Get Clients Online

How to Win Business with your Blog – Part 2: Focus

Posted byIan Brodie on 9th July 2011.

Blogs can be powerful tools to establish your expertise, position you as an authority in your field, and showcase what it would be like to work with you to clients.

Sadly, few live up to this. Most are dull, full of mediocre content and rarely updated.

As a result, they end up abandoned – discarded like a broken child's doll tossed from a car window on a motorway as the family heads off to other things.

So, of course, it doesn't win any business for you at all.

The first thing you need to to do to avoid this is to pick the right topic for your blog.

Blogs that win business for consultants, coaches and other professionals are, of course, almost always focused on a business topic that the professional covers as part of their services.

But what specific topic to choose?

Rather like the way you choose a niche to focus in for your business as a whole, your blog's primary topic needs to meet three criteria:

• You need to have genuine expertise in the area. The web is far too full of mediocre, generic information – it doesn't need another blog giving out more of the same.
• You need to have a passion for that area. To have an effective blog you need to update it at least weekly – that means lots of content. You need passion to keep cranking that out week in, week out.
• There needs to be a market for the topic. It needs to be in an area where establishing your expertise will bring you clients. And the more valuable your blog is to potential clients, the higher value you'll get.

My advice is to go narrow. Pick a broad topic like marketing or finance and you'll end up producing bland, generic posts that try to cover everything. And there'll be too much competition for anyone to ever find your blog.

Instead, pick the one aspect of that topic that you find fascinating. For me it was marketing and sales for professionals – and consultants and coaches in particular. When I first started out, there were just a handful of blogs in the area so this allowed me to establish myself quite quickly.

A lot of folks have jumped on the bandwagon since – but I've managed to maintain and grow my popularity.

If you're into marketing, maybe it's copywriting or ad design, or long term nurturing you find the most interesting. Write on that and you'll produce in-depth, insightful material that will attract visitors and potential clients.

I'll write more on how to get visitors and potential clients to your site shortly. But the first step is to have quality, in-depth content so that when they do arrive they stick around. And it builds your credibility so they're ready to buy from you.

You need to hit the right tone too. An academic paper or treatise on the latest trends in your specialty may mark you as an expert to your peers – but it's not going to impress potential clients much. What they're looking for are tips, ideas and practical suggestions on how they can improve their business or lives in the areas you focus in.

And you don't need to be the world's leading expert either. You can be the guy that makes complex concepts simple and practical. Or the guy who's blog is insightful and also entertaining. Or the guy who's the expert is a particular geographic area.

The next article in the series looks at creating valuable content for your blog.

Get Clients Online

How to Win Business with your Blog – Part 1

Posted byIan Brodie on 2nd July 2011.

I‘ve been blogging regularly since 2007 and one of the questions I get asked most often by people considering blogging themselves is “is it worth it?”.

In other words, “can you win business with a blog?”

Well, not only can you win business with a blog, it's been the main driver of my business for a couple of years now.

Now when many people think of making money from a blog, they think of showing adverts, or maybe selling products. And while nowadays my business is primarily product focused, for many years as a consultant/coach, I made the majority of my money from people buying my services.

Chances are, this will be the case for you too. If you think of how much you'd normally earn from running a training course, it would be in the thousands. For a small consulting project – 5 figures – potentially much more.

You have to sell a huge amount of advertising or products to earn the equivalent.

So for most people reading this – your primary goal for your blog should be to use it to win clients – not to earn money from advertising or products.

How do you win clients through a blog?

Well, think about what a client needs to know and feel before they're ready to hire you.

1. They have to have a problem that needs solving or an aspiration or goal they need to achieve. And they have to believe it's worth addressing.

2. They have to believe you fully understand that problem or aspiration.

3. They have to believe you have the capabilities to help them succeed.

4. They have to trust you, and believe they can work with you effectively.

Can a blog help clients with this?

Well, if your blog talks about the problems or aspirations they might have and describes the benefits others have seen from addressing those issues – you've ticked box number one.

If your blog shows deep insights into those problems and aspirations, you've ticked box number two.

Write how-to guides, share case studies from your experience, give your very best thinking on client issues and you've ticked box number three.

Write informally. Share stories about you and your clients. Use video and audio. Open up and share what's important to you and some of your successes and failures in the past. Then you'll tick box number four.

Now this isn't going to happen overnight. You need traffic to your site. And not just any traffic – you need potential clients looking for the sort of things you'll be writing.

And you need them to come back. It takes multiple interactions before people believe in your expertise and come to trust you. That's why I like to encourage people to sign up for regular communications via my regular client winning tips emails.

But if you can do all this – then you can win business from a blog.

Lots of business.

The next article looks at how to focus your blog in the right area to win business.