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When it comes to blog marketing, you’ve got to fit it into your marketing funnel somewhere. One of the biggest challenges to companies just starting out with a company blog is integrating the blog into their current marketing plans. It’s a challenge, but it can be done.

First, a definition of your marketing funnel. If you picture a funnel, with its large mouth at the top and it’s small exit at the bottom, you’ll notice that the entrance is where you meet your customer. You’ve got to have a lead generation plan that draws your customer in. Then, you want to canalize your customer deeper and deeper into your marketing funnel until you filter them out into the closing process. Where does your blog fit in to your funnel?

Here are some possibilities:

• Lead Generation - Many companies successfully integrate their company blog into the marketing funnel by making it their primary online lead generation tool. This is a very successful approach and one I recommend.
• Lead Qualification - Another approach that is success is to use the blog as a lead qualification instrument. It may capture leads as well, but in this approach the marketer usually has another method of marketing that drives leads to the blog (articles, pay-per-click, or something else) and then qualifies the leads with a narrow focus on the blog writing so that potential customers either leave the funnel because you don’t provide what they are looking for or stick around because you have something they want.
• Pre-Sales - Pre-selling must be done somewhere and a blog is a good place to do that. Many affiliate marketers use blogging as a pre-sales tool for the companies and products they want to promote. You can do the same thing with your own products and services, highlighting them and discussing features and benefits in a nonthreatening way so that your customers “warm up” to the idea of doing business with you. You aren’t closing sales on the blog, but you are making the sale possible by keeping your readers informed and driving the qualified leads to the final sales pitch and closing statements.
• Blogging for Sales - I’ve seen a few instances where closing sales on the blog is successful, but by and large that’s not what a blog is for. There are bloggers, however, who make this work and using your blog as a sales tool is something that you can consider as a part of your marketing funnel.
• Customer Service and Feedback - Another successful blog marketing strategy is to use the blog as an after-the-sale tool to communicate with customers. In this scenario you are using the blog to discuss ways the customer can benefit from what they’ve already purchased. You can receive feedback from the customer so that you can refine your product and processes and then regurgitate information back to the customer that is valuable and helps them improve the uses of your product for themselves.

Where in the marketing funnel you place your blog is not as important as deciding where you want to put and then following up on that plan. If you haven’t defined your marketing funnel just yet then I’d encourage you to do so before starting your blog. It will make the blogging more focused and successful.

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.

One question that often pops up is “How can I monetize my business blog?” First, you have to understand what a blog is for and how best to use it. You are not trying to create a publishing platform where you sell advertising or pop on AdSense so that you earn five cents per click. If you are then you are looking at the wrong type of blog for the company blog model. It’s not that the publishing platform type of blog isn’t a good model. It is. But you can’t mix and match the concepts.

A good company blog doesn’t necessarily need a monetization plan of its own if it is done properly. That’s not to say you can’t make money with it.

First and foremost, your company blog is a marketing tool for your business. The idea is to drive traffic to your website and increase your search engine standing through optimized quality content on a regular basis. A blog is the best way to achieve those two simultaneous goals.

To measure your blog ROI, follow the traffic patterns. Are you getting traffic to your static site from the blog. If so, is it converting? If not, why not? Perhaps you nee more in-text links. Or maybe you need fewer. Maybe those links need the proper anchor text. Or maybe the problem isn’t with the blog at all.

The most common problem with websites that don’t convert is with the content on the website itself. If you’re getting traffic to your website from your blog, but you aren’t closing sales then it’s the website, not the blog. Don’t fix what isn’t broken.

We’re firm believers in first things first. Get your website to where it will convert traffic to sales. Then use a blog to promote it. You can use other methods of promotion as well. Don’t just stick with one way (ever hear of not putting your eggs in one basket?). But realize that not every visitor to your site will buy something and not every visitor to your blog will visit your website. What do you do with that traffic that leaves?

Here are a few ideas for you:

• Sign them up for your newsletter
• Hit them with an exit “pop-up” window and sell them something; like, maybe an e-book
• Get them to subscribe to your RSS feed
• Sell them an affiliate product with a link in the sidebar
• Send to them a sister site

One important concept too many business owners ignore is the value of contact information, which can lead to future sales. Get the e-mail address, at least. Use your company blog as more than a repository for your “throwaway” content.

A blog is a great way to build inbound links. You can use an offsite blog to build links to your static website by posting daily and using your keywords as anchor text to build those inbound links. The best way to use a blog for building links is to augment other types of Internet marketing that you do and not try to do too much too soon. You don’t want the search engines thinking you are spamming and discounting those links. In the case of linking from your blog to your static site, moderation is the key.

There are two ways to make your blog’s inbound links for you:

1. Sidebar
2. In-text

Your sidebar links are permanent links and won’t help you a great deal, but they do help brand your blog and drive traffic to important pages where you want your traffic to go. Your in-text in-blog-post links are the best links you can have. The search engines love those links. And they count to help push your static site up in the rankings. Learn more about how an offsite blog can help you build inbound links.

There are essentially two approaches to blogging for business:

• The Carnival Barker Approach
• And the Dog Catcher Approach

The Carnival Barker’s Approach To Blogging

The Carnival Barker approach takes each blog post individually. Like a carnival barker you yell out in the crowd to random people passing by and invite them to play your game. You will use a different approach for every person who passes by because you know that all people have different personalities. What will work for one person won’t work for another, and vice versa. But you don’t know which approach will work for which type of person. You don’t know the personalities of the people passing by. All you see are random peeps.

Because you are operating in the dark with regard to the different personalities of the people you see, but you know that you have a handful of techniques that work for the personality types available, you decide to mix and match your techniques to see which targets you hit.

Keywords are the bloggers verbal barks. Each blog post should focus on one or two keywords. You are screaming at searchers in the search engines to come on over to your blog to see what you have to offer - “Come on! Play the game!” Not everyone, of course, will take the bait, but those who do will see an up-close-and-personal presentation after they’ve landed on your blog. Getting them to play the game is to have them click the link and go to your landing page - the one you want them to go to.

The Dog Catcher’s Approach To Blogging

The dog catcher is little more subtle than the carnival barker, but not as effective. The dog catcher tries to wrap a net around one specific dog. He’s after one little dog that the neighbors have been complaining about - that is, his CEO or marketing directory has a specific type of customer in mind and that’s the customer we should be going after. The problem with this approach is that it provides too narrow a scope for it to be effective.

Because the dog catcher has one target in mind for a product that has more than one target available, he does not target each individual blog post to different personalities or people with varying needs. He has a one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter approach and though he might snag a few dogs he will never catch all of the animals in his neighborhood that can make his bosses happy.

Carnival Barker Bloggers Set Their Own Limitations

Instead of just chasing one or two dogs, why not try to snag as many different customers as you can using the carnival barker approach? That doesn’t mean that every blog post has to different every single day of the year. Limit yourself to a handful of tactics - 10-20 - and rotate them throughout the month and over the course of a year. You’ll find it to be far more effective than the old tired-out dog catcher approach to 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.