Cindy King's International Business Blog » internatonal business development

Business Blogs For Sales Conversion

Cindy King — Mon, 25 May 2009 23:00:55 +0000

How To Create An International Business Blog

Are blogs a good idea for businesses? And what about blogging to reach international markets? Before you can answer these questions you have to understand the world your clients live in.

A Content Marketing World

Today we are all multichannel users.

How many times do you Google the products and services you see in a brochure before running into a store to buy them? When you are online and come across an interesting article on a subject of interest to you, what do you do? Of course, you will stop to read it. Now what happens if someone you trust recommends something? You will believe your friend, right?

It is fair to assume that your clients do the same thing. And probably some of your international clients.

Standing from inside a business, any presence online is about content marketing. No matter where you live and where your clients live it is still about content marketing.

Do you need to be online? Most business can benefit from an online presence, even the ones that do not think so. There are a few more criteria to look at when reaching out to international readers. But let’s leave that question for another day and continue the road to blogging for sales conversion.

Presence today is no longer a static website. You need more than an online presences, you need content marketing.

Content To Stimulate Different Response From Your Reader

Let’s look at these two ways to use content marketing:

Push your information onto people
Pull people to come to you

Both of these actions can be useful to a business. You use each one of these tactics for a different purpose.

First, let’s look at the pushing. An example of this is the content in a newsletter. When you push information onto your prospects and clients, your aim is usually to keep yourself on top of their minds.

Pulling is different. This is when you create content to attract people to come to you. Ideally you create content regularly and write it so that your readers want to come back to you regularly. Your content is enticing so people want to come back for more. It is content with personality that people can relate to. It is the opposite of a long, boring technical manual. It is easy, fun and enjoyable to read. The best example here is a blog because:

Blogs are written by people
Blogs have personality
Blogs are updated regularly and can incite readers to come back regularly to see what’s new

Content For Different Business Purposes

It is only natural that if one type of content stimulates your readers differently, then you also use different content for different business purposes. The two main uses for content are:

Lead Generation
Sales Conversion

White papers are known to be great lead generation tools. Blogs are great communication platforms to get people interesting in buying.

Blogs = Sales Conversion Platforms

Of course, this sales conversion can only take place within a good business strategy. You cannot simply start blogging and expect to increase your sales. The blog is just a communication platform, your business success depends on how you use it.

Let’s look at the key reason why blogs are such a good sales conversion tool…

Relationships Make Sales

Due to the very nature of a blog, readers feel a connection to a blog much more easily than through a company website or an advertisement. This is because blogs are a social media. Blogs create dialog. When you think about it, blogs are all about relationships.

Another advantage to blogs is they can help you increase traffic. You usually update a blog more than a website adding to search engine fodder. And readers come back to look for more interesting content which further increases your online visibility. More visibility increases the number of relationships you create.

But the best benefit for businesses with a blog is that a blog can help you establish authority, credibility and trust. And this is how you can use blogs to make sales.

Your blog communication helps you to convert prospects into loyal customers. The relationship building element of blogging makes blogs a good platform to do some of key business objectives:

Sales conversion
Cultivate loyalty

Blogging Within An International Business Strategy

Do you want to know how can blogging help you open new foreign markets? Stay tuned tomorrow.

Remember, blogging is a form of social media. All good blogs have a solid social media marketing strategy. The Social Media Success Summit 2009 is starting in a few hours. If you are also attending, please hook up with me on Twitter. Let’s enjoy the full social media experience of the summit.

What about you?

How are you using your blog to engage with your international clients?
What challenges do you face when using your blog to reach international markets?
What successes have you had in connecting with international clients through your blog?

Please share your comments below.

My Own Case Study – Small Business Flexibility

Cindy King — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 23:00:12 +0000

International Web Marketing

As a very small business owner, I do have more flexibility in certain business strategies than many bigger businesses.

Content Creates An Online Communication Base

It has now been 7 months since I started my business directory.

Writing and publishing an article each work day for 6 months
Creating a business system
Recently color-coding on the website to make this system obvious to the readers

Of course, with over 200 articles there is now an obvious editorial direction for the website.

But I have always wanted an online communication base for my own business. Sure, I spent some time looking into the great Internet Marketing “Get Rich Quick” processes out there. It is a good way to pick up a lot of knowledge on web marketing practices.

This is what lead me into copywriting 3 years ago. But I chose to study copywriting because I already had good sales skills, and sales writing skills. Of course, you need good copywriting to make money on the web, whether you are in a typical get rich quick internet business or a brick and mortar business using the web as a tool. But recognizing good copywriting is already more than half the work done.

My situation was a little different. I already have valuable skills. I knew I wanted to use the internet primarily as a communication base for my own business services. My websites are there to communicate my international business development system.

All well and good. But how do you go about communicating your business system online to reach the right people, and to bring in the right clients?

Structure For Your Business

I found I needed matter to work with. Content. Lots of content. This took me 6 months of writing one article a day.

As a small business owner I had the flexibility to jump in and develop the structure on an on-going basis.

My primary focus was to write on and around my main business subject area. My articles are not primarily determined by niche keywords and research. Of course I tried to use appropriate keywords, and ran keyword searches from time to time. These searches often proved to me that I knew my subject matter well. My main focus was writing on my own clearly defined subject.

On a side note, my experience has shown this content strategy to give fantastic SEO results. I have come up on the first page of many different search results from month 3 onwards. Businesses from all over the world find me.

People pay money for SEO? Why don’t they sharpen their business perspective and knuckle down to work on exploiting what is basically a communication platform?

Now that the content structure is there, the content is extremely easy to create. This business directory has become very easy for me to feed.

Using the flexibility I had in the beginning probably gave me a better structure 6 months later than if I had planned everything offline first.

So, I now have time for the next business phase and it is now in progress. This is the phase which links my business directory to my business.

What does that mean?

A Real Specific Business Offer And Not The Get Rich Quick Web Marketing

First of all I have a several new URL’s, or domain names, for very specific landing pages. Now these landing pages are not the get rich quick type. These are simply landing pages targeting each of the specific products and services I offer.

These products and services form a lead generation strategy. This means:

There are some landing pages for free products, some for paid products and services.
There are also some landing pages for the same product, but written for different audiences.

This leads to a fair number of new websites, even if they are mainly mini-websites.

Ready Fire Aim

My immediate task is to set up 20 odd landing pages. This takes time. I am doing just about everything single handed:

Lead generation strategy
Web marketing strategy
Copywriting
International SEO

Yes, it is a fair task, even just for mini-sites.

But as a small business owner I do have some flexibility. Also as a small business owner I value batch processing.

So one of the first things I have done is to put all of the URL’s live. I simply put all of the websites up with an article or two from my main business directory.

As a small business owner, I feel I can do this.

It is essentially a Ready Fire Aim approach.

Having all of the websites up early, means that Mr. Google will find them soon. I will appreciate this when I actually get the website ready and want to promote it. Tomorrow I start writing a new landing page website one after the other.

Online Flexibility Brings Success

One of the basics of international web marketing is testing and adjusting your communication. Your communication needs to be live before you get any real market feedback.

Market feedback often shows you how to improve your message. The better your online communication is, the more sales you can expect.

Market feedback will also show you where your business potential lies.

So there will be lots of adjustments to the landing pages. That is my second business phase.