List Building with Blogs

By Bruce · Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

One of the most effective marketing advantages for using a business blog is that it serves to build a prospect and/or customer list. I wish that, with every blog software, it would include an “opt in” box so that the blog owner doesn’t even have to bother with adding this feature.

Search engines love blogs and consistently have favored the page rankings on these types of websites. As a matter of fact, search engine giant, Google, has recently updated how they give preferable rankings to include blogs of any type as well as social media. So big tip here, if you are connected to blogs or social media, you are going to get higher rankings automatically.

A great way for businesses to build a high quality customer list is to put up a business blog and connect an “opt in” box, preferably in the upper right hand corner of your site. I had mentioned the types of blog software you can use in previous posts.

So what is an “opt in” box? Simply put, it is a way to capture information from prospects or customers from the internet. It does this by having some text that tells the visitor why they should give their name and email address in the opt in box. Usually it is a free report of some kind, offering a discount, or some other incentive to give a good reason why the visitor should enter their details. Whatever you offer, make sure it is of great value to the visitor.

Once the visitor enters their information, usually what is used is a third party company (online autoresponder service) that holds and maintains the database from all your opt ins. Most third party autoresponder services give you the ability to pre write emails in a sequence that is “time released” to your subscriber list. So you can automate your emails to “keep in touch” and build a relationship with your subscribers.

Email marketing is a very popular and effective way to generate new customers, retain your current customers and sell new products and services to both of these groups of people.

We recommend using a high quality autoresponder service like Aweber. Click below for more details.