Part 1: More Blogging Results: Know the Reason Why
Comments Off on Part 1: More Blogging Results: Know the Reason WhyBy Alice Seba
You’ve done your keyword research, you diligently wrote your blog posts and you got the traffic. Some people were even nice enough to leave you some comments.
Problem is, you log into PayPal and you still see this:
Not much to write home about. What’s gone wrong?
Here’s the thing, you not only need to know what you’re going to do, but WHY you’re doing it. And until you know the WHY of each and everything you do, you arenít going to get the results you hoped for.
See, it’s not enough to say, I want to make $100,000.
And if you’re a typically modest 30DCer, it’s not even enough to say I want to make $1, or I want to make $100.
You’ve got to break it down and start looking at each blog post you create and figure out their purpose. And I’m not necessarily talking about the purpose the post serves for your readers, but how the post will serve your BUSINESS.
Because without purpose, you’ve got nothing. Sure some posts will be just for fun or just because you felt like it, but if you’re looking to get results from your blog the majority of them need to be strategically planned.
Blog posts can serve a number of purposes and let’s look at some of them, breaking them up into traffic purposes and conversion purposes.
Traffic Purposes for Your Blog Posts
We all want traffic to our blog. Without traffic, we have nothing and no opportunity to convert our readers into prospects so let’s talk traffic.
Search Engine Food: You already know this and it’s what you’ve been working on. You research keywords, make content for those keywords with the goal of good rankings for those keywords.
Word-of-Mouth: Good content gets people talking as does entertaining and controversial content. Well-crafted content can generate plenty of buzz and translate into traffic.
Establishment of Expertise: Content can improve your reputation and allow people to see you as an expert in your subject area. It’s a traffic booster because people will come to you when they need advice on a certain topic.
Reader Satisfaction: Your regular readers have certain expectations of you and to keep them coming, you’ve got to keep delivering.
Certainly traffic is important for your business, but the good news is you don’t need a ton of it to make good money. In fact, if you’re getting a decent stream of traffic to your blog right now you can start making a lot more money from the traffic you already have.
So, let’s take that traffic and talk about converting it to sales.
Conversion Purposes for Your Blog Posts
Traffic is great, but if your visitors aren’t signing up for your mailing list and buying stuff, there’s not much point is there? Here are two common conversion purposes for your blog posts.
New Subscribers: If you’re providing great information on a topic and your mailing list offers more information, make sure you tell your readers about it. Don’t let them look for information about your mailing list because the fact is, most won’t bother. Instead tell them about it directly, give them a reason to sign up and tell them how to do it.
Mention your mailing list frequently because your mailing list gives you the opportunity to:
– Contact your readers more directly
– Contact them more frequently
– Make them more product offers
Pre-Sell: Content is a great way to warm up your readers to buy a product. You can review products, talk about your experience with the product and even other people’s experiences with the product. You can talk about the problems your readers have, to which the solution is the product.
If you prefer to stay content-focused on your blog, do so but you can still make recommendations that make sense and that fit the topic of your blog post.
Start by thinking about your recent posts and the purposes they served. What was the traffic purpose? What was the conversion purpose? You do that and I’ll be back soon with Part 2, when we talk about reaching your conversion goals.
About the Author: Alice Seba is the creator of Contentrix.com and one of the first to get Ed interested in growing organic search traffic. But what good is the traffic without the conversion? Click here for your free Profit with Content guide.