Employing these “Foolproof Marketing Strategies For Bloggers” will elevate your business to a whole new level.
You may think you do some pretty good marketing on your blog.
In other words, you think your blog is giving you a fair opportunity to sell products and services.
I’d like you to think that through more carefully after reading this article.
The Road To Riches
Most bloggers think the way to make money from their blog is this:
1. Find a niche to blog in… something you’re passionate about, or interested in.
2. Locate a product to review and promote on your blog
3. Convince your readers that they should buy that product
So, basically, you find a product and then convince people to buy it.
What Sales Tactics Do You Use On Your Blog?
You can get banners for the products you want to sell.
Put them on your sidebar and link to them within your articles.
Get people on your email list and promote those products to them in your emails.
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Social Media Promotion
You can also promote your products on social media sites.
Hopefully, you know better than to just post links to sales pages.
That is very ineffective and can get you banned from most social media sites.
Send out tweets, Facebook and LinkedIn status updates, for instance, but don’t link directly to sales pages.
Instead, link back to your blog posts.
That will help drive more traffic to your blog, and people will be exposed to your sales links from there.
Paid Advertising
You can also pay for advertising.
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Facebook ads and solo ads are very popular with bloggers, and they will get the attention of potential buyers.
But you need to have a budget to pay for ads, and you need to know what you’re doing.
It’s pretty easy to lose a lot of money pretty quickly when you rely on paid advertising.
Marketing Strategies
Bloggers are not limited to using “sales tactics,” though.
They can also engage in marketing.
Most bloggers think that the sorts of promotional tactics I just described are really what marketing is all about.
It sounds like the same thing to the casual observer.
Create or find a product and then market it.
This all makes a lot of sense if you know how to market.
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Do You Know How To Market?
Most bloggers think marketing is the same as advertising.
They talk about “free marketing campaigns” using social media platforms.
They use “paid marketing” to link to sales pages.
So here’s the problem with both free promotion and paid advertising.
You may engage in these campaigns without ever knowing what your prospects want.
You get your hands on a product link and decide you’re going to convince them that they need it.
It doesn’t sound like a very strategic campaign, does it?
Nonetheless, it may even work a little bit.
But it’s an awful lot of work and oftentimes an awful lot of money for results that are usually… awful.
What makes it so hard?
Why do so many bloggers give up because it just won’t work for them?
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The Problem With Marketing
Well, because it has a major, central flaw.
Most bloggers don’t know how badly their prospects want what they’re offering.
You have to ask yourself a few things.
Do the people that you are…
- advertising to, or
- sending links on social media to, or
- writing blog post reviews for,
…do these people actually want and need what you’re selling?
The reason it is so difficult to market a product in the ways we’ve talked about is because most people actually have very little interest in what you’re selling.
That’s because you’re not marketing the product, you are selling the product.
There is a big difference between marketing and selling
Marketing a product does not mean sending people to sales pages.
That’s selling.
Here’s a typical scenario.
Somebody’s not making enough money online and they decide it’s because they don’t have enough traffic.
They believe they just don’t have enough exposure for their product or exposure to their landing page.
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If only they could get more eyeballs to their offer, then the sales would start piling up.
So without really questioning what they are selling, and barely knowing who they are selling it to… they try to sell more of it to more people they know hardly anything about.
Marketing is about getting to know your prospects
Marketing is about getting to know
- exactly what those people really want,
- what they value,
- what they need, and most of all
- what they will buy.
Okay so how do you get to know your prospect?
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Sure, you can start going to Facebook pages and forums and blogging comment-threads.
This will take a lot of time, but it will give you some idea and some working model for just what your audience wants.
Then, you can test it with some paid ads.
You can also test it with a free social media campaign.
These tactics take money in the first case, and time in the second.
It’s the typical way that people go about marketing, though.
Find Your Best Prospects
What marketing really means is exposing your offers to people who are already looking for them.
If you’re a fruit vendor, you want to bring your fruit to some place where people want to buy fruit right?
You don’t bring fruit to an antique show.
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You bring it to a farmer’s market.
But that’s not just because you know people there are interested in fruit, it’s because you know those people are looking to buy fruit.
You know they’re there to buy fruit because…
- it’s a farmer’s market,
- they’ve been there before,
- they probably come every single week, and
- every time they come they buy more fruit.
These people have a proven track record of being interested in buying fruit, of needing, wanting and liking fruit.
These are the prospects your marketing tells you will convert well for your offer.
Marketing Online
To market things online, you need to know who will buy them.
The best way to find that out is to find out what who is already buying them.
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If bought it once, they are likely to buy again.
One of the big determining factors is always this…
- who has already purchased a similar product?
Another is this…
- what is the recency of that purchase?
We want to know…
- that they really are interested in your product,
- that they really will buy,
and we know that because…
- they already did buy, and
- because they bought it recently, so
- they are probably still interested in buying more of it.
This is marketing.
Foolproof Marketing Strategies For Bloggers
The best way to do that online is to sell products to people who have already bought similar products.
Try to sell products to people who’ve already brought from you before.
You see, when you put yourself into the equation it’s adds a new dimension to marketing.
Somebody may be very interested in buying fruit from one farmer, but not from another farmer who has a bad reputation.
Somebody may be interested in buying one thing from an expert, but they won’t buy it from someone else.
So…
you need to find people will buy something from you.
You need to determine who those people are and what they want.
Now when you run an offer past that crowd, you’re going to have a much better conversion rate.
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You’ll spend far less time and far less money promoting and selling things to them.
Know What Your Prospects Want
So what do your prospects want?
You can begin by knowing what their problem is.
And…
you can find out what problem they have by seeing what problem solving products they have recently purchased.
So, now you’re not just supposing that they have the problem, but they’re very purchasing history proves to you that they had that problem, and that they have a track record of paying money to get that problem solved.
You also want to know why they want to solve that problem.
In other words, what benefit will they get by solving that problem?
This helps you craft your sales offer.
Rather than just telling prospects that you can solve their problem, tell them that you can give them the benefit they’re looking for.
So somebody may say that they just want more Facebook traffic.
Will new Facebook traffic give them the benefit they want?
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Probably not.
The benefit will be something like “building a great business.”
So your prospect doesn’t really want Facebook traffic, but the thing that Facebook traffic can give them… a great business.
This is an important distinction when you’re creating a sales offer.
How These Foolproof Marketing Strategies For Bloggers Lead To Sales
Finally, you must ask yourself what you can give your prospects to help them solve their problem.
Make sure what you are trying to sell will truly solve their problem and deliver them the benefit that they’re looking for.
One of the best ways to accomplish this is to sell them something similar that solves that same problem.
If they don’t buy the “similar product” then they don’t really want to solve that problem… or, at least, not bad enough to actually pay for the solution you have.
So, what “similar product” can you sell them?
You can sell them a 10 minute coaching session, or an eBook or anything that solves their problem.
If they buy it, they are the ideal customer for your product.
Special: FREE Guide… 4 Things I Did To Build My Blog Using Only Free Traffic
If they don’t, then they probably are somebody you need to convince to buy your product, and that’s just not worth your time and investment.
Do your marketing properly to make sure you’re selling your products and services to the people who want them, are willing to pay for them, and have proven that through their past purchasing history.
Stop struggling to get accurate market research.
Make your customers pay to help you do your market research.
Do this by offering products that they will pay for and in so doing, will give you the best market research possible.
- Set up a support desk.
- Set up a coaching platform.
- Do regular Q&A calls.
All these things give you the opportunity to actually talk to your paying customers, the people who you are going to sell more related products to.
Have you used these Foolproof Marketing Strategies For Bloggers?
Are you ready to give them a try in your blogging business?
Leave a comment below to let me know, and let me know how this may be a solution to your own problem… learning to sell and market products on your blog.
Don’t forget to share this post on your social sites, too 🙂
-Donna
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