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Not everyone can buy now – stay in touch with potential customers to make money in the long run. Photograph: Mediablitzimages/Alamy
Not everyone can buy now – stay in touch with potential customers to make money in the long run. Photograph: Mediablitzimages/Alamy

Turn your business blog into a sales machine with these tips

This article is more than 8 years old

Content marketing can lead to future sales if you lure people into giving you their email addresses, writes Janet Murray

If you want to convert leads into sales, your business blog needs loyal fans, not one-off visitors. So even if you create brilliant content, if prospective customers aren’t returning to your blog time and time again you could be wasting your time.

Here are some tips on how to turn your business blog into a sales machine:

Optimise your website

If you want to engage prospective customers, you need to create content that solves people’s problems or make their lives easier in some way. This way, when they are ready to buy, they’ll think of you immediately. This approach is often referred to as content marketing.

But not everyone is ready to buy right now. In fact, it could be months before they have the need – or the budget – to become your customer. So your ultimate goal should be to collect email addresses, so you can keep in touch with potential customers until they are ready to buy.

Adding opt-in boxes or pop-ups to your blog (which require people to give you their name and email address) is an effective way of doing this. Some people worry this will be a turn-off, but there’s plenty of research to show they get results.

People need a good reason to give you their email address

But before you start adding opt-in boxes and pop-ups to your site, a word of caution. If you want people to give you their email address, you need to give them a good reason to do so.

In a time when many of us are overwhelmed with information, asking people to subscribe to a newsletter probably isn’t going to cut it. If you want to persuade people to part with their email address, you need to offer them something irresistible – ideally something they’d be willing to pay for. This can be anything from an ebook to a series of video lessons – something that teaches people something they didn’t know and/or solves a problem for them. In the world of content marketing, this is often referred to as a lead magnet.

If you’re a make-up artist, you could create a series of short videos on how to apply make-up. If you run a landscape gardening company, you could create an ebook or set of video lessons on how to build a simple wall or pond. A web designer might create a workbook on how to install and create a basic Wordpress site.

I recently started offering a free five-day course in writing press releases on my blog. This has increased opt-ins to my email list by almost 200%.

Most business owners have more than enough expertise to create a valuable opt-in offer in just a few hours. I procrastinated for months about my first – an ebook for small business owners on how to get press coverage – but it ended up taking me an afternoon.

If you don’t have design or editing skills, don’t let that hold you back. It’s easy to find people who do on sites like fiverr, Upwork or 99Designs, for a very reasonable price and with a quick turnaround too.

Keep people engaged with useful content

It’s often said that ‘the money is in the list’, so if you’ve convinced people to give you their email address, keep in touch. That doesn’t mean putting them on the circulation list for your boring newsletter (if you do this, there’s a good chance they’ll unsubscribe). It means keeping them engaged with regular, useful content.

One way of doing this is to create an email autoresponder. This is a series of emails – almost like mini-blog posts – that are exclusive to your subscribers and solve their problems or make their lives easier.

Some small business owners question the value of building an email list when it’s possible to buy them. But an email list you’ve collected and curated yourself is far more valuable than anything you could buy. Why? Because it’s made up of people who already like you and your content, which makes them hot leads.

Others worry that giving away things for free will lose them business, but in my experience it works the opposite way. Most people need numerous touchpoints with a company before they decide to buy. Offering free content helps you build relationships - and, crucially, trust - in a cost-effective way. So when they are ready to buy they’ll know exactly who to come to, and you can compete on quality, not price.

Janet Murray is a writer and media trainer. Her blog can be found at www.janetmurray.co.uk

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