I can hear people saying it now. “Are you crazy?” A blog as as sales funnel?
Yessiree.
1. Put up great content. As many of you know, I’m a huge fan of Michael Port and Seth Godin. Both of these fabulous marketers propose alternate ways of marketing, which takes the pressure away from the client to conform to your marketing process and puts the onus on YOU to provide more than just quick one liners to their most serious questions about their business needs. Your content is about your client, not about you. If you keep repeating the same information over and over, people will begin to ignore you. Once you’re ignored, your clients will find better solutions elsewhere. You need content for your blog, for Twitter, for your ezine, for your free reports, your ebooks, and your teleseminars. Once you grasp the scope of what exactly your clients are looking for, creating this content is a matter of sitting down and working at it. It involves a bit of elbow grease at first and each month to set up the new content, but man, is it worth it!
2. Interact. Once the content begins to go up, people will begin to interact with you. Be the most approachable person you can possibly be. Comment on other blogs, write articles for directories, add your RSS feed all over the Web, guest blog, spread your content around, and use every chance you have to interact with folks. Be authentic, be real, be you! The real you is polite, succinct, and never uses slick sales tactics.
3. Rework content in articles, speeches, ebooks, ezine, and teleseminar. The list of repurposed content may look like just a ton of work at first, but in reality it’s fun. Sure, each month you have to have an ezine out, your teleseminar ready to go, articles written, speeches prepared, and ebook content updated and ready for download. But all this can easily be outsourced to a VA to give you time to write it. I’m even planning to outsource the research for all this. I just found my first VA today.
4. Offer fantastic customer service. Along with being the most approachable person, you need to provide excellent customer service. If your clients have trouble downloading your ebook, make sure you fix it quick. If your clients have a question that you can’t answer, find out the information fast. It’s as simple as answering every phone call and every single email.
All in all, making a blog/web site into a sales funnel is not difficult. It just takes a lot of work at the outset. It’s worth it in my view. I look forward to my hour spent working on my blog/web site-related content each day. Speaking of, the ezine is coming in April and starting this summer, real/brilliant will begin monthly teleseminars focusing on content creation for bloggers, business owners, and entrepreneurs. Sound fun? Stay tuned to this blog for updates.
