How to Boost Your Visibility, Elevate Your Brand and Get New Clients with Your Blog
One critical (but often overlooked) element of building your visibility and your business is offering FREE content to your audience on a regular basis, and your blog is a great way to do this.
The online world is a noisy, crowded place, so people (most will be total strangers) aren’t just going to hand over their credit card to sign up with you when they know nothing about you. People are skeptical until they get to know you and trust you.
Makes sense right?
Your free content works as a bridge to build trust while you showcase your personality and expertise. When you create great quality content, your audience will also share the content with their friends and followers, so that you can reach a larger audience.
This free content can come in a variety of formats, including:
- Blog posts
- Videos
- Live Streams
- Webinar
- Workshops
- Summits
- Podcasts
Blog posts are usually the easiest for most people because the tech requirements are very low. You just need a website that has a blogging platform, and you’re good to go.
Your blog can be used in a few ways:
- To educate and inform
- Motivate and inspire
- Grow your email list
- Send people to your website to learn more
- As part of your program launch strategy
- Showcase your personality and expertise
- Enroll people in your programs
If your goal with your blog posts is to send people to your website, build your email list, and enroll people in your programs, here are some ideas to get the most out of each post.
1. Have a great free offer (lead magnet or opt-in) on your website to get new subscribers.
One of the biggest reasons people have a blog is to send people to their website. Once they’re there, what do you want them to do?
Since most first-time visitors aren’t going to sign up to work with you, you want to get them on your email list so you can stay in touch. You can do with this with a free offer (some type of free resource you know your audience would find helpful and valuable). Your free offer should be prominent, and easy to see as soon as people visit your website. Your freebie should also appeal to your specific target market. You can put your opt-in in several places including your home page (towards the top), blog post side bar, and at the bottom of your About page. You can also include your freebie in your blog posts (this is most effective when your freebie relates to the topic of your post).
2. Make sure you have a good follow-up email sequence in place.
Be sure to create a follow-up email sequence for your freebie since this will help people get to know you, as you share more helpful tips that relate to the topic of the free offer. Your email sequence can be a series of 5-7 automated emails (over a period of 7-14 days). These emails can include a call to action for how people can work with you, offer a strategy session or include information about any other programs you have. For more information on your automated sequence, check out this post HERE.
3. Include a call to action in your blog post.
Your call to action can be to sign up for your free offer (or schedule a consultation). In most instances, you’ll want to promote your free offer, so that you can build your email list.
4. Promote your blog post.
Promote your blog posts everywhere you are on social media. You can create 3-4 different social media status updates for each blog post, so you can get more mileage (and visibility) from each post. If you use a social media scheduling app like Hootsuite, Post Planner or Edgar (my personal favorite) you can set this up ahead of time, and ideally build a library of content and put it on rotation (so one blog post will be seen multiple times during the coming weeks and months).
Use all of your social media platforms to share your post, and consider running a FB ad for each post to drive more traffic to your site and blog. Running Facebook ads for a blog post usually costs quite a bit less than running ads to lead magnets where you’re tracking conversions. The advantage of running Facebook ads to your blog post is that you’ll be driving traffic to your website (if you have a Facebook pixel set up on your site, you can retarget your website visitors with another ad in the future, so you’re creating a new audience to target) to get eyes on your content, getting more opt-ins when people see your free offer. You can start with as little as $10 a week and see what results you get.
Don’t forget to let your current email subscribers know when you’ve written a new post, since this is a great way to bring them back to your website, so they can be reminded about what you do and how you can help them.
BONUS Tip: Make it easy for people to share your posts by including social share buttons in your posts.
Before you go…
This must-have guide shares insider tips and strategies to help you maximize your exposure for each blog post, including:
• Where to share your posts to MAXIMIZE exposure
• What to include in each blog post so you can BUILD your email list too
• Different ways to use your blog content to have the BIGGEST impact
• And MORE!
