How Blogging Can Boost Your Sales

In this article I’m going to explain how blogging can boost your sales. I read a lot of articles and blogs about making money with a blog. I must say, I’m not making any money with my blogs yet. But I used one of my blogs to promote my business and after 3 months I was allready earning over $1.000 each month thanks to that blog…

Blogging can boost your visitors

Maybe you read on the internet that blogging can attract a lot of visitors. Well, the good thing is that this is right. The bad thing is that it all depends on you . The more time and efforts you put into your blog, the more visitors you will attract.

So, if you allready have a website, how to start with a blog? Well, there are 2 ways to do this. You can attach a blog to your website or you can create a new website containing a blogging system.

Attach a blog to your website.

If you allready have a good website, the best way is to attach a blog. You can join external services like WordPress.com or Blogger, but I think it’s better to host your own blog on your own domain. In that way, your blog is directly linked to your website. The best software (in my opinion) to do this, is WordPress(.org). You can download WordPress for free and install it on your on webserver.

Create a new website containing a blogging system

If you have an old website, and you’re planning to get a new one, then it might be a good idea to think about using a CMS containing a blogging system. One of the best systems to achieve this, is WordPress.org.

More info

If you want more information about how to install WordPress, it’s not a bad idea to start with some of my previous posts:

• 9 great reasons to use WordPress as a CMS
• How to install WordPress in 5 easy steps
• How to turn WordPress into a CMS in 4 simple steps
• My 20+ favourite WordPress plugins

How to boost your sales?

Now we have a blog attached on our website, it’s time to write some articles!

What subjects should you write about?

Maybe you ask yourself, where should I write about? Well, write some articles about (new) products and services you’re offering. Write about interesting stuf, give something away for free. Write something unique, don’t copy paste from other websites! You can write articles to show the world that you are an expert, you can write articles to make your visitors curious,…

How often do you have to publish an article?

One of the biggest problems of blogging is that most people are very motivated in the beginning, but stop blogging after a couple of weeks or months. I now that running a business is very hard work, and that it leaves little time to do other things. But you don’t need to publish a blogpost everyday. If you can manage to post an article once a week, that’s fine. If you don’t have a lot of time, then once a month can also be ok. What I think that is important for such a blog, is that your visitors can see that your blog isn’t dead, that you update your blog on a regular base. Offcourse, the more articles you write, the more visitors you will attract.

How do you convert visitors into clients?

Expert wanted

If your visitors believe that you are an expert, they are more interested to hire you.

They allready know you

When blogging, you tell something about yourself, you write about your vision, about your interests. Some of your visitors will comment your blogs and you will react on that. So, your visitors will know you better.

Call to action

Always end an article with a call to action: you have to tell what your visitors “have to do”:

• If you want that your visitors will contact you, well tell them to contact you. For example: contact me for more information or a free quote.
• If you want them to buy something, tell them. For example: buy this book on Amazon now!

Make a link of the call to action so that you can guide your visitors to the right page.

Case study

One year ago I started my own website to promote my services (building websites). Because I read that blogging was a good way to attract new visitors, I turned my website into a WordPress blog. I used pages for general info (what do I do, how do I work, pricing,…) and used the blog functionality to write some blog articles.

I started to write articles about SEO, attracting visitors, tips and techniques,… The point is, there was enough information to start your own website . The frequency I wrote my articles was once a week in the beginning and ance a month after 2 months.

Before I started to blog I had 20 visitors a month. After 3 months blogging it was between 50 and 80 visitors a month. Today, one year later, my website attracts 500 visitors a month.

Now, what’s more important, after 2-3 months blogging, people started to contact me. A couple of designers contacted me to work with them. Somebody else contacted me to give some training sessions and a lot of people asked my advice about several topics.

So, thanks to that blog I earn good money. Not directly with adsense or affiliates, but because people started to know me and asked me to work with them or to build websites for them.

Conclusion

On the internet you can read a lot of succes stories about how you can earn a lot of money with blogging (thanks to ads and affiliate sales). Don’t be a fool, it takes a lot of hard work, dedication, patience and time to reach that. For most of us, that’s not the way we are going to make money. So let’s focus on the way we can. Blogging can boost your sales, it worked for me so I’m sure it can also work for you!

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