Blogs that Win Customers do so with Skill not Luck:

Do you like my graphic showcasing that a pen can be used to hit a target too?  What I most like about it is that only one of those darts will typically make you money…the other two, however, can be a lot of fun!  You could make money throwing darts at a board in some championship game I suppose…but putting your pen to work and understanding the power of the business blog is a sure win where skill, not luck takes home the winning prize.

How do I Write Blogs for the Bots and at the same time Win Prospects?

Its not as difficult as it sounds actually.  But its not as easy to explain as I wish it were!  Maybe begin with realizing that targeting both the Bots and your prospects are the same thing.  Here’s my attempt at explaining why that’s true.  The search engine is composed of Bots; electronic digital devices that read, file, retain content and know were to find it again.  The target you need to hit to win your customer is the same one that needs to be hit to lure the Google Bot.  When the Bots track your information about your product or service, it is the same information that is fed to that prospect that is looking for what you’re selling.  Still with me…?  After all when you consider that all of us, including your prospects are the initial programmers.  If you can spend a few minutes thinking about that you’ll know how brilliant the internet actually is when viewed as the gigantic and never ending marketing machine it is.  All you have to do is put it to work for yourself.

Writing the Effective Business Blog:

I get asked this question over and over:  “What do I write about?”  That’s a fair question and what I hear loudest in it is the small business owner who feels they haven’t the creativity to keep generating original material.  That’s what web content writers are for!  After all, most small to medium business owners now work at least 10 hr days.  Since the economic downturn, many of they state that due to not being able to afford staff, they are now working 14hour days.  Very easy to understand that to be asked to sit and think about what to blog about is just off the list of options.  But the strong and brave survive, so to answer the question about writing effective business blogs,  just get a list of what in the ‘used to be days’ you would have hired traditional advertising space for.  Sales & Discounts?  News & Updates on product lines?  Special events & Hangouts?  AND if you have a business that has a natural calendar built into it, like making wine, or cheese, or something that comes into season once a year, then you can have a running calendar blog that feeds fresh, relevant, and useful information to your existing clients and constantly broadcasts for new prospects.

Remember that your clients and prospects are people just like you. 

I say that because sometimes when the small business owner decides to begin a business blog, they seem to conjure and put on another persona.  The truth is that the more you communicate in the way you want to be communicated to, the better the results will be.  You don’t have to put on the ‘advertising personality’; all you have to do is maintain the same friendliness towards them through the blog, that you show to them when they come into your shop.  If you don’t have a shop, pretend you do so you can get this salient point I am demonstrating.

Stories Sell – Facts Tell

Tell a story.  Everyone loves them and the best marketers in the world tell stories about themselves and their products…they actually do not set out to sell anything to anyone.  They tell their story and we buy into it.  We all remember our favorite teachers; they entertained us while they educated us.  Ministers do this all of the time they actually are just copying the Great Master Storytellers. You must have dozens of stories about how your business was started and why; war stories about how some competitor tried to put you down…but you won and they lost!  Maybe you know something about the history of your product…how did it come to be, who invented it, why does it exist…and is this product sold in different parts of the world but somehow looks very different?  You get the drift.  Tell a story about your product or service and make it interesting.