All Entries Tagged With: "sales"
Give Your Blog Time To Perform
One of the most common mistakes people make with blogging is expecting too much too soon. You aren’t going to get a wave of orders overnight from your blog. If you’re lucky (and a lot of people are lucky in this regard) you’ll get your blog crawled and indexed at the search engines rather quickly (like 48-72 hours). There is no guarantee, of course, but I’ve seen it done.
Even then, if you get your blog indexed that soon, you won’t see any real results from it right away. You’ll get traffic, but you won’t get any sales until people trust you. To do that they’ll need to subscribe to your blog over a period of time and get to know you. When they feel comfortable knowing they can trust you, they’ll buy from you. But it may not be from your blog.
People don’t generally buy from blogs. They’ll read a blog every day if it’s on a topic that interests them. But they won’t buy anything. They’d much rather buy over the phone, in person, or through a static website. But what you say on your blog can lead a person to that decision to buy from you on your website. You just have to give it time.
5 Ways To Increase Traffic To Your Blog
It’s important to keep traffic flowing to your blog. Traffic is what makes you money. Without traffic you are simply writing into a vacuum.
But a blog doesn’t necessarily have to be the place where you close the sale. You want to talk to people, if possible. Or at least get them to visit your web site. A blog post is really about getting them interested in you. Then, you and your sales team can close the sale.
We had a real estate agent who let us write her blog for a while then she left because we didn’t make her any sales. But she did tell us that we sent her more traffic to her web site than anything else she’d ever done. Still, she was disappointed that we didn’t close any sales. Sorry. That’s not our job. Our job is to drive traffic to your web site so that you can close the sale.
That’s not to say that we won’t ever close sales with blogs. Sometimes we do. But we don’t make that our primary effort because most people prefer to speak to someone and visit a website before they buy something. Especially in real estate. People aren’t going to buy a house from a blog.
So keep your expectations realistic. And keep in mind these 5 ways that you can drive traffic to your blog so that you can get their attention and close the sale:
- Search Engine Optimization – There is no substitute for SEO. Have a list of keywords that are important to your business and use those keywords in your blog posts. Link to your website pages in your sidebar using those keywords.
- Social Bookmarking – Pick some popular social bookmarking sites and make friends. Bookmark your blog posts and bookmark your friends’ blog posts. Be a social butterfly. It works.
- RSS Feed – Set up an RSS feed for your blog and invite your readers to subscribe.
- Use A Blog Promotion Newsletter - Not everyone understands RSS. But they will read your blog from an e-mail or newsletter. Offer them one. For free.
- Write Articles – Articles are a great way to drive traffic to any website, even a blog. Write articles and include your blog’s URL in your author resource box.
The One-Two Blog-Article Sucker Punch
I have a strategy I like to use online that I like to call the Blog-Article Sucker Punch. It revolves around the combination of blogging and article marketing, as if you couldn’t guess by the name. It’s real easy to implement and even easier to grasp because you only need one brain cell to get it, which means most of the human race qualifies.
First, you build a rock solid website. It must be optimized and it helps to have at least one landing page that you want to promote heavily. You can do it with any any number of landing pages, but the more landing pages you have then the more time you will spend marketing them. If you’re new to internet marketing you should stick to one landing page. This combination, however, can work for any number of landing pages that you want to promote.
After you’ve built a solid landing page that you want to drive traffic to, build a blog to promote it. You can build an onsite blog or an off site blog. Which you choose depends on several factors that we can cover in another blog post, but for now just plan on starting a blog. You’ll write to it every day.
How To Make The Blog-Article Combo
Work For You
The first thing you need to do is make sure your landing page is prominently displayed on your blog somewhere. It can be anywhere, but it must be on your blog somewhere. Secondly, write about your landing page or something in your niche related to your landing every day for 30 days. Don’t be over-promotional. Just include useful tips about what you are promoting. Give away your knowledge, but don’t give away the farm.
Also during that 30 days, write one article per day and submit it to 10 article directories each day. At the end of 30 days you’ll have 30 articles at 10 directories – that’s 300 starting links. Those links are not ends of themselves. They are the means to an end. What you are hoping to do is to make your articles readable and popular enough that other publishers in your niche will want to publish them. That’s not as hard as it sounds.
Let’s say that each of your 300 articles (30 X 10) is published one time per month for the next six month. Now you have 1,800 inbound links. Each of links will serve to push your website further up in the search engines for your keywords. Higher search rankings translates into more traffic. But you’re also writing to your blog during that entire six month period, and you’re writing to it every day. Because each blog post is a separate web page and you are linking back to your landing page with every blog post, you’ll have 182 additional links to your landing page – at a minimum!
Keep in mind that your blog posts will also be ranked in the search engines for your keywords. That will draw traffic and consistency in publishing daily will keep traffic coming back to your blog. Plus, if you promote the blog in other ways through social media and networking, you can get even more traffic. You’ll use your blog to drive that traffic to your landing page. All you have to do is sit down and count the links and the traffic. Do the math and you’ll soon see that the blog-article sucker punch is a powerful search engine marketing strategy that can make you money over time. But for it to really be effective, you’ve got to make sure your landing page is ready to close the sale.
Blog Marketing Here And
