How To Sell Effectively Through Your Blog

How To Sell Effectively Through Your Blog

What comes to your mind when you think about leveraging your online opportunities and monetizing them? I bet your thoughts swing to large corporations like Facebook, eBay, Google, Amazon and other online ‘big deals’. Of course you’d love to make a fortune too and build an equally big business brand.
So, what’s the secret? What can you do to join the likes of Jeff Bezos and Pierre Omidyar?
The primary secrets is………wait for it…..START SMALL! Yeah, I know it sounds cliché but that’s the deal. A business doesn’t grow overnight. Building a business brand significantly depends on your respective strategies as you take the first steps.
There are many ways of kick-starting an idea. The approach you take is largely dependent on your idea and the respective business goals. If you are dealing with products for instance, a perfect place to start would be building a marketplace for prospects through a blog.
A blog is not only inexpensive to start and run, but also very effective in engaging with your customers. How you run and operate the business through the blog dictates your subsequent entrepreneurial success.
Of course most people already understand what it takes to run a blog. The problem comes in on the business part. How do you run a business dependent on the blog? How will you be able to sell to your prospects through the blog?
A single sale once a blue moon will not take you anywhere. You need to take charge of your blog and understand how you can trigger an exponential growth in sales. Here are tips on how you can achieve this:
Market Your Blog
Many entrepreneurs and solopreneurs make the mistake of kick-starting their businesses aggressively by going straight into marketing their products. Of course this strategy will help you make some sales, but only a few.
To understand why, you need to first comprehend the lead conversion process. Any person you want to sell to qualifies as a lead. To sell to him, you have to successfully convert him into a paying customer. That’s the hardest part of business.
That’s what sales people and marketers always struggle to achieve. The quicker the conversion process, the faster you’ll make the sale and subsequently the larger the prospective profit margin in your business.
Now let’s go back to determining why beginning by marketing your products won’t be very effective. The prospects you’ll be marketing to will be cold leads. Converting a cold lead straight into a paying customer is much more complicated than dealing with warm prospects. That’s where your blog comes in.
A blog will help you convert your cold prospects into warm leads first before making them customers. A better strategy therefore, is marketing your blog and once your leads step in, you use it to convert them into customers.
For this, you could use SEO and social media to promote your blog posts and drive traffic into them. The more the traffic, the higher you stand making from your blog.
Engage Your Customers
Don’t turn your blog into a jungle of sales pitches, testimonials and money-back guarantees. Only a really desperate customer would have the time of scrolling through the sales pitches before buying your product.
To sell, you need to perfectly establish yourself in your niche by consistently engaging your customers. Use your blog to tell stories that would attract them. For instance, if you are dealing in baby products, you should consider publishing blog posts that discuss things like “How To Detect Ailments on Your Baby Before It’s Too Late”. Such a post would attract parents particularly because they are protective of their babies.
A good way of selling to such an audience is engaging them before mentioning your product as you conclude your advice. Do not direct your visitors to other sales pages within your blog. If you want to sell more, you have to do it straight from the main page they visit. That’s why you should consider leveraging simple ecommerce tools like Selz. It’s embedded in your WordPress or Blogger blog to allow you to conveniently and securely sell your products to your visitors after engaging them.
Use A Purchase Funnel System
Just as we’ve discussed earlier, a visitor to your blog is only a cold prospect. He’s therefore not ready to buy. It’s only after engaging him that you turn him into a warm prospect who’s way easier to convert into a paying customer.
As you engage the visitors, you need to additionally use a purchase funnel to strategically convert the warm prospects into paying customers through stages. For instance, you could ask your visitors to subscribe to your mailing lists after reading your posts for additional engagement. This is a very effective strategy to convert the prospects who still don’t buy after reading the posts.
As you engage with them through their emails, you’ll gradually funnel them and subsequently convert some into paying customers.
Link Your Blog Contextually
Most of your visitors will be internet surfers, most of whom don’t have the time to keep searching through your blog. If your products are scattered on different pages, be sure that your prospects will not take it upon themselves to search and access those pages. It’s up to you to direct them appropriately.
The best way to do this is through linking. But be very careful with this. Linking is not just about posting links anywhere within your blog posts. They have to be contextually linked. For instance, a product should only be linked to the keywords which relate to it. That’s how you’ll direct the traffic accordingly to make good sales from your blog.
If you have successfully used other strategies to boost sales through your blog, feel free to drop in comments and share with us. We’d love to know what’s helping you stay at the top of your game.
Author Byline: Davis Porter is an extensively experienced internet marketing specialist and web writer. For any writing and/or marketing jobs, get in touch with him through davisporter15@gmail.com .