All Entries Tagged With: "sales"

Is Your Blog Outside Of Your Funnel?

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.

When Should You Hire A Blog Ghostwriter?

There comes a time when you should think about hiring a ghostwriter for your blog. But when?

Maybe it’s time to start thinking about a ghostwriter when:

• You’ve realized that you don’t have the time to write any more
• You need a professional approach to blogging
• You want well-optimized content that delivers traffic to your important landing pages
• Your blog isn’t performing as well as you think it should be
• You are not confident of your own writing ability
• The competition is beating your socks off

I know what you’re thinking. A blog ghostwriter will cost me money. Yes, you’ll have to pay for the service, but if you get a decent ROI on the expense, would it be worth it? Let’s say that you pay out $300 per month for a ghostwriter and you get 1 lead each month from that. The cost of your lead is $300. Is that more or less than what you are paying now per lead acquisition?

Even if the cost of acquisition per lead is less than you’d normally pay, you still need to close the sale. Right?

Well, if closing one sale means an additional $1,000 in your pocket and you know you can close one of out every three leads, your ROI is $100. You have a positive ROI, correct?

But let’s say you only close one out of every four leads and you have $1,000 coming in out of a $1,200 expense on ghostwriting services. Are you losing money? Not necessarily. Your blog could be sending you one lead per month, but it is also building up new content and building links to your website, which pushes up your search engine rankings. Let’s say it takes you two years to capture the top spot in Google for your key search term and once you do then you realize a 500% increase in traffic.

If your traffic count from organic listings was 1,000 unique visitors and you start getting 5,000 unique visitors per month knowing that you can close 1% of those, your sales conversions go up from 1 per month to 5 per month on organic listings. Your income will also increase from $1,000 per month to $5,000 per month based on the $1,000 per sale. Two years of spending $300 per month on blog ghostwriting services equates to a total expense of $7,200. You’ll make that up in two months after you hit the top spot in Google. How’s your ROI now?

I’m not guaranteeing you a top spot in Google for blog ghostwriting services. We’ve accomplished that feat for customers in the past and I believe we can do it again. But the illustration does show that ROI is not as cut and dry as measuring the sales developed from your blog alone. There’s more to ghostwriting than mere dimes and nickels.

Should You Splog Or Blog?

There is a huge prejudice against commercial blogs in the blogosphere. And there’s even a racial epithet equivalent that seems to shut down conversations quicker than a Republican press conference. It’s called a splog. This blog may even be one.

According to Wikipedia, master of all knowledge (note the sarcasm), a splog’s main purpose is to increase the PageRank or backlinks of related blogs. In actuality, those benefits only go so far.

Another defining characteristic of a splog is that it is made up of “fake blog posts.” I’m not sure what a “fake blog post” looks like. I do know that this blog post is very real.

I think sometimes a legitimate blog is characterized as a splog because the person making the declaration doesn’t really understand the purpose of the blog in question. What if a blog is written by a real human being who writes original content yet uses keywords, links, and other SEO tactics typically associated with sploggers and their spammy creations? Is that blogger a splogger or a bona fide blogger?

Distinctions can sometimes be hairy. Or harrowing.

The problem with Wikipedia’s definition of splog is that it doesn’t allow for some middle way. Many professional bloggers with custom designed blogs and unique, original content in every post are fine bloggers and human beings. They are good business people who understand their business model and try their best to provide a good user experience. But they aren’t making any money. It isn’t because they aren’t writing good material. It isn’t because they aren’t targeting the right market. Primarily, it’s because they aren’t selling. And this is where it gets hairy.

Thanks to the uprise in social media and the inherent dislike of blatant marketing messages online, which are understandable by the way, it has come to be expected that blogs will not be used as direct marketing pieces. The problem with this thinking is you are running a business. You want to see a return on your investment, don’t you?

Whether you spend $10 or $2,000 on building your blog, you want it to earn you some income. And that’s the bottom line. The difference between a splog and a blog could be your ROI. If you are writing a blog the way that many professional bloggers tell you to write it and you aren’t seeing a return on your investment – counting your dollars and your time in your expense calculation – then you probably need to change what you are doing. I’m not saying you should become a spammer, but you might want to employ some stronger closing lines and use sales and lead generation tactics to get people to contact you for business. You might even employ a ghostwriter. But whatever you do, you want your blog to make you some money.

How A Blog Writer Drives Traffic To Your Landing Pages

Blog marketing is really nothing new. It’s been hitting the mainstream pretty hard for the last two to three years, however. But we’ve still got years to go before we saturate the Web with too many blogs. Every minute a new blog is started and probably three times as many are abandoned. What can you do to make sure yours isn’t one of those left high and dry?

For starters, you need a plan. You need to define your blog’s purpose and hit it strong. Who is your target market? What do they want? And how will you move them to being customers?

While a blog is not the answer to every problem, it can become an integral part of your online marketing strategy. But you shouldn’t miracles. A blog is a pre-sales tool. It isn’t your primary closer and you shouldn’t expect it to be. A blog can, however, be used as an SEO tool as long as you don’t overdo and use it to spam the search engines with useless content. First and foremost, you’ve got to provide your human readers with valuable and helpful content. When you do that you increase your visitor count and you can drive traffic to your most important landing pages. But first you have to capture the traffic.

That’s where a professional writer comes in. To make sure your blog attracts traffic and drives traffic to your most important landing pages, you need an experienced blogger who understands SEO and sales strategies to get your blog to perform its mission. Do you have one your team?