How your blog will drive potential clients to your business

This article relates to a previous post “What is the meaning of Blogging”. Today the focus is on how your blog will drive potential clients to your business.  Ultimately, that is one of the main purposes of a business blog.

When you start out with blogging, you can create a 6-step plan that will turn your blog into an effective tool that will drive potential clients to your business 24/7.

1.    Define goals for your blog

Your goal for a business blog could be to become more known to your target market and attract clients to your business. To assist with goal setting, here are a few questions to answer about your business blog:

a)    What is your blog’s purpose?

b)    What are the goals for your blog?

c)    Who is your ideal audience?

d)    What is your core message?

2.    Pick good blogging software

Blogging software starts with choosing blogging software that’s right for you.  There are several choices out there like Typepad, Blogger and WordPress.org, but I prefer to use WordPress on my own domain for its ease of use. For a blog post on recommendations for choosing a platform:

Buildabetterblog.com

3.    Find topics that your target market wants to read about

Do research through online social networks and search engines to find topics. Also check out Technorati.com to find blogs on topics related to your niche market.

4.    Always write blog posts that are of interest to your target market.

Once you know who your audience is and what their needs and interests are, it becomes easier to write content that is relevant for your readers. However, it is important to keep your content topical, informative and non-promotional. A blog post should be 400-600 words. Interactive media like images, videos or even polls and surveys will enrich your content.

5.    Bring traffic to your blog

To get benefits from blogging, you need to create a strategy to bring traffic to your blog. One traffic strategy that works well for me is to use social media. My blog posts are syndicated to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as to other Social Bookmarking sites by using a WordPress plugin called OnlyWire. See a post I did about using Social Bookmarking for generating traffic and how to automate the process.

6.    Convert blog traffic into clients

In addition to bringing traffic to your blog you need to have a procedure in place for turning your blog readers into clients.  Remember that you want readers to return to your blog. Make it easy for them by providing RSS or email subscription on your blog. Also use opt-in forms to capture leads (name and email) in order to continue communicating with potential clients. Once they get to know, like and trust you, they won’t think twice to become your clients when you have something good to offer.

Follow this simple plan to get started with your own business blog or to improve an existing blog. Please share in the comments section what else works for you so that we can all learn from one another.