Marketing your Blog
There are three steps to successfully marketing your blog…
- Get the customer to your site.
- Present your product, or service.
- Close the sale.
Although fundamentally correct, this is simplicity at it’s best. Each step has a number of requirements to work effectively, and this is what I would like to explore.
Getting the customer to your site is a combination of advertising, networking, and search engine awareness.
A successful site needs to be attractive in two distinct ways; visually and structurally. The visual appearance will catch and hold the customers attention, while proper structure invites the SE’s to rank favorably. You need both.
A few points:
Colors – Others may not like what you like. Try staying as neutral as possible.
Ask yourself, do the colors strain my eyes? Can I easily read the text? Are the colors too violent? Passive?
Consistency – Maintain your theme throughout the entire site. If the header, navigation links, or background, varies from page to page, the visitor can become easily confused and leave.
Layout – Make it easy for the visitor to navigate. They came here for a reason, what was it? To find a Widget?
Don’t make them dig through your life story, or any other unrelated crap. Put up some good quality, useful info, about your product, how it will benefit them, why this widget is the best, etc.
They came for information on something that they hope will better their lives… give it to them.
If they want to know about you they will read your “About” page.
Content – As stated above, your text content is the “sales pitch” to the customer, but it is also an invitation to the Search Engines.
Integration of keywords throughout your site is very important. This can be the tricky part. Your wording needs to obviously make sense to the customer, be grammatically correct, yet rich in keywords.
This is how NOT to do it… “This widget is the best widget there is in the widget world according to widget experts.” It sounds stupid and will be flagged by the Search Engines for keyword stuffing.
WHAT does the widget do? WHY does the widget exist? WHO buys the widget? These are some of the questions you will want to ask yourself to determine any number of good keywords to use.
* Don’t sell price, sell the product.
Bear in mind that people tend to scan a page, rather than read word for word. Headers, sub-headers, highlighting in bold and italics, bullet/numbered lists, attract attention. You will want to use these to capture immediate interest.
Breaking up your article into blocks using 2 to 4 sentences per block will make it much easier to scan and your visitor is more likely to read the entire article.
Site tips
- Images – pictures are very useful when it pertains to your product, period. Large graphics that are not related to what you are selling take up room, distract from the intent of your site, take valuable time to load, and have no distinct advantage when it comes to SEO.
- Any advertising, affiliate or otherwise, should be related to your business. Subtle, inline, contextual advertising works the best.
- Flash and JavaScript will slow your site down. Have you ever come across a site and have to wait 5 seconds, or more, for it to load? Your potential buyer will most likely leave you for a speedier site. Also, many people have these turned off in their browsers. Unless you are a designer, and Flash is a key to your business, leave it behind.
- Meta Tags – learn about them, and use them. They are still effective.
- Title and Description – Both of these tell the customer and SE what your site is about. Use keywords here, but use them wisely. They should make sense to the reader.
- Structure Code – Make sure your site conforms to current CSS/HTML standards. You want it to look the same in different browsers.
*Any images you do use, should have an “alt” tag using a keyword related description.
*Advertising images should be held to a minimum. Large banners, flashing graphics, pop-ups, peel pages, and redirects, look cheap, and turn off most visitors.
Closing the sale with a customer should be much easier now that your site is “tuned” properly.
Make sure the checkout process is easy and secure, and by all means, tell this to the customer.
Allow them see a total price, including tax, shipping, and any other charges, BEFORE they give any personal info.
Thank them for the sale and offer a print invoice, email invoice, or both.
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