Blog Profits via Self Promotion
If you’re a consultant, coach, creative professional or service provider of any kind, blogs are ideal tools to promote your services online. You can stay in contact with your clients, and new clients can find you via your blogs.
Although you can create one do-it-all blog to promote yourself and your business, you’ll have better results if you create more than one blog. Web surfers are impatient - they demand relevancy, and if they don’t find what they want immediately, they hit the Back button.
If you check your referrer logs, you’ll see that the average time many visitors stay on any page of your site is just a few seconds. With more than one blog, each blog will be more focused, and more relevant, to searchers’ needs. Of course, you can link the blogs together.
You should create at least two blogs, and more if you sell products. Create a portfolio blog, as well as a prospecting blog.
* Your portfolio blog
Your portfolio blog is your online bio and resume. It contains examples of your work, case studies, white papers, and other downloadable material. This material makes it easier for prospective clients to decide whether they want to get in touch with you.
By providing some free material, you’re increasing your visibility online, and are showing your expertise.
* Your prospecting blog
This blog is pure self-promotion: you create this blog to become known in your industry, and as with your portfolio blog, to establish yourself as an expert.
* Do you sell products? Each product needs a blog
Many consultants and coaches sell products: MP3s of tele-seminars, ebooks and courses. Create a blog for each product. This is especially vital if you’re using Pay Per Click advertising, because of the huge emphasis on relevancy. You’ll pay less for your clicks if your landing pages are relevant.
If you’re a new blogger, the thought of creating several blogs may seem intimidating. However, you’ll find that once you’ve been blogging for a few months, it’s much less so.
Start by creating a prospecting blog, to attract clients, then create a portfolio blog - you’ll be please with the results.
Barbara Ling (aka Owlbert) | April 16th, 2008 at 10:39 am #
Excellent post! I myself have several blogs online - a mommy blog, an entrepreneur blog, a “here’s my life” blog…and they all seamlessly interact. It’s quite the benefit to always have an area in which I can write targeted posts (ie, marketing posts go to the entrepreneurs blog, mom posts go to the Mom blog, etc.).
Enjoy,
Barbara
JamieO | April 16th, 2008 at 11:00 am #
That model - different blogs for different products - doesn’t fit if your products happen to all be related to a single line of business. From that standpoint, the category feature of a blog would be better used to differentiate, and offer visitors the ability to subscribe to category-specific RSS feeds. This will, as a result, put a lot of impotance onto how you customize your landing page(s) and navigation structure to promote your service offerings.
aerobatics instruction | April 16th, 2008 at 1:33 pm #
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