How to blog your way through the recession
Global financial uncertainty has meant that many business owners are currently seeking more cost-effective and targeted marketing strategies.
Blogging has dramatically changed the concept of online marketing and is a very powerful tool for generating leads (both online and offline!) that's worth investigating for every business owner.
4 Ways a Blog Can Make a Real Difference to Your Business:
- Strengthen your relationship with unconverted prospects – build rapport with them, dispel fears and dissipate scepticism. This will, in turn, generate more leads and increase conversion.
- Generate more leads for your business – this works well especially via word-of-mouth. Your blog will attract online visitors who will turn into customers. Without a blog you wouldn't have attracted these people.
- Position yourself as an expert in the field – positioning you as an expert will increase your credibility and increase sales conversion rates. When you share expertise, people can see that you really know your stuff.
- Build top of mind awareness with potential customers and existing customers – increase your sales conversions and repeat sales. The more frequently you communicate with customers, the more they are aware of your business which means the much greater the chance of them thinking of you when they next ready to buy.
A Blog, whether a text blog, picture blog or video blog, builds a stronger relationship with an audience than a website does because it has more human feel to it. A Blog's entire focus is to share information and experiences from the author.
Conversely, a website is a group that hold static and dynamic information about a topic. A website is serious. A Blog is informal. A website has facts. A Blog has facts but its main focus is to offer a more personal commentary – which is exactly what creates those raving "fans" that every business owner wishes they had more of.
10X Top Tips to Get You Started:
- Know who your target market is and what you want your blog to achieve
- Determine how much time it will take to write and determine return-on-investment
- Arrange for design to be created (there are many excellent templates freely available from www.wordpress.org, the leading blogging platform, that you can point a domain name at and have your designer cheaply customize)
- Create and post a series of content-rich, product or industry specific articles Inform customers about your Blog
- Monitor comments and determine feedback
(c) 10X Limited 2009.