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by Daegan Smith.
One of the biggest mistakes I see people making in their blogging efforts is “why” they use them. Most people tend to think of blogging as a primary traffic generation strategy, and it can be, but it’s not THE best use of a blog in our type of business.
You should think of blog traffic more like icing on the cake. The primary and MOST powerful use of starting and using a blog in your business is it’s ability to create a powerful testimonial for you. Let me explain . . .
When I started my first successful business here’s exactly what I did. On an almost daily basis I blogged about something relating to my business, at the top of that blog I would always note the number of people in our team, and then carry on with the message.
Sometimes if I had new recruits I would create a formal blog welcome to my new team mates by listing their names and welcoming them to the team.
If there was a co-op, advertising strategy that was working well for me, you better bet I put in on that blog.
Why? Well, I haven’t told you how I used my blog to recruit yet (we’ll get to that in a second), but along with using a blog to recruit I also constantly referred my team members there for any and all updates on our business.
It was a central meeting point. As a result my team always checked the blog to see what was going on in our business. This was important for two reasons:
First, easy access to important current information pertaining to our team, and second as team wide social proof.
They came to the blog and saw the number of people on the team growing and welcome messages to our new team members and subconsciously it helped raise their belief level about the business they were in.
It’s sometimes easy for a new recruit to get discouraged without encouragement and the blog helped give them that encouragement they needed. As a result they “believed” in the business, and took more proactive action to go out and do what we were doing to grow which translated into a higher rate of duplication in the business and longer retention.
So let’s recap so far, we’ve got a blog where we’re blogging about our team, what we’re doing to advertise, we’re “training” our team members to check the blog often for advice and encouragement and as a result their using that motivation to go out and build. This causes the team to grow faster, stronger, and better.
What do we have? That sounds like a pretty darn powerful testimonial to me. And that’s the primary use of the blog as far as recruiting is concerned as I mentioned earlier.
The mistake most people make is they want to blog for traffic, which you can do, and I’ll share a few tips to doing that better in a few, but not it’s best use for recruiting. Here’s how to use your blog to recruit . . .
I’d generate leads directly to my own lead capture page or my company’s lead capture page. Once I saw my lead opt in I would send them a personal email to tell them a little bit about myself, our team, and our business. In that email I would always include a link to my blog so my prospects could get an inside look at who I and our team was doing.
This is powerful as heck for a couple reasons where recruiting is concerned.
First, people are inherently voyeuristic. They wanna spy, so let them. By sending my prospects to my blog they now had the opportunity to get to know me and my team without me even being there. As a result, when we did have an email correspondence or they called me they already knew me.
I’ve always found this to be a MUCH better option than cold calling leads. I let them get to know me first.
Second reason this is powerful is based on a principle called “The Power Of Documentation” which states we as humans tend to take things which we read as more truthful than things we just hear.
In other words, a prospect who goes to your blog and reads about you and your team is going to take what they read there at face value where if you’re on the phone telling them the same thing they’re most likely saying “Yeah right”
If you’ve ever called leads and had that question come up of “Well why should I join you?” Having and sending your prospects to your blog first will virtually eliminate this objection and ignite powerful curiosity and intrigue about you and what you do.
So, when it comes to using a blog to recruit, it’s best us is as a secondary traffic strategy. You get the lead, then you send them to your blog for a powerful testimonial.
So I can hear the question welling up “What should I put on my blog to start?” Simple, talk about yourself, your company’s products and service, why you love your company, your team, AND here’s a key . . .
Ask your upline or downline to write you a quick note about why it’s great to work with you and put it on your blog.
You do that, and you’ve covered all your bases. Not only are your prospects learning about you, why you like what you do, your personality, your team, BUT they’re also SEEING other people saying great things about you. Third party validation about you is a powerful thing.
Simply doing this and nothing else, I was surprised to see that after about six months of consistent blogging my blog received about 300 site views per day from people finding online via search engines. I did nothing but blog, but just because I had content on the blog I had tons of people finding it for free, and as a result, calls out of the blue from people saying “yeah I found your blog, what’s up with your business” (kinda cool)
So let me share a few things you can do to improve you search engine rankings for you blog posts to enhance your free traffic.
First, do a little keyword research using the Google Keyword tool. Find a few keywords related to business and use those keywords in your blog title, and a few times, along with a few synonyms for that main keyword in your blog post.
One secret strategy that’s really increased my blog traffic personally is using images in my blog.
On blog posts where I insert an image to correspond to the blog post keyword I tend to get about double the traffic. So find a few images related to your blog post keyword.
Name those images as your main keyword, for instance if my blog post was based on the keyword “internet network marketing” then then I would find 3 images I could use for that keyword and I would name the images internet-network-marketing1.jpg, internet-network-marketing2.jpg, internet-network-marketing3.jpg etc.
Search engines rank you based on how many other websites link to your post related to your keywords, so when you create a new blog post, write an article with the same keyword and submit it to the major article directories with a link going back to your main blog post.
Find a few other blogs in the niche and comment on a few post and link back to your blog post.
Create a facebook, twitter, myspace, squidoo account and post some content based on the keyword and link those back to your blog post.
You do that for you blog and you’re ahead of 99% of marketers.
So now that we’ve got traffic down, let’s talk about $$$, how do you make money with your blog? I think the simplest way to make money with blog from the outset is to simply add Google Adsense to each blog post, not so much because you’ll make a ton of cash from it, but when people do click on your Google Adsense ads on your blog you’ll make a few bucks which is powerful positive reinforcement for your efforts in the early going.
It’ll fuel you forward. You’ll see money coming in and you’ll get excited.
The best long term way to make money with your blog though is . . .
Integrating your blog with your email marketing efforts. I love using the one two punch of email marketing and blogging because it allows you to change the dynamic of your email messages to your prospects from a one way conversation to a two way conversation by giving your prospects the ability to comment back to you.
Getting people involved and commenting on your blog is a powerful way to build trust. Think of your blog as a conversation and you’ll see the bond between you and your prospects growing stronger daily and for it your income will increase.
There are two powerful benefits of turning your emails into a blog conversation.
The first is simply when people get involved and proactively comment they’ve taking a powerful step into your world. The second benefit is a little more sneaky, but extremely powerful.
Say you send a prospect to your blog to share an important post today and 15 people comment on that post. Great!
Well what if you take the email that you sent people to your blog and add it to your auto responder?
Now the leads that join your list 3 months from now will get that email automatically via your autoresponder email sequence you set up and when they get to the post not only are they going to get to participate in a conversation you set up on autopilot, but they’ll also see all the people that commented prior and say . . .
“Wow! I just got this email and 15 people already comment there must be a lot of people listening in.” and hence conclude you’re a good teacher and someone a LOT of people listen to.
