Blogging To Close Sales

Most of the bloggers i know who are experiencing success promoting products or services don’t embrace the “hard sell” approach. Many of these people would chafe at the notion of actively trying to manipulate visitors, and would rather just focus on creating quality content that gets noticed.

Whilst i agree posts are great for driving traffic and credibility, sales will certainly be enhanced if you have a strategy for dealing with people once they arrive on your blog, and that doesn’t mean breaking out the hard sell. Experienced online retailers like Amazon spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours annually trying to enhance “conversion rate,” which is a measurement indicating what percentage of Web site visitors become buyers. Those companies have discovered scores of techniques (mostly proprietary) that can make a huge difference in sales. In a report issued in April 2007, Nielsen/NetRatings released an Internet retail analysis that indicated that for the top 100 Web retailers, an average of 1 in 20 visitors become buyers. Amazon’s rate is more than double that. If you are averaging less than 5 percent conversion, you may want to look at ways to help people through the buying process.

Keep in mind that the blogosphere is not a used car lot, and overly pushy promotions can get negative comments from experienced blog readers and posters. Instead of nagging “buy now!” exclamations, i believe the best way to convert a visitor into a buyer is to simply make it easy for them to make a buying decision. Smart commerce-oriented bloggers utilize several techniques to help facilitate this process; here are a few key ideas.

Make it clear what you do, and the products you sell. A brief paragraph about your company containing a link to your product pages should be positioned near the top of your blogs home page.

Post about positive customer experiences. Testimonials from satisfied customers in the sidebars (again with links to products) can help visitors overcome any objections to buying that they might have. You can boost sales dramatically by researching why people are reluctant to buy your product and featuring customer comments directly refuting those common reasons. Mentioning products in posts and linking back to pages that allow purchasing also works well.

Leverage trusted services your visitors may rely on now. Many potential buyers are hesitant to provide credit card information to unfamiliar blogs, and prefer not to have to re-enter contact information. Consider using a few different payment options, this gives users the ability to use a services which they are familiar or feel comfortable using. Such services may include the biggest and best known online payment processor, PayPal, or you could even use Google Checkout.

The bottom line here is that blogs intended to sell products require frequent posts that describe product offerings and discuss how customers are successfully (or unexpectedly!) using these products. Posts should also contain direct links to buy. Think about posts with subjects like “Megacorp CEO says ACME lubricant also makes an excellent dessert topping” or “Boeing saves an estimated three million dollars a year using ACME widgets.”

So in conclusion, make your blog posts interesting, with attention-grabbing headlines and enticing copy which promotes the product you are trying to sell. Be sure to include testimonials in your sidebar and feature the testimonials in blog posts which are related to the product that was purchased. Lastly give users the ability to pay using a service they are familiar with, and feel safe using.

What are your views on using a blog to sell products? Which techniques would you / are you using to sell products via your blog? What are your experiences as a blogger?