Blog Your Business to Success
It has long been known in the marketing community that keeping in touch with current clients and potential clients is the path to future sales and multiple sales to loyal customers.
Sandy Penny began blogging before it was even called blogging. She has offered an email and online newsletter since she built her first online business. That business helped companies target, concept, create, write, template and maintain customer, vendor and employee newsletters (Penny Pincher Newsletters). So, she has the experience that will help you use your blog to build a better business to generate more sales.
Blogging Tools: Sandy Penny recommends using Blogger.com (a Google owned site) to host your blog because it's free, offers many sophisticated business building tools, you can easily monetize it, and it's easy to learn. Sandy is a big fan of free and easy. They also upgrade regularly to keep up with changes that users request, and they're not likely to disappear anytime soon. That can be a problem with web/blog companies.
Serving Your Clients: In this age of information overwhelm, customers want to be able to rely on trusted vendors to keep them abreast of industry changes, innovations, inventions, new products and services and interesting news that targets their needs. You can accomplish this for your business with a blog or online newsletter.
Commitment: The thing about a blog is that it takes a commitment, once you launch it, to continue providing information on a regular basis. If you fall down on that commitment, you will waste the time investment you made when you built it because it will be like starting all over again. People get in the habit of receiving information to which they have subscribed, and if it doesn't come for a while, they quit paying attention to it. Attention spans are short on the web, and readers are fickle. When you're ready to commit, Sandy can help you create a blog that serves you and your customers.
Frequency: It's better to provide a small amount of information on a more frequent basis than to provide a lot of information on a less frequent basis. Readers online like instant gratification. They don't want to have to search through extraneous material to find what they signed up for. The popular trend right now is to make readers wade through multiple sales pitches before giving them what they want or what you offered for free. I personally feel that's a bad idea, and in the long run, people will tire of that strategy and choose vendors who provide easy to navigate sites with readily available professional information on their topics of interest.
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Pre-Blogging Checklist:
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Identify what you want to accomplish with your blog or newsletter.
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Identify your target readers.
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Decide how frequently you want to blog and inform readers of your planned schedule.
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Decide whether and how to monetize your site.
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Decide where to promote your blog (Facebook, Twitter, sites that appeal to your target clients).
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Choose a look and feel that will appeal to your clients.
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Keep it simple.
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Make a list of potential subjects that will lead readers to your desired action.
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Write a logical series of articles and begin posting them on the appointed schedule.
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Stay ahead of your schedule with writing.
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Proofread before and after you post an article. It's easy to change mistakes online.
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Get feedback from clients on what they would like to see on your blog and give it to them.
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Provide a comments section and use the feedback when possible to show that you are responsive.