When you are a startup, you are doing everything you can to gain new business and may be especially interested in how to make money online with your online content. Bringing in new customers through the internet seems to be an ideal way to attract a large audience and keep costs low. In this article, we are going to talk about 4 ways you can use your blog to bring in new customers.
Before you start trying to make money online with your blog, you need to define your goals. When you start blogging, is your only goal to bring in sales through your content or are you going to be patient and implement some long term marketing strategy with content that would cater to searchers that are fresh to the discovery process and closer to the beginning of the buying cycle?
Understanding how you want to operate before you start putting content on your blog is going to allow you to work with purpose and that is going to make you much more effective. If you are simply posting content on your site for the sake of having content on your site, you are missing the mark.
1. Position Yourself As An Authority.
If you are a startup, most people have no idea who you are and do not know why they should listen to you. What credibility do you have? Who is backing you? If you do not have strong endorsements from influencers in your industry, you are going to make you own authority and the best way to do that is through your blog.
If you want to become a top authority in your niche, you want to blog about the most important topics in your industry. Find topics that people care about right now and questions that need answering. If you are able to answer people’s questions and help them find solutions to their problems, they won’t care if you are a startup or if you’ve been around for 20 years.
When you are writing your content, make sure you are going in depth and showing as much of your knowledge as appropriate. I made certain not to say “as possible” since that could be a very long article for your users to read and if there is a lot of lingo and jargon, you could confuse them. Your main goal should be to give them an answer to their question and a step to take in the right direction.
2. Search Engine Optimization.
For every blog post or any other piece of content that you put online, you want to make sure it is optimized for the search engines. This means that you should have your keyword research done and keywords that you are targeting in the important areas like the title tags and headings in your blog.
When you start getting traffic from the search engines, you will be able to gain leads and when you gain leads, if you are marketing to them properly, you can gain customers. When your site is showing up in the search engines, you get “free” traffic so you don’t have to buy ads unless you want to put more fuel on the fire.
3. Map Your Content for Buyer Intent.
If you want to help your potential customer through the sales process, you need to map your content for buyer intent. When you do this, you can help your visitors walk through the sales process as you are answering the questions that are coming to mind. Each stage is going to require a different piece of content so making sure that you are providing content for each of these staging is important.
According to HubSpot the three stages are awareness, evaluation, and purchase. While awareness might need a tip sheet or how to video, the evaluation stage might find a webinar more helpful and for those that are ready to purchase they need a free trial, demo, coupon or something of that nature.
When you are creating your content, make sure that you have all three of these stages in mind. If you create content only for the buyer, you are missing out on a large number of people that would purchase, but they simply are not sure if you are the right one for them.
4. Build a Custom Landing Page for Guest Blog Visitors.
When you guest blog, you have the opportunity to send visitors to a link on your site. You can make a custom landing page for people that are visiting when you do guest blogs. Thank them for coming to the site, but also make sure that you point them to your most popular content so that you can keep them reading. Asking to stay in touch through an opt-in form is totally acceptable as well.
Conclusion.
Your blog can be a lot of things to a lot of people so knowing what content to put where is very important. You also need to make sure that you navigation stays clean and easy to read as you are adding all of the content to your site. If no one can find what they want to read, all of the content you can write won’t do any good. Putting these tips into practice right away will help you get up the momentum you need to start seeing results with your blog so make sure to take action.
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