Are you still using the same old traditional ways of direct mail marketing, telephone or fax machines and even personal meetings to stay in touch with your clients.
Now gone are those days of traditional ways of marketing your business. Today, businesses are using blogs at its best use and making much more profit than ever before. Having a blog for your business will not only improve your outreach to new customers but will also help you stay in touch with your present customers and keep providing them value.
One of the best things that has happened online in all these years is the transformation of regular diary entry blogging into business oriented blogging. Earlier, blogs were just used to share one’s thoughts and ideas or by people to make some money online by Adsense or such medium. It has happened in just some recent years that blogging is now being used by offline businesses to gain more exposure and customers.
With blogging you have the ability to constantly keep in touch with your clients and potential customers as well.
How Blogs Can Help You In Your Offline Business
There are a lot of advantages of doing blogging for offline business…
1. It Can Save You Big Bucks
Setting up a blog is very easy and you can have your blog up and running at a very negligible cost. You can literally save thousands of dollars that could have gone completely lost in offline marketing. Not only it is very cheap but also it is user-friendly, can be customized, and can be a flexible medium for circulating useful information for effective positioning of your products in the market.
2. More Exposure Than Traditional Marketing
People are now spending more time on internet that ever before. Research shows that 30% of 2 billion internet users today read blogs and most of them take a decision of buying something by doing research online. Just imagine how much audience you can attract towards your product using blogs and the value you can create for them.
3. Power Of Testimonials
You can ask your present customers for their testimonials about the products or services you provide and post them on your blog. Imagine what impact this will make on any new visitor that comes to your blog. This will not only make them aware of benefits of buying your products but will also generate a sense of security to them as they’ll now know that there are other people that have already tried and tested your products.
4. Free Marketing For Every Product Launch
Since blogs are quite popular to most Internet users, you can stay in touch with your customers all the time. With your blog you can tell them about any new product or service that you are about to launch, and that too without any extra cost. You’ll already have a following on your blog and you’ll just need to publish a new post telling them about what’s new.
This is a great way to market your product launches for free. Think of a situation that you have 10,000 subscribers to your blog’s feed. Now if you are going to release a product, you’ll just have to write a descriptive post about it and hit the publish button. Within hours you’ll have almost each one of them know about your new product. And this is where it really starts getting good.
How To Start Blogging For Offline Business
So, now you’re convinced that you should have a blog for your offline business but are not sure where to start. I’ve written the steps below that you can use to start blogging for your offline business.
1. Get a domain and hosting – To have your own business blog you’ll have to first buy a domain name and hosting where you can store the files of your blog. Bluehost is a great place to buy a domain name and hosting. They provide great service and the pricing is also very competitive. I’ll recommend you go and check them out.
If you need help in selecting a domain name you can read this post of mine.
2. Install a blogging platform – You need to have a blogging platform for your blog. It is basically a software that you install on the web server(your hosting) that helps you to create or modify posts, change the look of your blog and add extra functionalities to it.
I personally use and prefer WordPress. I have it installed on every blog of mine as I find it very easy to learn and setup a WordPress blog. If done correctly you may end up building your blog just within a couple of hours. After that all you’re left with is writing great blog posts.
3. Blog Well – Once every thing has been setup there’s only one thing left to do – blogging. Create great content on your blog that’ll engage your users. Provide them details about your products and pricing and how they can benefit using them.
You can visit my post series on how to blog to get started.
One tip that I want to give you before finishing up this post is that don’t just blog about your products or services all day long, people will eventually get bored. Try also to talk about some exclusive background information of your business. This will not only keep your customers engaged but also keep them curious of what’s coming next.
Remember business blogs provides you great marketing possibilities of your product. Its possible that your prospect customer may be sitting down the road waiting for your next blog post. So don’t waste your time anymore and get your business a blog.
