Sunday, January 24, 2010

Five Powerful Business Blogging Tips


If you’re using a blog to promote your online business, congratulations! If used wisely, blogs are one of the best tools to drive traffic and increase sales. Unfortunately, many business bloggers are blogging ineffectively.
Here are five business blogging tips that can increase the effectiveness of your blog.

1. Make Offers

Some bloggers are so scared to sell on their blog because they’ve heard that a blog is not a place for product pitches. So, they write about their niche but never talk about their product. The problem with this strategy is that you’re not able to fully leverage the trust you’ve built by delivering quality information.
I’ve found that most people don’t mind sales pitches as long as you don’t overdo it. Once you’ve got some steady traffic, feel free to talk about one of your products every 4-5 posts. In those posts, tell your readers why your product can benefit them. If you do this, you should see a increase in sales.

2. Don’t Sell on Every Post

On the other hand, some bloggers overdo it and make their blog one big sales pitch. Every post reads like a product description. This is a bad strategy, because most people see blogs as a place to consume useful and/or entertaining info. They don’t mind hearing about your products once in a while but they’re turned off with product pitches on every post.
If they were interested in buying something, they would’ve gone to your product pages, not your blog.

3. Be Personal

Blogs have a reputation of being a personal medium, so let your personality shine through your posts. Use your name. Share personal experiences about running your business and being involved in your industry. Tell interesting stories about your niche. Write with a conversational tone, or write like how you speak.
Being personal builds trust with your audience and gives your site that human touch that’s missing in most commercially-oriented sites.

4. Use Multimedia

Multimedia is the difference between turning your blog from a boring book to an exciting magazine. There’s nothing wrong with just using text, but many people are visually oriented. It doesn’t take too much extra effort to add an image or two to each blog post. The images will enhance your blog and improve the browsing experience of your readers.
If you’re ambitious and willing to do a lot more work, adding audio and video can be worth it. Video is especially effective if you upload your videos to YouTube. There are many people that don’t like to read or listen to audio, but they do like watching videos on YouTube.

5. Build an Email List

There’s a saying in the internet marketing industry about the importance of building a list: “The money’s in the list.” Email lists are one of the best tools for generating income in the long term. Let’s face it, even if you have an awesome blog, many of your readers will visit a couple times, forget about your blog, and never come back. However, if you’re able to capture their email address, you can keep in touch and notify them of new posts.
Blogs fits perfectly with list building. Over time, you’ll build trust with your blog, which will attract your readers to join your list. You may think RSS fits the same purpose but the vast majority of people don’t know how to use RSS. Email is definitely more widely used.
Also, if you’re not getting many signups, try making special offers to get people to join the list. One of the common giveaways is offering a useful short ebook or a discount code to your products in exchange for an email address.
Guest article by John Copper from Blog Herald, a popular site that covers blogging news and tips. Also, John works with a Japan hotel site where you can book your Japan accommodation online. You can also write a guest article and share your tips.

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