One of the biggest mistakes I see people making in their blogging
efforts is “why” they use them. Most people tend to think of blogging as
a primary traffic generation strategy, and it can be, but it’s not THE
best use of a blog in our type of business.
You should think of blog traffic more like icing on the cake. The
primary and MOST powerful use of starting and using a blog in
your business is it’s ability to create a powerful testimonial for you. Let
me explain . . .
When I started my first successful business here’s exactly what I
did. On an almost daily basis I blogged about something relating to my
business, at the top of that blog I would always note the number of
people in our team, and then carry on with the message.
Sometimes if I had new recruits I would create a formal blog welcome
to my new team mates by listing their names and welcoming them to the
team.
If there was a co-op, advertising strategy that was working well for me, you better bet I put in on that blog.
Why? Well, I haven’t told you how I used my blog to recruit yet
(we’ll get to that in a second), but along with using a blog to recruit I
also constantly referred my team members there for any and all updates
on our business.
It was a central meeting point. As a result my team always checked
the blog to see what was going on in our business. This was important
for two reasons:
First, easy access to important current information pertaining to our team, and second as team wide social proof.
They came to the blog and saw the number of people on the team
growing and welcome messages to our new team members and subconsciously
it helped raise their belief level about the business they were in.
It’s sometimes easy for a new recruit to get discouraged without
encouragement and the blog helped give them that encouragement they
needed. As a result they “
believed” in the business, and took more
proactive action to go out and do what we were doing to grow which
translated into a higher rate of duplication in the business and longer
retention.
So let’s recap so far, we’ve got a blog where we’re blogging about
our team, what we’re doing to advertise, we’re “training” our team
members to check the
blog often for advice and encouragement and as a
result their using that motivation to go out and build. This causes the
team to grow faster, stronger, and better.
What do we have? That sounds like a pretty darn powerful testimonial
to me. And that’s the primary use of the blog as far as recruiting is
concerned as I mentioned earlier.
The mistake most people make is they want to blog for traffic, which
you can do, and I’ll share a few tips to doing that better in a few,
but not it’s best use for recruiting. Here’s how to use your blog to
recruit . . .
I’d generate leads directly to my own lead capture page or my
company’s lead capture page. Once I saw my lead opt in I would send them
a personal email to tell them a little bit about myself, our team, and
our business. In that email I would always include a link to my blog
so my prospects could get an inside look at who I and our team was
doing.
This is powerful as heck for a couple reasons where recruiting is concerned.
First, people are inherently voyeuristic. They wanna spy, so let
them. By sending my prospects to my blog they now had the opportunity to
get to know me and my team without me even being there. As a result,
when we did have an email correspondence or they called me they already
knew me.
I’ve always found this to be a MUCH better option than cold calling leads. I let them get to know me first.
Second reason this is powerful is based on a principle called “The
Power Of Documentation” which states we as humans tend to take things
which we read as more truthful than things we just hear.
In other words, a prospect who goes to your blog and reads about you
and your team is going to take what they read there at face value where
if you’re on the phone telling them the same thing they’re most likely
saying “Yeah right”
If you’ve ever called leads and had that question come up of “Well
why should I join you?” Having and sending your prospects to your blog
first will virtually eliminate this objection and ignite powerful
curiosity and intrigue about you and what you do.
So, when it comes to using a blog to recruit, it’s best us is as a
secondary traffic strategy. You get the lead, then you send them to your
blog for a powerful testimonial.
So I can hear the question welling up “What should I put on my blog
to start?” Simple, talk about yourself, your company’s products and
service, why you love your company, your team, AND here’s a key . . .
Ask your upline or downline to write you a quick note about why it’s great to work with you and put it on your blog.
You do that, and you’ve covered all your bases. Not only are your
prospects learning about you, why you like what you do, your
personality, your team, BUT they’re also SEEING other people saying
great things about you. Third party validation about you is a
powerful
thing.
Simply doing this and nothing else, I was surprised to see that after
about six months of consistent blogging my blog received about 300
site views per day from people finding online via search engines. I did
nothing but blog, but just because I had content on the blog I had
tons of people finding it for free, and as a result, calls out of the
blue from people saying “yeah I found your blog, what’s up with your
business” (kinda cool)
So let me share a few things you can do to improve you search engine rankings for you blog posts to enhance your free traffic.
First, do a little keyword research using the Google Keyword tool.
Find a few keywords related to business and use those keywords in your
blog title, and a few times, along with a few synonyms for that main
keyword in your blog post.
One secret strategy that’s really increased my blog traffic personally is using images in my blog.
On blog posts where I insert an image to correspond to the blog post
keyword I tend to get about double the traffic. So find a few images
related to your blog post keyword.
Name those images as your main keyword, for instance if my blog post
was based on the keyword “
internet network marketing” then then I would
find 3 images I could use for that keyword and I would name the images
internet-network-marketing1.jpg, internet-network-marketing2.jpg,
internet-network-marketing3.jpg etc.
Search engines rank you based on how many other websites link to your
post related to your keywords, so when you create a new blog post,
write an article with the same keyword and submit it to the major
article directories with a link going back to your main blog post.
Find a few other blogs in the niche and comment on a few post and link back to your blog post.
Create a facebook, twitter, myspace, squidoo account and post some
content based on the keyword and link those back to your blog post.
You do that for you blog and you’re ahead of 99% of marketers.
So now that we’ve got traffic down, let’s talk about $$$, how do you
make money with your blog? I think the simplest way to make money with
blog from the outset is to simply add Google Adsense to each blog post,
not so much because you’ll make a ton of cash from it, but when people
do click on your Google Adsense ads on your blog you’ll make a few
bucks which is powerful positive reinforcement for your efforts in the
early going.
It’ll fuel you forward. You’ll see money coming in and you’ll get excited.
The best long term way to make money with your blog though is . . .
Integrating your blog with your email marketing efforts. I love using
the one two punch of email marketing and blogging because it allows
you to change the dynamic of your email messages to your prospects from
a one way conversation to a two way conversation by giving your
prospects the ability to comment back to you.
Getting people involved and commenting on your blog is a powerful way
to build trust. Think of your blog as a conversation and you’ll see
the bond between you and your prospects growing stronger daily and for
it your income will increase.
There are two powerful benefits of turning your emails into a blog conversation.
The first is simply when people get involved and proactively comment
they’ve taking a powerful step into your world. The second benefit is a
little more sneaky, but extremely powerful.
Say you send a prospect to your blog to share an important post today and 15 people comment on that post. Great!
Well what if you take the email that you sent people to your blog and add it to your auto responder?
Now the leads that join your list
3 months from now will get that
email automatically via your autoresponder email sequence you set up and
when they get to the post not only are they going to get to
participate in a conversation you set up on autopilot, but they’ll also
see all the people that commented prior and say . . .
“Wow! I just got this email and 15 people already comment there must
be a lot of people listening in.” and hence conclude you’re a good
teacher and someone a LOT of people listen to.
However,
we all encounter disappointments, frustrations and set backs. That’s
just how life is. These situations or circumstances are different for
all of us.