Offline Biz Profits
Here are some techniques of using a blog to help your offline business generate business, even in the down economy!
1) One of the most obvious ways to grow your business with the use of a blog is in it’s ability to attract traffic through the search engines. The moment you add a post or article, you “ping” the search engines such as “Google,” “Yahoo,” and “MSN.” What this means is that you alert the search engines that you made a change or changes to your blog site. This, in turn, helps to raise the rank of your blog site in the search engine listings. Of course, you want to get higher ranking in order for your prospects to find you.
SEO, or search engine optimization is a popular term used to refer to tweaking your website to get more favorable ranking in the search engines.
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2) The one most important way a business blog can help your offline business in a down economy is with driving people to opt in to your email list. You see, if you have no customer list/prospect list, you are “dead in the water” for generating any business soon. The old “Bible of Sales” says, it takes an average of 7 repeat contacts with a prospect before he/she buys from you. Well, blogging gets people in the “pipeline” now to start that “7″ touch process going…NOW!
To get opt in names to your blog site is as simple as offering an incentive for visitors to sign up. As you can see by our site, we offer a free report in exchange for the name and email address of the visitor. We make a gaurantee that we will not sell or pass on their name to anyone, that it stays “in house” and is only for the use of the blog owner and visitor to communicate. You go on to further add that anyone on the list can opt out at any time.
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3) Blogs can dramatically help offline businesses by offering coupon or limited reduced price packages for your service or product. Just think of what you can add to drive visitors to your “brick and mortar” location! For example, let’s say you operate a restaurant and you want to attract more people during the coming Easter holiday. For a limited time, say, three weeks prior to the Easter holiday, you offer a graphic coupon that allows a substantial discount for a second meal with the purchase of one meal at full price. Your marketing message on your blog should let people know they can only get this discount from visiting your blog. At the same time, your blog should have an opt-in email device so the same visitor can get new coupon updates to your restaurant in the future.
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4) After you get your blog to mature for a couple of months, you may want to think on how you can monetize your blog by offering a digital/information product. An information product or eBook is the most common product to sell online, both with blogs and on self standing sales pages. With a blog, you can create an eBook, get a graphic made for a virtual cover of the book, and upload it to your webhost that hosts your blog. Next, you can insert the ebook graphic on the sidebar of the blog with a “Paypal” button attached to it which allows anyone on your blog to make a credit card purchase of the product. Another way to do it is to insert a short description of your ebook product in a post of the blog with a pay button at the end of the post. Still another way is to make a post to describe your product with a link away from your blog that leads the visitor to an online “sales page” that is dedicated to selling the benefits of your product in depth. At the bottom of the sales page will be the Paypal button to buy the product.
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