Recently, I took on a client who is looking for a new approach to selling a product whose sales have flattened. (Sound familiar?) Her product is a cookbook full of healthy recipes geared toward diabetics; her question was, how is a blog likely to help her generate sales?
Two sentences into my reply, I realized that this is killer material which applies broadly across all kinds of business models. Here's what I told her:
There are a lot of other people out there selling books online, right? But only a fraction of them sell cookbooks, and an even smaller proportion sell cookbooks, and ultimately only one of them combines easy diabetic-friendly recipes, useful anecdotes, a pleasant writing style and a low price - you. (I assume I am representing you at least reasonably well?)
The same trickle-down effect applies to people who buy books, buy cookbooks, buy diabetic-friendly cookbooks. And among those there are going to be people who want exactly what you're offering. Your first objective is to define your very specific category in which you and your product are #1 - and define your target market with the same level of detail. (For those who remember, this same concept was illustrated in an August 2007 post about marketing to the Long Tail.)
Then the blog is how you connect them-in a few easy steps.
1. Define your voice and subject content.
For example, you could define your blog as a "lite" version of your cookbook: stories about your experiences as a diabetic, news items showing how the foods showcased in your cookbook are rising in popularity, the occasional recipe, and so on. Alternatively, you could make your blog more of a forum for other diabetics to share their own "wish lists" for diabetic-friendly recipes.
2. Pull in information from various sources.
Do you cruise the internet consuming content related to cooking, diabetes, health eating, etc? If what you find is germane to the theme of your blog, bookmark everything and use it for future posts! Example: a graph documenting trends in healthy eating, a new bestselling cookbook (and what it lacks, that yours has), another blogger's personal accounts of the difficulties of eating healthy with diabetes. This stuff is all out there. Navigating the internet, particularly with search engines like Google, is an invaluable skill - very apparent in an exercise like this. (Search Engine Guide has some very user-friendly tutorials for novices, on how to effectively search the internet.)
3. Write, and write often.
Search engines tend to favor active, dynamic sources of information. A web site which is published and never changes will rarely reach its full potential, because Google, Yahoo! and other search engines don't trust them as much. If you, the blogger, show expertise and dedication by updating your site with fresh content on a regular basis, you immediately establish your authority and expertise in the subject at hand. As a rule of thumb, if your blog's primary objective is to sell products or services, you should write once a week at minimum. Many bloggers post once a day, or more.
Your goal is for your blog content to become link bait - the kind of content that people read, reread, forward, and post all over the internet by their own volition. Once you get really good, you'll effortlessly be creating link bait on a regular basis.
And then a remarkable thing will happen. After a few months of regular, dedicated activity, the search engines will start to take notice of the frequent mentions of keywords that are relevant to what you sell, e.g. "healthy eating," "easy recipes," "low calorie," "diabetic-friendly," and so on. Meanwhile, visitors begin to interact with your content, posting comments of all types: supporting your ideas, contradicting them, elaborating on them, and so on. If a few of those people are themselves bloggers, your visibility begins to multiply. Your blog starts to climb higher and higher in the search rankings for these topics.
A sizable proportion of people are typing these terms, along with the word "cookbook," into Google and other search engines. They're someone's customers-and if your blog ties back to your e-commerce enabled web site, they're yours and you're already halfway to making a sale. With each and every one of them. Effectively, what you've done here is humanize your site, draw people in and engage them with your unique content, and stand out in their minds the next time they're presented with a dozen options to buy cookbooks.
There's no doubt that this is a significant time commitment. But patience is a virtue-and like all marketing projects, you get what you put in! Have some fun with it, and the upside is all yours for the taking.
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