Blogging – The Backdoor Approach To Sales

If you’ve ever attended a sales meeting, you’ve been reminded to “ask for the sale”.  Sales trainers vouch for the fact that novice salespeople often go on and on about the features and benefits of their product or service, and then literally forget to ask for the order!


Enter the Internet, standing that advice on its ear… With blogging for business, guess what? Don’t ask! As blogging expert Ted Demopoulis explains in his book “What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging And Poscasting“:, in creating buzz through blogs you “cultivate an audience of people who ask you to sell them something!”


Posting blogs is how businesses take advantage of the main reason people use the Web – to find content.  Instead of running traditional ads for your brand of hats, or vitamins, or travel, you provide lots of information on the history of hats, on why vitamins are good for you, and about exciting places to go on safari.  Consumers interested in your subject, but who never even knew your name come to see you as a trusted resource, possibly as a business to do business with!


As a professional ghost blogger, when I’m working with a new business client, we select just the right “tone” and direction for the series of blogs. As I explained in Ask Not What Your Business Blog Can Do For You, I need to pick up on their unique corporate culture and style, so I can “speak” in their voice to their type of customer. At the same time, though, I need to make it very clear that this effort is different from all the other marketing and sales that company’s doing. 


We’re not asking for the sale, remember.  It’s a “Don’t Ask, But DO Tell” arrangement. “Watch out, world!”, I want to say.  “We’re coming in – but through the back door!”

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Would You Find You?

The Indianapolis Star “Careers” section posed an interesting question for job seekers: “Would you hire you?” Writer Michael Goss advised that seeing ourselves as others see us is a good way to prepare for interviews. Goss added a caution: Making a good impression with an interviewer might be the least of your worries if no one grants you an interview in the first place! The real question, he admits, is “How can I get someone to look at me?”


When I thought about it, I realized that’s precisely the challenge I help my business owner clients face in the world of online marketing. While there are different sorts of blogs for different purposes (see Cat Blogs And Boss Blogs Are Fine, But Viral Blogs Mean Business), the overriding purpose of the business blogs I help my clients write is to attract consumer traffic to that business’ website.


Businessowners who are not yet on board with blogging have heard all the buzz about blogs, but may be wondering whether they need a new marketing initiative.  And that’s exactly when I pop the question “Would you find you?” I challenge business owners to imagine someone seated at a home computer, or perhaps navigating the Web on a laptop at the corner WiFi coffee shop, searching for information about the kinds of information, the kinds of products or services their business has to offer.  Except, I add, you have to remember – that customer has never heard of your business name!


“Go ahead”, I say, “assuming you don’t know the name of your business, type into Google (or Yahoo, or MSN) what you as a customer need. Does your website come up?  On what page of the search engine?”  (Are you a mortgage broker? Search under “mortgage rates in Indianapolis” or “qualifying for a mortgage in Morgan County” .)  (Are you a home health care provider?  Type in “home healthcare for mom in Indiana” or “nurses at home for parents”.) Try many different combinations – how easily would you find you?


Posting content on the Web is the best form of marketing there is, says David Scott in his book “Cashing In With Content”. With blogging, Scott explains, content is not forced on people – they access it because they want to.  Search engines organize the content, and direct people to it.


A business blog targets organic search. Simply put, that means people who don’t know your name.  They don’t know that you have exactly the information, the products, and the services they’re looking for, and they won’t know that until they’re “introduced” to you by the search engine through your blog.  So, if you were in those customers’ seats right now, the question is, Would You Find You??

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Blu-Ray Blogging For Business

Monday following Thanksgiving, a radio talk show host offered listeners a prize if they could name the #1 product purchased in the stores on Black Friday.  The correct answer (alas, not from me!) was Blu-ray high definition disc players.


Later that week, USA Today helped demystify that answer in an article called “10 top discs and questions”. Blu-ray got its name, I learned, from the fact that it uses a blue laser beam to read data from discs, rather than the older-style red lasers used by DVDs.  What’s more, Blu-ray discs hold up to 50 gigabytes, compared to the 10 gigabytes a DVD can hold.


Aside from my own holiday shopping needs for electronics, I found the information in USA Today interesting from my point of view as a business marketer.  (In my work as a professional ghost blogger, I become part of a business’ marketing team, and I’m always on the lookout for ideas that can bring “higher definition” to blog posts.) 


Truth be told, including more “bytes” of information on any one blog post is not a good idea; blogs, by definition, should be concise and focus on one aspect of the business only (see Enuf Is Enuf In Blogs).  But one technical detail about Blu-ray explained in the article is that its video resolution is called 1080p.  The “p” stands for “progressively”, and signifies that the Blu-ray technology constantly (progressively) redraws 1,080 lines across the screen. 

Here’s how that’s highly relevant for blogs: many company blogs include information that could be covered on a traditional website.  What lends blogs their “laser focus”, though, is frequency of posting new content.  In other words, in executing a successful blog strategy, lines of information are “progressively being redrawn” – across searchers’ computer screens!


USA Today remarks that Blu-ray “faces strapped consumers worried about investing in still-pricey players”.  A blog strategy, by contrast, can be started with very little money and lots of “sweat equity”.  That allows a business to begin to attract some of those search engine “blue laser beams”!

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Ties That Tell The Truth In Blogging

Plagiarism’s a big, bad word on college campuses.  As an Executive Career Mentor at Butler University College of Business and an English Tutor at Ivy Tech Community College, I hear a lot of talk about preventing – or punishing – plagiarism. Then, last week the Indianapolis Star carried a fascinating story about “plagiarism” of a different sort.  The St. Louis Art Museum acquired a 3,200 year old mummy mask.  Now Egypt’s antiquities authority is claiming the mask was stolen and transferred illegally to the U.S.. Our Department of Homeland Security is looking into the case. While academia and the arts wrestle with plagiarism issues, in business, protecting “intellectual property” has become a concern of monumental proportions.


Since, as a professional ghost blogger, my arena is the World Wide Web, I can’t help but be awed by the fact that the Internet has become the largest repository of information in human history.  Trillions of words are added to it daily, and literally anyone with access to a computer or cell phone can add content to the mix at any time. Blogging activity has become a rapidly growing part of this oceanic information swell.


Remember the old “Telephone” game we played as children?  Kids would be seated in a row.  The first child would be given a phrase or sentence to whisper in his neighbor’s ear.  That child, in turn, would whisper what she heard to the next child, and so on down the line.  The object of the game was to faithfully pass on the message so that the last child could repeat it exactly as the first had whispered it.  Never happened that way, did it?  By the time that message had traveled down a line of ten or twelve kids, it was unrecognizably distorted.


Blogs, as I stress in Blogs – Between Crafted and Cranked Out, are more casual and conversational than other marketing pieces.  The fact is, though, people read blogs to get information.  My college students are taught to use citations and reference pages to show where they got their information.  That way, they avoid plagiarism by properly attributing statements to their proper authors.  In your blogs, you can give credit to the sources of your information as well.  The blogging equivalent of citations is links.  So even if you’re putting your own unique twist on the topic, link to websites from which you got some of your original information or news.


On the Internet, the rewards for honesty are both psychic and practical.  Electronic links actually enhance search engine rankings for your blog by creating back-and-forth online “traffic”. And, of course, doing the right thing is always its own reward. 



 

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Search Engine Optimization: Three Rights Make A Right For Your Blog

Since word tidbits tend to make my professional ghost blogger’s heart proud, I can’t resist mentioning a seed commercial I heard on the radio the other day.  The announcer was urging farmers to order their seeds now for next spring’s planting, explaining there’d be more time for the seed company’s agronomists to custom-design exactly the right seed mix for each farmer’s needs. The tag line went like this:  “Right time.  Right seeds.  Two rights make a right!”


Now, I concede that, of the thousands of radio listeners who heard that tag line, I’m probably the only one to make a mental leap from seeds to search engine optimization.  Seriously, though, I sense a metaphor here.  More often than I’d like, when I’m enthusiastically explaining how the blogs I write for my clients help them “win search” and get to Page One of Google, Yahoo, or MSN, the response I hear is “Oh, so you’re fooling Google?” (NOT!) 


Adam Sandler warns that “You Don’t Mess With The Zohan“, and I’m sure the same is true of Google.  Aside from that reality, however, I’m tempted at that moment in the conversation to offer a review lesson in Economics 101:  When two parties each possess something the other wants, and they make a fair exchange, that’s called commerce, not “fooling”. Search engines, I hasten to explain, are in the business of providing content.  The reason so many online searchers return to a particular search engine to find products, services, and information, is that they’ve found what they were looking for on that site before. Because Google provides the content people want, it is able to draw visitors, and thus sell more ads. 


Bloggers provide Google with what it needs – content.  Google rewards content providers by indexing their blogs and moving them higher on the search list towards the top of Page One.  Bloggers (or in my case, my business owner clients who’ve hired me to post business blogs) who provide relevant content frequently and over sustained periods of time are rewarded with the highest rankings.  Meanwhile, online searchers are the real winners, finding exactly the information, products, and services they need.  Everybody wins.  Two rights may make a right in seeds, but three rights make one very big right in blogs!


 

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