Blogging For Business Tip #4

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All week I’ve been blogging about the power of your online presence. And for the most part, every small business owner understands that they need to be online. What falls short is the follow through.

You may be thinking, "I want to have complete control over my image, and put up a site that is perfect."

Online, there is no such thing as perfect. I follow the 80-20 rule when it comes to being online. I get my new site/profile/page/salesletter etc to the 80 percent mark, and put it online and test it. Does it get signups? Are people buying what I’m offering? If not, I tweak it. And it works the other way too - even if they are signing up and buying, I still tweak it.

You may be thinking, "My advertising in the yellow pages and trade publication has always worked; I’ll stick with that."

Have you really been tracking where your clients come from? Keep a tracking sheet by your phone and your computer. Every time a client or prospect emails you or phones you, ask where they found you. I’m willing to bet you’ll find more and more people are finding you from online sources. (It is good to keep your name in many places - just track that you really are getting your money’s worth from expensive advertising sources.)

You may be thinking, "I just don’t have the time to spend getting connections online.

Too bad. Let me ask you a question. How long are you planning on being in business? Let’s say your goal is to retire 10 years from now. That means you must keep marketing for the next 10 years to sustain your lifestyle.

If you buy into a one year contract with a magazine, you’ll spend four or five figures over the course of that one year period. And then what? The magazine disappears, doing you no good. You either buy another year, or find another way to gain clients.

But let’s say you spend one hour creating a profile on a place like LinkedIn. LinkedIn is free (you can upgrade, but that’s another article) so any information you put out there today will still be there a year from now, two years from now, etc.

Now let’s say you move over to Facebook and create a profile there. Another hour of time. Another free resource. And the opportunity to connect with people for the next 10 years.

Of course you can’t just spend one hour putting up a profile and expecting it to work for 10 years. You have to add content, share your knowledge, and take the time to work the system. But you can get more than enough business by working this systems.

You just have to do it.

Jul

1

Blogging For Business: Tip #2

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Education or persuasion?

How do you reach out to your prospects?

In today’s information-driven world, people learn all they can before they make a purchase. The more money a product or service costs, the more time they spend making an informed decision.

When information wasn’t so readily available, it was easier to persuade someone into a purchase. The used car salesman could very easily tell his prospect that the car simply won’t be there tomorrow - make your decision now.

But with the Internet, anyone can hop online and learn all they can about what they are looking for before they try and find a business that offers what they want. And in the world of eBay, if it’s not in your town, buy it from wherever it is (my neighbor just bought a Porsche from Florida).

Now it’s all about education. The more you learn about something, the more one business or one person proves their expertise, the more you trust them to provide you with the products and services you desire.

What can you do?

1. Look at your blog as an education tool. Provide your readers with the details of what is possible. Don’t provide the detailed steps of how to achieve everything you provide in your services - just tell them what’s possible.

2. Set yourself up as the expert. The more you’re willing to share, the more you’ll prove your knowledge base. And the more you share information throughout the Internet, the more your name will come up again and again, through the various searches your prospect performs.

Jun

18

Blogging For Business: Tip #1

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When you designed your traditional website, you may have included a variety of testimonials on a separate page, or possibly down one of the sides of your site pages. In either case, testimonials were used as support to get people to take action.

With your blog, you have even more power in using testimonials, or case studies.

When a prospect reads your copy and your sales letters, they may be attracted to your ideas. But there might not be anything that pushes them over the top. Case studies can do that. They

1. They provide the true benefits you provide to your client base.

2. It adds a sense of reality to your business, giving your prospects the ability to see your products and services in action.

You can provide as much or as little information as you desire - anything from how they found you, to the results of what you offered. You can provide photos, videos - really the sky is the limit. Why not have your client create a video with your product or service in action?

And with a blog, you can add these again and again. And you can continually build rapport because of the comment section attached to each post.

Your own raving fan section - free with your blog.