How do we do attract local search to your blog? Simple, just make sure you mention your local city in your blog posts. Let’s say you are a florist in Chicago, Illinois. A good number of your blog posts should contain the location phrase, “Chicago florist” in it. Remember not to mention it too much. Inserting the local city phrase and your business type at least once in each paragraph.  And it is not important to reverse the phrase to say “florist Chicago,” which does not look natural in a paragraph anyway. The search engines will pick up on “Chicago florist” and make the necessary changes to address everyone searching for “florist Chicago” as well.

So, for marketing you business with a blog, keep in mind that you should always be thinking up of a promotion, at least twice a month, where you could offer a special discount or free gift only to your blog readers who are local to your business. Many business owners leave out this important way that your blog can generate new customers to your store and a great probability to make new sales in the process.

Blogs are a “natural” to build your list because of the “optin” box that can easily be inserted into the front page of your blog.  It’s main purpose is to capture new subscribers to your list. Your immediate obligation is to serve up valuable content within each email to keep your subscribers interested.

Be sure to plan out your ongoing message sequence with your list so that it is a consistent pathway to selling them more of your products and services.

If you do your job right in keeping the interest of your subscribers as well as successfully selling them over and over, you will have guaranteed repeat sales from happy customers.

Now, business blogs are just about connected to every business website. If they have a main website, there is a great chance that a blog is attached to it. Businesses became aware that a main website has no power to get attention from the search engines because it was not “changed” enough to warrant search engines to “crawl” their site. Only if the business owner made changes in the form of adding text content, pictures or video, did search engines truly give that site a higher ranking. Page ranking was, and still is the lifeblood of any website. A high page rank is where your business can be “found.”

So, to properly use your blog for your business, you should be adding content everyday, to maximize the daily advantage that your blog is going to give you.

Business blogging is great to strengthen a customer base. Now that we know most customers have a computer and surf the internet for goods and services, what better way to tap into where they already hang out?

Blogs are a great way to get your message out there. Do you excel at customer service? Do you have a product or service that no other business has? If you have lots of competition in your industry, are you using your blog to help educate your customers by differentiating your product from other businesses in your industry?

Are you using your blog to attract new customers by offerring discounts for first time buyers of your product?

Are you keeping your blog updated and current with new promotions and new information that is interesting to your customers?

A business blog can do so much for your business. You just have to consider all the possibilities that you have in controlling the output of all your valuable content you provide in your blog.

The great thing about having a business blog, is that you, as the business owner can easily add and change content in their site by themselves. Gone are the days when you had to hire a highly paid webmaster to make changes you want and had to wait a very long time before they get back with you. You can make changes quickly to your satisfaction. Although there is a little learning curve, on the average it takes about a week or two to get comfortable with the basics.

Having a blog website will guarantee you sales from the site itself and also able to drive visitors to your physical location.

All successful business blogs and websites have a way for a visitor to enter their name and email address to subscribe. This is usually done through offering some incentive such as a free report in exchange for their email information. This type of list building is very effective today.

Secondly, everytime a customer walks through your door, get their name and email address, even their physical mailing address in exchange for a chance to win a gift certificate at your place of business. Anything that the customer thinks is a perceived value, they will gladly give their name and address.

With these two simple marketing tools in place, you can dramatically increase your business 5 fold. You now have permission from these people to sell products and services to into the future.

Did you know that after you get your business blog established you can make money from the blog itself? Earlier, I stated that the purpose of your blog is to connect with your audience to showcase your brick and mortar business by posting interesting and informative articles related to your business.

After your blog has a good number of blog posts, say over 200 or so, it’s time to monetize the blog itself.

One of the first methods is to insert affiliate ads. This way, when you are attending to the day to day posting on your blog, you “silently” make money when visitors click on the affiliate link and purchase the product from that link.

Next, when you build up a large viewership to your blog, then begin to sell banner ad space for a monthly or yearly fee.

Lastly, you can develop an information product or membership to sell within your blog.

Having these three sales channels going on simultaneously along with selling products from your business is a winning formula for profits to you.

The number one rule in marketing to customers is benefits and leading to the result of them using your product. If your customer wants to look young and you provide skin cream, you want to stress how your product achieves that look.

The marketing “mantra” today is build customer relationships. So remember that the sales process takes time. You can’t expect to get a sale from a prospect on first contact. You must develop that relationship with your customers first then you lead them to the sale. People want to buy, not be “sold” to.

With a business blog, you give time for the prospect to get to know you and trust you. They see your “world” via your blog. You make regular posts on your blog about your business, its latest promotions, customer testimonials, pictures of your business location, videos of you introducing yourself, articles about your business that was previously written in a magazine, pictures of specific products and brief descriptions of each.

Blogs have so much to offer your potential customer that it can’t help but look to you for authority in your industry. You are a live and breathing business that is available to your customer and their needs.

Take a look at this moment what you are using for your marketing and advertising in your business. It could be Yellow Pages, print advertising, flyers, business cards, radio commercials, TV commercials, magazines, classifieds, memberships, direct mail, co-op advertising, word of mouth, and so on. Well, you should complement your online presence (website or blog) with promoting your site’s URL. You have a “www. yourbusiness . com” that could be your blog site or main website. You should make every effort to make your blog URL as much your marketing message as the address of your business location. Consider it synonymous with your business location. This way, your customers or prospects gets to visit your site at a later time for more information. The beauty of a business blog is that it keeps customers in the know about ongoing promotions, what kind of products are provided by your business and also a little about the history about the business and its owners.

This is a great publicity component of your business and it will become more important in the years to come.

As previously mentioned, it all starts with great content. Writing about your business, your products, and your industry will greatly influence whether people are going to visit your site again and again. Once you get repeat visitors, then they may be inclined to opt in their name and email address into your email list. This is a very good thing because you then converted a “stranger” into a “friend.” When they start reading your email newsletter, then you have the advantage of “trusted advisor.”

Then, whenever you have a great product promotion in your business, you can let your subscriber list know first what products you have for sale that they can buy before anyone else knows about it.

Your subscribers then feel like they are “privilaged” to get into your VIP treatment. From there, your sales funnel can continue with more valuable content you give them and then upsell them with more expensive products that they may be interested in.

It is also important that you plan out the “sales funnel” process too. You want to be able to know what products and promotions you are going roll out way in advance so it looks to the subscriber that you are offering fresh and new offers in an ongoing basis. Little do they know you planned several promotions out months out in advance!

The sales funnel is practiced by the most experienced marketers out there. Plan and design your blog marketing efforts accordingly and you can’t help but make it a win-win situation for your customers and your businesses.

A great example is if you have a blog about golf clubs, you may want to put an affiliate ad for golf instructional videos. This is a perfect match since your market is not competing with theirs. When someone clicks on your affiliate link, they are sent to the product site for golf videos. Your visitor then has the chance to purchase something from that site. When they buy something, you get a commission immediately. The beauty of this system is that it is automatic. You don’t have to fill out any paperwork, you don’t fiddle around with a support desk, and you aren’t responsible to deliver the product.

A number of you may have heard of the Google advertising program called “Adsense.” This involves siging up with Google Adsense and then placing a code on your blog. When the code is inserted, a section of the blog will show up text ads that are related to the keywords and keyword phrases that best match what is on your blog.  Although, not an exact science, the flaw here is that more times than not, the text ads are not related to the product or services or content you write about. What’s worse, is that text ads that pop up may be products or services that are in direct competition with your own product or service. So currently, this is not my favorite way to monetize a blog, but many of my students wanted to hear my “take” on it.

Another great way to monetize your blog is through “CPA” or click per action. This is where you set yourself up as an advertiser with a CPA network that provides products for you to click on and insert into your CPA offers on your blog. When a visitor clicks on the hyperlink, you get paid from the click-through. The visitor does not have to purchase anything! You get paid from the lead you sent to the CPA network company! How cool is that?

That last and final way I see to effectively monetize your blog is through selling your own product. The most common way to do this is through ebooks or “how to” courses that cover your industry or market. People are constantly looking for solutions and will gladly pay for it through your own blog site because they already trust you and will be open to what you have to offer as original conteint.

You have more than enough information to keep on appealing to solving their problems. Blogging allows feedback from your customers as well. Remember in previous blog posts I stated that you need to carry on a “conversation” with your blog visitors. You make a blog post that is relevant to your visitors, and it sparks interest with them and they comment back to you. Now, just because you may not get many comments from your visitors, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t reading or paying attention to your blog. So many people are coming back to your blog and reading everything and not commenting.

You don’t realize it, but your visitors are paying attention to your blog. You will find out through checking your visitor stats. If you don’t know how to check your stats, ask your webmaster how to get into the hosting account to find these statistics. For those of you who have Google Analytics attached to your blog, you simply log in there and find out these stats.

What is important is you consistently post to your blog. In time, you will have hundreds, if not thousands of regular visitors to your blog and this is where you start monetizing your blog.

In my next blog post, we will cover techniques on how to monetize your blog.

So passion is the first thing to make your blog successful. The second thing to have is a penchant for writing. Yes, as a blogger you become a publisher and must be able to write. It won’t do you any good if you hand out the writing duties to someone else….you should at least write half of all your content on the blog. That is the only way to be connected with your blog and understanding what you have to do on the blog to satisfy your visitors.

Lastly, you must be able to guide your visitors through your blog. Putting in content for content’s sake is not going to cut it. You have to have a laser focus on where you want your readers to go. “Call to Action” is what you should be thinking about all the time. Give your visitors a reason for being on your blog.

For example, the purpose of your blog is to inform and educate people about your product or service that your busines provides. Explain, in simple terms, how valuable your product is to your customers and that they have to buy it today! Give them a reason to buy and buy now! You also need to generate a customer list. If you have an optin box on your blog, direct your visitors to fill in their details to get on your email list, today! Call to action is what a blog can achieve for your audience.

So let’s recap. The things you need to make a wildly successful blog is:

1. passion
2. write often
3. make a call to action

If you practice these three things, I guarantee that your blog will be successful beyond your wildest dreams!

If you position your business in front of your target audience, you can’t help but be successful. But you must give real, valuable content. It must resonate with the audience you are serving. It sounds simple but so many businesses try to over analyze the “message.” To second guess your market is fatal. Try, instead to be real and develop your content that reflects your values, your personality and what you truly feel that your customers are going to consume and implement.

Once you have a fan club, you then get feedback from them on what they want. The old sales/marketing adage, find out what your “hungry market” wants and give it to them has never been truer.

Your blog should concentrate on reaching out and recruiting more people to your fan base. This is ongoing job. Keep this up and you will be more than profitable in the long run.

If you set up a blog with too many different topics or go into too many different directions, you will just be “spinning your wheels” and will be wasting your time.

Besides your main focus, your secondary goal should be to have a “call to action” for your visitors to go to your place of business and buy something. Your blog can show the benefits and advantages your customer will receive it they do buy your product or service.

If you do nothing more than focus on those two things, with time, your blog will be a very important vehicle for generating more customers and raising your revenues.