Cindy King's International Business Blog » sales conversion

Business Blogs To Get International Clients

Cindy King — Wed, 27 May 2009 23:00:56 +0000

How To Create An International Business Blog

Earlier this week we looked at how business blogging is a sales conversion tool and for international readers they are strongest at building relationships and making the connection across distance. The question is, can you expect to get international clients out of a business blog? Is an international business blog just as good at sales conversion as a business blog can be in it’s local environment?

Well it depends on several things:

Whether you already have international clients, or not
Where you are located and where your international clients are located
What you sell and what you can sell to your international clients

How International Blogs Bring You Sales

First here are the reasons why an international blog can bring you international clients. An international business blog can:

Provide a platform to give more lifetime value to any international customers you may already have
Make it easier to evaluate specific countries to explore further
Create authority & relationships for an initial step into a foreign country
Give your business visibility to bring in opportunities to create joint ventures or foreign partnerships

In order to get beyond the connection or communication platform you need something else.

The Secret Ingredient

An international business blog can only help you make sales if you find the way to develop relationships with your international blog readers. And this will depend on who you want to reach.

To make a business blog successful in international markets requires a bit more effort. You really need to dig and sift through your online options to find the right one or ones to use to create the authentic connection with your international audience. Then you need to examine your communication strategy carefully to see how this fits in with the culture you are trying to connect with.

It is no secret. Culture-customized content gets more sales. This also means foreign language content gets more sales.

Although your end goal is to create culture-customized communication plan, you can decide to start off with one broad international communication plan. This can give you the time you need to come up with a good strategy and find the right foreign content providers. You will need to transition through to fully customized content if you are serious about developing a foreign market.

One Possible Strategy

Here is an easy first step that works for many cases:

One international business blog, targeting a broad audience
Culture targeted social media marketing to promote your blog

This can create an online synergy and give you feedback on specific markets that can be of interest to you. This process can help you make the business decision to choose which foreign markets to develop first.

Your next action would be to conduct further country-specific campaigns outside of your blog. Your blog could then become a platform for your sales conversion process. However, the distance your blog can take you along the path of sales conversion would depend on a variety of factors relative to your business.

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.

Business Blogs To Open Foreign Markets

Cindy King — Tue, 26 May 2009 23:01:26 +0000

How To Create An International Business Blog

Yesterday I wrote about how a web presence is content marketing and described how different content can be used to fulfill different business objectives. Business blogs are great sales conversion tools because you create relationships, credibility and trust through blogging. At least this is how it works in your own markets.

Are blogs still sales conversion tools in international markets?

Today let’s look at how businesses can use blogs to open foreign markets. Before seeing how a business blog can fit in with your business objectives, let’s look at three key points to consider when blogging to build international markets:

Research For Feedback Before Investment

A business blog can be used to get feedback from a wide international audience. You can:

Use tools such as polls, to stimulate feedback
Carry out integrated marketing campaigns to targeted feedback

And of course you can do this targeting international audiences.

For businesses with a longer international strategy, a business blog can be a wise investment. It can shorten your time to enter a foreign market when you do decide to expand and it can help you avoid basic cultural blunders. You can use your time blogging to:

Become familiar with international markets of interest to you
Dialog with international clients to find out how you need to adjust your marketing strategy
Identify primary regions or countries for further international development
Uncover business opportunities you cannot see from your current location

A business blog can be a powerful international market research tool. In some cases, it can also be a stepping stone to reach your international markets before further business development.

Content Marketing Adapted To Foreign Markets

A business blog can only help you open foreign markets if you adapt your content marketing to communicate well within these foreign markets. This may sound complicated and it would be with a typical company website. With a blog it is much easier than you think.

Learn to listen to other cultures

You see, good blogging practices involve writing specifically for the people reading your blog. Blogging is about dialog. Bloggers use other social media platforms, together with some basic marketing tactics, to find out what their readers are interested in. It often simply involves asking readers what they want… and listening. You can easily do the same by filtering out your international readers.

Your international readers will probably have different concerns than your domestic clients. Blogging is a great way to find out what these are. Once you know what interests your readers, and find out how they like their information, it is easy to give it to them.

Language

When adapting your content for foreign markets there is the question of language. Foreign language, culturally-customized content will always get you more sales. But can you rush into selling someone your product if they do not know you? Probably not. You need to transition into foreign language content when you are ready.

I don’t know about you, but translation in blogging definitely does not appeal to me. Good blogs have personality. I think blogs are better when they are written directly by one person instead of two, which is what happens with translation. Otherwise readers will sense the translation and you risk losing the contact with them.

I always read books and watch movies in their original version. I think I would do the same with a blog.

The choice of language raises the important question of defining very clear readership targets with specific business goals. The determining factors in your decision will be whether your company language is English or not, where you are located and where you are targeting.

An English language company can usually create a blog in English for an international audience
A non-English language company might want to look into creating a blog in English to reach a wider audience

If you are an English language company and do not have one narrow cultural target audience, it is probably not worth the investment of getting a blog written in a foreign language. At least not until you find out more about your international markets and how your business objectives fit into that market.

Social Media Relationship Builders

These first two points may, or may not, be enough reason for you to consider creating a business blog to reach your international markets. There is one more element that you must not overlook… and must not underestimate.

Blogs are social media and different cultures respond different to social media

…and this can be great news for many businesses. To me, this is reason enough to get excited about blogging for international audiences. It acts as a turbo charge to the relationship-building aspect of having a business blog.

What does this mean?

Well, when you look at the different cultural scales you can see that some cultures have higher scores than others on the cultural scale of collectivism. This usually means that they like to talk to each other. They probably have other popular social media platforms in their country. You should be able to get a business blog to work well with people from these cultures.

The reason is because your blog is a social media platform. You have the possibility of connecting with other social media platforms and engaging in the dialog with your international markets. These countries probably have different social media platforms and you will need to find out where these are, how people use them and how you can connect to them. But the potential for authentic dialog with international clients while sitting in your home office is real.

International Relationship Building Tool

After all of this, do you think that a blog is an international sales conversion tool? Can a business blog can fit in with your business objectives? And where does it fit in?

Well, when you look at these three points it become clear that a blog targeting an international audience is more about discovering your international markets and building relationships.

This does have a strong advantage over traditional international business expansion methods. You can begin to learn about your foreign markets by creating a business blog:

From your current location
Without travel
Starting with little knowledge of your international markets

And you can create relationships with your prospects and clients abroad. An international business blog can take you a certain distance along the path towards international sales conversion. But alone it has its limits. Luckily in many cultures a well-thought out social media marketing strategy might bring you even further along that path towards sales conversion. More about that in the next article.

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.

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.

Content Rich By Jon Wuebben

Cindy King — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 23:00:13 +0000

Book & Product Reviews

Opportunities for quiet reading seem to have vanished the last couple of months. But yesterday I took a couple of hours and read a book on SEO Copywriting.

Content Rich – Writing Your Way To Wealth On The Web by Jon Wuebben

Jon states that his book is:

The complete SEO Copywriting Guide for Search Engine Rankings and Sales Conversion

What You Get Out Of This Book

At first, it was hard to situate this book. I already have some SEO copywriting skills. What else could this book offer?

As I flipped through it, a few of the chapter titles are similar to what you would expect for Search Engine Optimization:

Keyword Research
Optimizing Your Site Content

But most of the book is about writing content for good Search Engine Optimization. It is a copywriting book.

Jon caught my attention right from the beginning, my back straightened up. This book offers more than copywriting.

In the first couple of chapters I found:

Some really useful strategies for content creation.

Now, I have spent a lot of time working on my own strategies for content creation. And Jon actually taught me two very useful things:

How to analyze your web copy
How to prioritize which type of content you need to get what you want out of being online

This might seem easy for you. But I have not run across these clear tactics before. And these tactics are:

Easy
Relevant
Measurable

If you are in any way involved in writing for the web, the first few chapters alone are worth the price of the book.

The cover of the book promises copywriting for sales conversion, and Jon shows you how.

These first chapters are good examples of what happens as you read the whole book. There are little nuggets throughout the book. Nuggets to help you get maximum value out of your online content. Nuggets that come from experience.

At first, I thought I would skim through the chapters on subjects that are familiar to me.

But the book was well worth a full read. It is obvious that Jon has the experience and knows what he is talking about. He knows how to improve your web copy for better SEO for both humans and search engines.

Who Is This Book For?

Well, the book is definitely about copywriting. SEO copywriting. There are chapters for different types of online copywriting:

Web copy
Articles
Press releases
Viral copy for blogs, RSS, and Wikis
Pay per click, landing pages and banner ads
Emails and newsletters

Jon also explains the differences in copywriting between small companies and large corporations. There are case studies. And there is also a wealth of information on how to become a SEO Copywriter.

This book is great for anyone involved in web content:

Marketers, writers, and even technical web users.

What I most appreciated was how it is easy to see the strategies that go with the “how-to’s”. It’s not often you find this mix in a book. This makes it easier to see the whole picture of writing the content and using your content to get the results you want.

Communication For International Sales

Here are reviews of the books I have read recently to help me with communication for international sales:

A Writer’s Guide To Powerful Paragraphs By Victor C. Pellegrino
Content Rich By Jon Wuebben
Get Content Get Customers by Joe Pulizzi & Newt Barrett
Letting Go Of The Words – Writing Web Content That Works By Janice Redish
Stories That Sell By Casey Hibbard
The Culturally Customized Web Site By Nitish Singh And Arun Pereira
The Magic Of Pre-Writing By Steven Osborne
The Secret To Writing A Successful And Outstanding Blog By Liz Strauss

International Sales

Here are reviews of the books I have read recently to help me with international sales:

All of the Little Sales Books by Jeffrey Gitomer
Asinine Advertising By Herschell Gordon Lewis
Influencer: The Power To Change Anything by Kerry Patterson – Joseph Grenny – David Maxfield – Ron McMillian & Al Switzler
Sales Strategy From The Inside Out By Duane Sparks

International Web Marketing

Here are reviews of the books I have read recently to help me with international web marketing:

Bit Literacy Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload By Mark Hurst
Dotcomology The Science Of Making Money Online By Stone Evans
How The Internet Works By Preston Gralla
How to Win Sales & Influence Spiders By Catherine Seda
Landing Page Optimization By Tim Ash
Mastering Online Marketing By Mitch Meyerson
Multichannel Marketing By Akin Arikan
Online Competitive Intelligence By Helen P. Burwell
ProBlogger by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett
Stats Faceslap By Ed Rivis
The Ultimate Web Marketing Strategy By Ed Rivis
Website Optimization by Andrew B. King

Here are some Product Reviews:

All of the book and product reviews here are totally unsolicited… spontaneous …and without affiliate links. These are books I have read recently and only the ones that I share with friends. So all of the reviews you find here are on books and products that I highly recommend.

Also, as these are books and products that I have recently read since, this is not a list of my all-time favorite books. Hopefully I will get around to reviewing my favorite culture and international business books sometime soon.

Cindy King's International Business Blog » sales conversion

Business Blogs To Get International Clients

How International Blogs Bring You Sales

The Secret Ingredient

One Possible Strategy

More on How To Create An International Business Blog:

More on International Social Media

More in these Get International Clients Business Guides

Business Blogs To Open Foreign Markets

Research For Feedback Before Investment

Content Marketing Adapted To Foreign Markets

Social Media Relationship Builders

International Relationship Building Tool

More on How To Create An International Business Blog:

More on International Social Media

More in these Get International Clients Business Guides

Business Blogs For Sales Conversion

A Content Marketing World

Content To Stimulate Different Response From Your Reader

Content For Different Business Purposes

Relationships Make Sales

Blogging Within An International Business Strategy

More on How To Create An International Business Blog:

More on International Social Media

More in these Get International Clients Business Guides

Content Rich By Jon Wuebben

What You Get Out Of This Book

Who Is This Book For?

Communication For International Sales

International Sales

International Web Marketing