The last post I wrote was about why to write a plan for your blog. Of course Next Level Blogger is focused on monetizing, business blogs and sales training for everyone involved in internet marketing and social networking. As such, this content doesn’t apply so much to personal blogs or any type of blog that is not concerned with making money online.
If you DO want to make money online…blogging is of course a key activity, and writing a plan before you start is essential if you want to avoid coming off as a spammer and doing more damage to your brand than good. I hope this list of questions is thought-provoking and helps you create good content that not only helps you sell but also helps you engage your prospects on a personal level. This is what building a real business is all about. If you can create trust and build relationships, you can sell many products to the same people over years, get referral business and more. It’s so much easier, simpler and more cost effective than constantly scraping together new business to meet your goals month after month 🙂
People in home based business, internet marketing and many other businesses often take a spammy approach to achieving their sales goals. It’s smart to sell things online through your blog. It’s how you make money and build a business. But if you want to do it long term, it’s essential to do it in a way that is sustainable, smart and well-received by your customers. It takes more work up front to help you make sure you’re selling effectively, but the extra work will come back to you in the form of more trust from your customers, more referrals, more sales over time and a lot more. I hope this list of questions helps you get the thought process started:
- What are the top three goals you want to achieve from this blog?
- How is the content you produce specifically targeted to help you achieve these three goals?
- How do you plan to monetize?
- Is your chosen method to monetize sufficient to help you reach your goals?
- Have you verified there is enough demand and that this is a strong enough market that your buyers will be able to realistically meet your sales goals?
- Have you designed a sales funnel?
- How will you drive traffic to the blog?
- What actions will you take to ensure that each page of your site moves buyers a little further down that sales funnel?
- Can the actions you plan to take to drive traffic be in any way perceived as spam by your prospects?
- How will you interact with and engage your customers on a personal basis?
- What steps will you take to encourage personal interaction with your readers?
- Do you have a unique value proposition? In other words, is there a clear and compelling reason that buyers should buy from YOU, and not someone else?
- Does your site rely on buyers taking the initiative to buy, or are you taking steps to personally engage them and lead them to a sale?
- Is your site clean, easy to navigate?
- Is there a call to action on every page?
- Can you write a personal description of your target buyer?
- How old are they?
- Where do they work?
- What social networks, forums and sites do they frequent?
- How do you plan to engage them on a personal level in these places and bring them to your site?
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