Thinking about blogging to sell your products or services? You need 2 key ingredients…
A while ago I was working with a company that wanted to drive more traffic to their website through their blog. The articles were supposed to attract potential clients looking for legal services or looking for answers to their legal questions. The existing blog had a very poor readership and the conversion to download free e-books was very low.
It turned out that the content – while interesting, engaging, and well written – was missing 2 key ingredients:
1. it was not written to sell the product or service (directly or indirectly)
2. It was not SEO optimized
Let me dive a bit deeper into these two points now as you may wonder why well-written and engaging content was not enough. It wasn’t because… the intention of the blog was to be informative and thought-provoking, and in some cases also entertaining. And articles written from this perspective were great for branding, but they were not designed to solve clients’ problems, either to stimulate them to take any action like downloading the e-book, signing up for a newsletter, or getting in contact.
And let me clarify it right away… I am not saying “write to sell”. I am saying “write to add value, solve a problem, give advice, share the experience and give your clients a chance to stay in contact or work with you”. And this is why you craft content that responds to your client’s needs and you offer them additional resources like e-book, newsletter, or service subscription. And this solves problem number one.
But there is also point number two – how to make sure that your blog – the endless well of knowledge you created – will be found by your potential clients?
You probably already know it should be SEO optimized. So what does it mean exactly? Does it mean you have to compromise your creativity in any way to please the search engine? Not necessarily!
Traffic is not the goal for your website, it is a result. The question is: what is your goal? Do you want to sell your services or products? Do you want to increase readership? Your goal should determine the type of content you write and the extent to which you would go to optimize it.
You also should know that by content I do not refer solely to the text – blog posts, articles, landing pages – but also to the images, documents, infographics or videos that you place on your website.
Once you define your goal, it is important to understand who your audience is. In other words – who would potentially benefit from your product or services. If you have clarity on your potential client, it is easier to put yourself in their shoes and start thinking from their perspective: what are their needs or problems? What do they look for? Or in some cases, perhaps creating that need for them.
Curious now? Check out the other articles in the Blogging series to find out how you can create a need for your clients and offer your product or service to satisfy this need.
