Blogging for Business
If you are looking at blogging as a business development tool for generating quality leads and prospects and convert them to customers, then you can not afford to be amateur blogger. You got become a pro and invest some serious time in blogosphere. Amazingly, the results will be sweet and the experience will be exhilarating.
Why Blog?
Now that the Internet has turned into a mass marketing media, the internet space has become cluttered just like the traditional TV and print media. If you want to stand out, you need to use several strategies to drive traffic to your web site and generate leads. The strategies include EMail Marketing, Blogging, Articles, PR and paid advertising using Google Adwords, MSN, Yahoo, etc.
Of these strategies, blogging is the most interactive medium and can be leveraged to nurture the leads to a great extent.
Invest Time and Efforts
Blogging supports the most natural form your expression! Unlike PR or articles, there are no set standards or expectations for blogging. You can be your own and express your ideas and opinions and share the expertise.
With some time, efforts and little money invested, you can become a pro blogger and produce results for you and your organization.
How do I Master Blogging?
As you all know, there is tons of information on blogging available on the internet. You can get primers and advanced guides for free if you spend some time. Here is a free ebook on blogging from Yaro Starak. This Blog Profits Blueprint is a concise guide on blogging. Note that Yaro is a professional blogger. He has also provided several free beginner videos on his BecomeABlogger.Com website. Probably you may not need them, if you have come thus far; but no harm in browsing through them – you may pick up one or two tips.
If you are in a hurry and master things quickly by spending some money, then I suggest that you take a look his blog coaching and mentoring program. You can opt in for a one time fee and get immediate access to the entire program; or if you wish to move in a slow pace, select the monthly subscription. Of several such programs available from internet marketers, his program seems to be more genuine, professional and involves no hype.
Another word of caution: As a pro blogger, Yaro provides tips and tricks for making money directly from the blog using sponsorship, advertisements, third party product reviews, Google Adsense, etc. You need not use these if you are selling your own product or service; but you can leverage the concepts and best practices to professionally maintain your blog. You may also think about adding complimentary products in your sales suite. You may also take a look at his money making blog http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com.
Video Blogging
By now we all know that video is a core part of blogging activities. Weather you are an amateur blogger (for fun or hobby) or a professional blogger (to make money through your blogs or promoting your own products or services), including a video in the blog helps attract more readers.
Why use Video?
Research shows that blog readers are more likely to share the links with their friends and acquaintances if the blog includes a video. In other words, video blogs are more likely to act as viral marketing tools and enhance reach of the word of mouth marketing.
Tools for Video Production
Even basic product tutorials can be converted into videos using tools such as Camtasia Studio, which can be learned and used in a short time. If you would like get a professional / HD qualit, you can invest thousands of dollars to use pro grade cameras and editing suites! Many organizations have started using professional production crews.
Video Hosting
Once you create a video, you will realize that the volume of the file quite high unlike the traditional text or image contents. While you might have enough space on your web hosting server, the bandwidth will be a key issue. If several visitors start viewing the video, your web site will start slowing down and might even fail to respond!
An easy solution to avoid situations is to host the videos external servers (other than your web host). There are several options available to host videos. The same option can be used to host your podcasts (audio narrations) and large image files.
YouTube Hosting
One simple and widely used option is to host the videos on YouTube and provide (or embed) a link on your blog web site. Millions of users use this method to host their videos. However, most of these videos are not commercial in nature. These are used to spread the word around and share with friends and family.
There are several other options such as Yahoo Videos, Google Videos and several other little known video hosting sites.
Amazon S3 Media Hosting
If you are looking for a professional hosting, I strongly recommend using Amazon S3 for media hosting. It is very easy to setup an account, upload your media files and link the hosted files in your blog or other web content.
I am planning to prepare a brief overview of the S3 set up process and using the content on your web site. I will keep this for another post.
LeadPro Auto Responder System
Auto Responder services, which forms part of Email Marketing, play a critical role in Lead Management and Follow-up and increase conversion rates. While everyone use autoresponders to generate a lead, very few leverage the power event triggered drip emails (another name for auto responder emails) to nurture the lead.
If you market off-line products or services, using autoresponder service to nurture the leads will greatly enhance the conversion rates and even helps increase customer satisfaction.
This video provides a brief walk through of the autoresponder feature of LeadPro. Please note that this feature includes some powerful functions which could be used to target specific segments of of your lead list.
LeadPro is an integrated lead management system for marketers leveraging internet as a lead generation medium. Whether you are a online product marketer or brick and mortar business, Internet is a major lead generation source. Managing and converting the internet leads is a critical process for businesses to succeed in this information era.
LeadPro helps manage the leads in a central place and nurture the leads by using follow-up auto responder emails. Lead management best practices are taken into account in designing the system. The following video provides an overview of the LeadPro service – including Email Marketing and Lead Management.
Get rid of the spreadsheets, please!
Spreadsheet usage has proliferated so much, that it has started reducing the efficiency of business operations. Spreadsheet usage was supposed to reduce clutter on the physical desktop; I am not sure if it reduced the paper use (remember, the paperless office). But I am confident that the spreadsheets have increased the clutter on the PC desktops and hard disks. With hundreds (if not thousands) of spreadsheets floating on every PC in the organization, it has become difficult to get the right spreadsheet when needed. Since everyone has a different version of the same dataset, it is literally impossible to identify the latest data.
Do you wonder why I worry about the pros and cons of spreadsheet usage in a blog on sales lead management? The reason is obvious: everyone who deals with the Lead Management has his / her own version of lead database in nice little spreadsheet database with neat color coding and acronyms. Sales folks are required to feed their datasheets with updates and notes. Sometimes I wonder if the million dollar CRM suites may be less complex than these spreadsheet dragons. Don’t forget about lead coordinators, sales managers and their bosses; each of them have their own version of spreadsheet based lead management tools.
So, please get rid of these spreadsheet based mini applications, if you are serious about lead management and let the sales guys perform their jobs: selling.
I am not suggesting that spreadsheets should be banned and mega customer relationship management applications should be installed, which will be totally counter-productive. Get into the world of centralized, web based, cute, and light weight lead management applications. These applications are always on (oh, they do go down when you need it, that’s the subject of another blog post!), available everywhere (on the Internet) and fairly easy to use.
The on-demand lead management applications (such as LeadPro) generally include other lead follow-up related features such as email marketing automation. If your products or services are sold over the internet (what is not being sold on the Internet nowadays?) or if you are in a B2C scenario, these solutions are more than sufficient.
I am sure you have lots of stories that you can’t wait to share. Your thoughts are welcome!
Thanks.
