Content Crooner

photo credit: Avoir Chaud

Let’s not forget that one of the premier reasons for the Internet’s birth was information exchange. Keep the dream alive by encouraging idea sharing among your prospects. Your open idea forum will attract new prospects, promote sales-boosting interaction, and even provide you with hints on how you can improve your business and best address your audience’s needs. And by demonstrating that you are interested in what your prospects have to say, you also show them that you’re human and value them as a person; not just a credit card. This new bond persuades people to buy.

Blog Posts Are Building Blocks for Better Business

A corporate blog can be a dynamic powerhouse for your business. It’s like the Wheaties of the marketing world…actually, it’s more like Raisin Bran since it offers flavor in addition to a high nutrient count, whereas Wheaties tend to taste a bit bland. Frequent blogging combines SEO benefits with the value-based benefits of providing your blog audience with useful and interesting information.

Blogging allows you to delve into the more unique aspects of your product or service and create interesting topics. Always maintain your prospect’s perspective to think of what will pique their interest. What about your product or service can you discuss in order to assuage general fears they might have? What can you talk about that would invoke their interest about making more money? Can you offer a way for them to provide added stability and safety for their families?

And while blogging provides an ideal opportunity to discuss finite areas of your business such as your USP, it also grants an excellent realm for touching on some relevant tangents. This helps open up your topics, making them friendlier for comment posting. Your blog audience is much likelier to respond to your posts when you make real-world connections for them—create the numbers and they’ll paint in the corresponding colors.

How to Simplify Complex Issues

This is especially helpful for products or services that feature complex technologies. Telling your prospects that your CPU products will help them get their work done faster is fine. Taking advantage of your blog as a way to explain exactly how multiple cores in a CPU will help them do that is much better. Don’t stop there though. Do everything you can to encourage questions, because the more they ask, the better they’ll understand your offer and the greater the belief they’ll have in your product. And by responding to their comments you’ll not only position yourself as an expert, you’ll show that you care enough to take the time to answer individual questions, which is sure to give them the confidence necessary to purchase your product. Make your blog a personal experience for your audience. (Hint: Remember to program visitor comments to not post until you review and accept them to protect against spamming and malicious remarks by random jerks.)

SEO Blogging Tip:

• Try to write at least three posts of at least 250 words spread out through the business week (business-related Internet searches trail off during the weekend). While it’s hard to pin down a finite minimum word count for SEO purposes, 250 and more is generally agreed as a good number for search engines to recognize your blog posts as useful content versus a quick advertisement.

Would you like fries with that?

McDonald’s didn’t become one of the world’s leading food service retailers because they serve the best burgers (tasty, but barely qualify as actual food). One of the premier reasons why they’ve maintained such lucrative momentum is because they’re master marketers. Probably the most classic example is their automatic up-sell attempt with every order: “Would you like fries with that?” This simple question has been incredibly successful at getting people to order more than they planned to when they first walked in through the door.

Use this same technique with your business. “If you found this blog post interesting and useful then please forward on this link to your friends or business associates.” It is absolutely guaranteed that your blog post will find its way to at least one more person using this method. Think one person is merely a drop in the ocean? Then perhaps you should think of the lifetime value of one customer. Or better yet, think about how many people they might end up referring to your business and then multiply their combined lifetime values. After all, you’re not pitching greasy, heart-stopping fries, you’re asking them if they’d like to share helpful information with others. Now that’s some McWordofMouth you can feel good about.

To your success,

Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!