All Entries in the "Lead Generation" Category

Is Your Blog Like A Carnival Barker Or A Dog Catcher?

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.

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.