Archive for October, 2010

The Correct Way to Blog About Your Business

Why do I keep seeing people leave posts on their Marketing Blog just to post about it?

If you are adding content to your blog "just because", you are adding an extra chore for yourself, you are preventing yourself from actually getting real work done, and you are missing out on a lot of the opportunities having a blog can give you.

As you probably know, Google loves blogs.  And that means if you blog about one of your products, or about your niche, or about something that you are doing, it is going to be ranked highly in the search engine, especially when that is brand new.

That means that if you just blog about any old subject, you are going to get ranked highly for no reason at all.  But if you are about to come out with a new product or are about to re-launch an existing one, you should be blogging about it - that way it shows up in the search engines. And when you send your list to that blog, you are already overcoming many of the objections they are going to have when it comes time to buy.  Plus your subscribers now feel that you are giving them value and not simply hard-pitching them.

The next time you make a blog post, stop and think for a second:  "What can I talk about that will get people ready for my next product launch or re-launch?"

There is also nothing wrong with recycling your auto-responder content.  And this can go either way. If you have an auto-responder broadcast or follow-up that got a lot of response, there is nothing wrong with expanding that into a blog post, or even just posting it as is.

Likewise, if you had a really good blog post that got tons of response a year or two years ago, but people simply can't find it now, there is nothing wrong with scheduling that as an auto-responder follow-up.

We all need more follow-up emails in our auto-responder sequence.  You should definitely start off with ten - but you have less than two years' worth of an auto-responder sequence, you should add a little bit to it every month.

And finally, while it is great to make a blog post about an upcoming product, it is even better to blog about that once it is now live.  I don't do this as often as my pre-launch posts, but every now and then I will create a blog post and disable comments, and make the Call to Action at the end of that blog post via a link to whatever it is I am talking about:  I hard-sell people directly on the blog.

Most bloggers seriously underestimate the power of the Call to Action - whether that is to get comments for social proof, to make your upcoming launch look even better, or just to promote something you have just launched.  Or even to re-launch something you launched in the past.

And that is the correct way to blog about your business. Frame people and pre-launch them for whatever solution is coming up from you.  Recycle your auto-responder follow-ups - and even use those blog posts as auto-responder follow-ups.  Market the stuff you already have.  And deliver a strong Call to Action to get people to take action and do something at the end of your blog post.

Which of these three items are you missing in your blog?  Please share this with me in the form of a comment below and let me know what you are going to do better in your blogging business next time you make a post.