to drive traffic to your website and close sales.
• Affiliate Programs – Join a few affiliate programs and place affiliate ads on your blog. Again, these shouldn’t be your primary focus, but it doesn’t hurt to capture exit traffic and make money on them. They’re leaving anyway, right? Why not capture them as they leave?
• Sell A Digital Product – Create an e-book or a podcast and sell it through your blog. This can be an additional offering that you make through your blog posts and in your sidebar.
• Promote Your E-zine or Newsletter – If you publish a newsletter or e-zine, place your opt-in box prominently on your blog. Then you can use your e-zine to sell and promote your products, services, and affiliates. This is highly effective.

Keep in mind that the primary purpose of your business blog is to drive traffic to your website to close the sale. Anything else you do may run the risk of diminishing that goal. It is usually best to limit the exit holes on your blog and focus on driving traffic where it will be most effective in closing sales. But it’s your blog.