Guest Post From Joel Williams (aka Blog Tech Guy)
There are a massive variety of blogs out there, but broadly in the money-making blog world there are two types – ones that make money from the blog themselves via advertising and/or affiliate sales, and ones where the blog is part of a business site that offers product/services.
If you have the latter, what I boringly simply call a business blog, then there are a few decisions to be made. You’ve heard having a blog on your site can be good for business and increase sales, but how do you achieve this?
Fundamentally it’s about trust that is built from interaction and through your actions. The trust, of course, is for a customer to trust you to deliver what you promise when they depart with their hard-earned cash. A blog is a great way to generate this trust and there are a variety of ways to do it.
Testimonials
The old classic, verifiable testimonials are a great way for potential customers to measure the type of service or results they can expect from doing business with you. The FTC have tightened up the rules for these, and some directly affect bloggers around testimonials, as well as free products.
There are even a couple of free plugins for WordPress to easily add testimonials such as Testimonials Manager and WP-Testimonials.
Customer Success Stories
Case studies are often a great way of showing a potential client what you, or your product will do for them. Tell us a story, we might be in the same position that your client was, and we want the outcome that you achieved. You look like a company that could help me too.
Questions and Answers
While you can (and should) proactively ask for questions about your product or services, you no doubt have a huge bank of questions that people have asked you since you launched. You may already have some on an FAQ page, but bring some into your blog and expand on them, and vice versa, add any questions you post to the blog to your FAQ page.
By the way there are a whole raft of FAQ plugins available if you don’t feel comfortable adding them manually, or indeed want a bit of pizazz!
Advice and Tips
Probably one of the best services you can provide to your potential, current and past customers are tips and advice on your product, and even for the general industry as a whole. Using a technique or piece of software that saves you time? Then tell everyone. Does a little-known feature of your “widget” save you 30 minutes a day? Let us know, we may thank you with more business down the road.
Also “How to…” posts, whether directly with your products or in a related area helps to educate your customers without asking them to buy. I’ve seen these come from all sorts of places, copied from emails, to videos of client training seminars – you probably have the material already.
News and Announcements
There are at least three types of these:
Company News and Announcements
Hired someone new? Won a new important client? Up for an industry award? Blowing your own trumpet is not a crime on your own site. In fact I encourage it!
Product News and Announcements
A pretty obvious one but one I personally often forget to do myself. Announcing changes to products, updates, and new features is a good way to keep content fresh. If you have something new coming, perhaps offer a sneak peek with a photo or screen shot. Invite people to apply to test it for free and get feedback before it is finished that may make your product even better.
Industry News and Announcements
Sometimes it can be great to bring traffic to your site with some industry announcements of breaking news. Usually this is done in a positive light, no mentioning of a competitor going out of business or suffering from issues. Some businesses like to position themselves at the forefront of their industry and so concentrate mainly on industry news and positioning themselves highly in that news.
Polls and Surveys
Find out what your customers are thinking, or get ideas and opinions on what you are offering (or are planning to offer). Google Docs can help you create a survey with the results automatically added to a spreadsheet, or you can use Survey Monkey. WP Polls can help you to easily add a poll to your post or sidebar, or you can use Poll Daddy (who apparently do surveys too).
Guest Posts
Guest posts from experts within your industry can not only add credibility to you and your business but also provide excellent information to readers and also bring in new readers that are fans of the author, who may not have even been aware of you.
Personal Stories
How did you come to be in the business you’re in? How was the product or service you’re selling created? What are the stories behind the business? Let readers get a feel for the company, and you and/or your employees. There’s no need to post about an employs new dog, but if an employee found an interesting solution to something and integrated into your process, let people know.
Answer Comments
Not really a type of post, but worth mentioning. I’m amazed how many sites I see and work on that have unanswered comments on them. These are potentially your customers, if you don’t answer a question on your site, what if something goes wrong with their product or they have further questions? Their hopes of great support are not going to be met if your responsiveness on your own site is anything to go by.
It’s not about selling! It’s about positioning yourself so your potential customer or client is ready to buy. Be open, be honest, be human, not a faceless business who probably outsources everything or employees robots. Probably. Sure blogging takes time and effort, but then everything worthwhile does.
Joel Williams (aka Blog Tech Guy) helps people solve their blog technical problems giving them more time to concentrate on the fun stuff. He also runs Income Blogging Guide, a step-by-step membership course to help you build a solid platform for earning an income from your blog.
