A company blog is essential for establishing your place on the web. You can use it to share updates, post about your industry, and even advertise open positions.
What’s more, you can also use it to drive sales.
To help you capitalize on this profit potential, YEC asked 13 successful business owners how they’ve used their own blogs to drive product or service sales.
Take an Educational and Consultative Approach
We make sure our blog posts educate our readers about information security and how encryption is part of the data security puzzle. We make sure to turn off the sales pitch in the post. We find that posts from years ago often get hits, and in many cases, this has translated to new sales.
– Tim Maliyil, AlertBoot
Compliment Other Influencers
I’ve used our company blog to highlight other similar products, brands, or VIPs. I’ve had my copywriter research people like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos and write a feature about them. I feel like this promotes good morale, showing that we are in the business of honoring others, but it also forms a subconscious association between their brand and ours.
– Rob Fulton, AudioLumin™
Make it the First Stage of the Sales Funnel
The blog is at the top of our sales funnel and helps us place a cookie on their browser. Once they come to the blog, the next objective is to capture their email address by offering them something in exchange, such as a free ebook, webinar, tool, etc. Next we re-market to them on Facebook and Google to increasethe number of touch points. Finally, offer emails are sent to convert them into a sale.
– Marcela DeVivo, National Debt Relief
Extend the Shelf Life of Live Content
We use our blog to share tips, tools and recommendations with clients, potential clients, business partners and other audiences. Part of what we share are highlights of webinars we’ve held and/or events we have co-sponsored. In this way we can re-package live content, provide a service to our readers and extend its reach while avoiding an overt sales pitch.
– David Ehrenberg, Early Growth Financial Services
Tell Them Something Without Selling Anything
We never sell in any blog we write. Our blogs are strictly about presenting who we are and what we do. We always look at sharing our perceptions and experiences while educating our readers on our beliefs. No one wants to be sold to these days, so share as much content as possible and you can always add a “sneaky” link within your content at the bottom of your blog. This has worked the best for us.
– Engelo Rumora, Ohio Cashflow
Offer Anecdotal Evidence
If you want your products to sell, what better way is there than to show how they’ve been useful to others? Besides soliciting testimonials from previous customers, you can use your company’s blog to show how these companies are actually using your products, and whether they’ve made life easier. We’re in the business of productivity, so our blog is mainly used to show how tasks can be simplified.
– Cody McLain, SupportNinja
Empower New Audiences Through Education
EarlyShares operates in the old guard private finance sector — an industry notoriously resistant to change. We aim to help investors and capital raisers capitalize on new regulatory exemptions, but few understand the new opportunities available to them. Our commitment to education, via our blog and other channels, has been key to moving our business (and our industry) forward.
– Heather Schwarz-Lopes, EarlyShares
Answer Customer FAQs
Answering every customer FAQ as a separate blog post is not only good for SEO, but it can be a huge time saver in responding to prospects. Break down your FAQ’s into separate blog posts to build visibility for specific product-related keywords. Once the blog is posted, just send the link to customers who want an answer to their question. This strategy drives inquiries and helps convert prospects.
– Brett Farmiloe, Markitors
Collect Data Through Gated Content
On our blog we offer access to gated content, such as e-books, for the price of an email address. These people go into our nurturing funnel, and we send them more helpful content until they either contact our sales team or indicate purchase intent through the content they spend time with. Afterwards, we reach out to talk business. It works remarkably well, and it’s the opposite of pushy!
– Shane Snow, Contently
Republish the Best Content into a Digital Magazine
We use our blog content to produce a quarterly digital magazine using Uberflip. We then track the number of people who download the magazine and go on to place and order on our website. On average, each issue produces over $45,000 in sales. We’ve also noticed that customers who download the magazine spend more than customers who don’t. This strategy has allowed us to get the most out of our blog content.
– Derian Baugh, Men’s Style Lab
Don’t Forget to Sell
The BannerBlog provides tips and advice for conducting business online. The content is informative and useful even if a reader doesn’t use our company’s products. However, we find ways to make articles relevant to using our products and services. Many advice pieces say “don’t sell in your blog articles,” but I completely disagree. Provide insightful information, but don’t forget to sell.
– Mark Cenicola, BannerView.com
Create Drip Email Courses
Use a tool like Hubspot or Mailchimp to send people a series of emails as part of a crash course on a topic. For all related blog posts, link people to the crash course in the middle or at the end with a strong call to action. For instance: Want to learn more? Click here for a FREE crash course on [X]. Then make sure your crash course has a hard sell at the end. Over time, make sure you optimize your emails.
– Mattan Griffel, One Month
Publish Product Updates
We periodically write about newly launched features in our product. We talk about why we thought those features were important and how they solve a customer problem. Not only do these posts drive sales, but they also serve as an effective marketing technique as it communicates that we are continuously evolving and listening to our customers.
– Pratham Mittal, VenturePact
How have you been able to monetize the traffic on your company blog?
Image Credits
Featured Image: Rawpixel/Shutterstock
In-post Photo: Solis Images/Shutterstock
