Blogging for Sales

Use a blog to drive sales and communicate with your customer base.

 I am a sales guy, I don’t have time to maintain a Blog.  I can just hear it now, the excuses, the reasons why a Blog would be an absolute waste of time.  The reality is, with Blog technology and automation, building a Web-based Sales Blog is simple, and can provide the following benefits:

• Communicate with your current customer base
• Drive leads for both you and your company
• Give you a strong voice to differentiate you personally and your product.

Below is a quick guide to getting started, and how to automate the process.

1. Blogs are free, just sign up.  You don’t have to be a programmer, and definitely do not need a lot of time to get setup.  I would recommend WordPress, it is a professional platform, has a ton of automated widgets to create content, and is quite simple to understand.  Note: You need to make a decision on the address for your Blog.  With WordPress, and others, you can choose a Blog site name.wordpress.com.  The title you choose can help in driving traffic to your Blog, so you need to decide if you want to be industry specific, or just use your name.

Choosing a WordPress Address

2. Do some initial setup.  Once you have done the initial setup, now you can dig in and get some other things configured.  Log into the site, and in the left hand pane, go down to Settings and choose General.  Here you can enter your site Title, and your Tagline.  Next, go to Appearance, and you can choose your theme.  This is a pre-configured setup for the Blog, and you can play around and preview what it will look like.  Blaskan, Inuit and Titan are some great, simple Themes that give a professional presentation.

3.  Do your first post.  There are a number of topics you can do with your posts: Informational articles about your product or company, press release information, new product feature overview, embedded video information, etc.  In your WordPress Dashboard, click on the Posts menu item.  The first thing you will want to do is get rid of the Hello World post, which is a default post.  Check the box next to the post, and from the drop down, choose Move to Trash.  Click add post, enter a title and go.  It is always good to put keyword-based links into your posts.  You can link to other Blog posts, or to your corporate website as a reference.  For example, here is a link to Twitter for Sales, a post I put up a bit ago.

4.  Add some widgets to auto-post content.  Think of Widgets in WordPress as a pre-built feature, allowing you to add content to your blog through simple configuration.  In your Blog, you can access Widgets through the appearance menu.  Below is the Widget screen:

Widget Configuration for Sales

To add a Widget, just grab it and drag it over to your side bar.  Most require some configuration entry, but they are self-explanatory.  Some great Widgets for Sales below:

• Twitter – This widget can be linked to your Twitter, or your company Twitter account to give your blow a real-time feed of Tweets.  Set it up once, and it will auto-update.
• Follow Blog – This allows users to receive email updates whenever a new post or comment is made on the site.  Encourage customers to follow you for product updates and information.
• Links – This Widgets requires you to add some links in the Link main menu item.  I would recommend adding keyword based links to your corporate site, and/or product pages.  For more info on linking and how to make it count, read:  Keywords and Links
• Milestone – Allows you to configure an event and display a count down in days.  This is great for a user conference, software release dates, etc.
• Try them all – there are a large number of other widgets you can play with and see if they fit your setup.