Congratulations, Entrepreneur! Your business is off to a solid start. You have a website, you have some testimonials, you have a list of services, and you know how much you want to charge. Now, how do you get your target audience to notice you? What will bring Jack or Jane Ideal Client to your website so they can see how valuable it would be to work with you or buy your product? One of the best ways to fill your client list is to start blogging.
What if you don’t know the first thing about blogging? No worries, I’m here to help. Remember to keep it simple and include plenty of white space. You may have to break up paragraphs in places that you don’t feel comfortable doing so, but it’s all about readability and not correct format like in a college or school paper. Now, you can laugh in your college professor’s stoic face.
Next, include pictures that are relevant to the blog post and always fill in the “alt” information for the picture. The “alt” tag provides a text alternative to an image. They are a way to “describe” an image to those who cannot see the image. (Learn more about “alt” tags here.) The best thing to enter in the “alt” field is the title of the post or your business or website name. For example, the “alt” tag on all your images could be ‘MyAwesomeBiz’.
Use plenty of bullet points, headlines, H1 and H2 headers. Bullet points and headers make your content easier to read and, in the world of short attention spans, easy to scan. If you are unsure of how to use the H1 and H2 headers, this is an excellent YouTube video that will show you how. These are formatting elements that will attract the web crawlers (spiders) and get you listed in search results.
Disperse keywords within the first 100 words and if possible in each paragraph. If you haven’t made your list of keywords, there are many free tools that can get you started. Three very effective and easy to use ones are Google Adwords, Wordstream and SEOBook. After you have your keywords, remember to keep it natural with keywords. No keyword stuffing! This is using all your keywords in your writing so it appears unnatural and very hard to read. It may also be done in your metatags. You can be severely penalized by the search engines for doing it and it won’t attract your target audience. Your first concern should be whether or not your blog post is interesting, engaging, targeted and readable to your niche audience.
Now that you know the formatting basics, let’s go over a few things that you can blog about to promote your business.
You can blog about your services or product. Blog about each of the services or products you provide so that your client base will understand what these services entail. For example, if you provide blogging services for entrepreneurs and small business you should frequently blog about this topic. Remember to focus each blog on one service and the benefits it provides potential clients in each blog post. In fact all your blog posts should be short, sweet and to the point. They should focus on one specific topic at a time.
Blog about the problems and roadblocks you client may encounter. You know your ideal client well and what issues and problems they have. Therefore if you blog about these problems and then mention your service as a solution, you’ll find your ideal client organically. If you can show how you understand your target audience’s problems, fears and concerns and that you know how to solve them, people will seek you out as the expert. Eventually, you may even receive questions in your email or through social media. Use those as bogging material. Until you start receiving inquiries, make up questions that your ideal client might ask you.
Blog about the success you’ve had working with clients or high points of your own career. Story telling is a powerful marketing tool. These are the most fun blog posts! Did you solve something for a client, and is the client willing to talk about it? Interview them on it and post it as a vlog to your blog. Seeing satisfied clients rave about your work and how you solved their problems can bring you many new clients. Put the audio and video up, as well as a transcript of the interview for a double whammy. Since your target audience learns in different ways, you need to provide your content in a format that will appear to each person.
Blog about how to work with you or buy your product. Blogging about how working with you works is a good way to educate those who don’t know. For example, if you work virtually, some people still have a hard time envisioning how you can do work for someone, whether it’s coaching, providing a service, or even a product without having a brick and mortar space. They may be confused about the technology that enables you to work virtually. If you are selling a product, you can blog about how to order it, what to do when they receive it and your customer service process if they have questions.
By including these topics in your blog posts you’ll go far in filling your customer list. But remember, once you post a blog you’re not done. You need to promote that blog post across all your social media marketing accounts plus send the announcement of a new blog post to your email list. Ask people to share it and help you get the word out.
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