Using Your Blog to Win Over Clients

If you’re in business, then you probably have a domain and website. If you don’t, you can find one here. Many businesses also have a blog that’s been dormant for quite a while or are just starting out. Many business people don’t always know how to utilize their blog effectively, whether that is to win over their clients or to gain more organic traffic to their website by ranking higher in search engines.

While there are many ways to utilize your blog, one of the most important is to win over clients. Your blog can take potential customers who are on the fence about who to use for a service or what product to purchase and make them your customers for life. Here are just a few ways to help you convert prospective clients into buying clients.

Ask Open Ended Questions and Ask for a Response

Asking your audience their opinion goes a long way toward creating a relationship with your client. It healps them feel connected to you when you show that you truly care about them and their ideas. Create surveys and post them on your blog.

Once the survey has closed, you can review the answers and create a blog about the results. For example, If you run an appliance repair business, you can create a survey asking your blog readers how long they’ve had their appliances and which appliances they have in their home.

Once you’ve collected all the information, you will better understand your clients and be able to focus on their needs. These answers may also interest them, and inspire them to explore repairing old appliances instead of buying new ones.

No matter what your business, you can apply the principle of asking open ended questions to engage and convert your readers.

Communicate about Deals and Sales

Everyone likes a bargain, and communicating through your blog about latest sales and deals will keep customers coming back to see what you are offering next. You can even create a special sale activated by a code or coupon only shared on your blog. Encourage readers to share it through their social media channels and offer them incentives to do so.

At the same time, share your blog across your social media outlets as well. This will drive traffic to your blog, and can gain you both blog readers and e-mail subscribers, another place to share unique deals that help convert browsers into clients. Users also may browse other articles you have written, and at the same time learn about your business. Make the deals personal and those you use them feel like a privileged, part of a community, and they will keep coming back over and over.

Tell Your Business Story

People by from you because of why you do what you do, not because of what you do, or because you offer the cheapest product or services. Customers want to feel a deep personal connection with the people they do business with.

It’s not about how cheap you can sell something. All businesses have a mission statement and you can tell the story of why what you do is important to you and what you’re doing to connect with your community.

Share what you are doing in the area of community outreach. Write about your passion for creating viable living spaces for the homeless. Find those passions that push you to do better in your business and highlight them by sharing them on your blog.

Blog Regularly

Regular blogs are important. People these days are inundated with so many communications that they are likely to read or watch only those that engage them right away. If you regularly post on your blog, your clients will come to expect and anticipate your blogs and willingly interact with you on social media.

Even if you don’t get interaction at first, keep at it. Most businesses require months of blogging before their clients and potential customers start to interact. It doesn’t mean they’re not watching, they could be reading all your posts and not yet engaging.

Also, know that to spread the word about your blog, you are going to have to spend money. Boost posts, take out Twitter ads, and advertise on LinkedIn. You will gain attention, readers, and clients, and that will make it worth the cost in the end.

Post Case Studies and Guides

A great way to gain client trust is to create case studies and offer them on your blog with a synopsis. These easily read documents can come as small e-books or white papers. Creating how to guides for your clients to do small do-it-yourself projects activates the principle of reciprocity, and case studies prove that your products or services work they way you say they do.

It’s subtle, but by giving away information, how to guides, and useful documents inside case studies proves your expertise. And because you’ve given your knowledge to those you serve; the client feels indebted to your for sharing your expertise.

That client will think of your company when she’s ready to tackle those hard projects or buy that big-ticket item. If you have a service business, this technique is important to creating a connection along the buyer’s journey.

Even if the person who is using the information on your blog does not buy from you right away, they may. share it with someone who is ready to buy, or may introduce you to a connection or client that turns in to something bigger.

Whether you’re just starting your businesses blog or you’re restarting it, these tips for using your blog to win over clients will help you get a jump start on the process. many businesses use a blog of some sort to communicate with their clientele. If you want to win them over, you’ll need to create a blog that people will want to read and that continues to create value for your clients. In the end, it’s about giving the client these small values and they’ll give you big returns in gratitude.

Continue Reading

Best ways to keep your WordPress site safe

Close to 19% of all websites on the internet use WordPress software to organize their internal system functions. It’s not hard to see why, as the back end of WordPress sites are extremely user-friendly, making them the top choice of many webmasters.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

However, the commonality of this platform makes them a very attractive target for hackers and cybercriminals. What are the best ways to keep your WordPress site safe? This post will give you several ideas to keep your presence on the web free of unwelcome visitors.

1) Download a comprehensive security plugin 

One of the easiest ways to keep your site clear of viruses and malware is to download a security plugin to your WordPress back end. Of all the options available on the market, SiteLock is one of the best overall programs.

Despite what you may have heard about the supposed SiteLock scam (which is a myth based on unbalanced negative reviews), SiteLock is a security program that has a lot to offer your website.

It scans all the pages on your website on a regular basis, downloads malware definitions as soon as they are discovered in the wild, and displays a trust label that lets visitors know that your site is protected against the worst the web has to offer.

2) Always update to the latest version of WordPress 

As annoying as it is to log into your website to update it to the latest version of WordPress, this simple action will keep you safe from security weaknesses that are uncovered periodically in this popular web platform’s code.

Many of the minor updates to WordPress contain patches that close loopholes that a hacker could use to break into your site, so don’t be lazy about it: Take two minutes to go into your back end and click the update button when a new version is ready to be downloaded.

3) Keep all plugins and themes up to date 

While you’re at it, be sure to update all plugins and themes while you are in the update tab of your WordPress back end. Clicking a few buttons is all it takes to update your plugins and themes, as every one that has an update available will have a check box to their left.

Above all the plugins and themes, there will be a box that will select every one in the list when checked. Click it, scroll to the bottom, and hit the update button.

In mere seconds, your site will be protected from exploits that take advantage of poorly coded plugins, so don’t neglect your updates tab when it tells you that new downloads are available.

4) Change your administrator name from ‘admin’ 

You would be shocked at how many people give away half their login simply by not changing the default administrator user name from ‘admin’ to anything else.

The first user name that hackers try is ‘admin’, as most people are too lazy to shift away from this default user name.

Don’t make a cyber criminal’s job easy: rename your administrator user name to something that is not easily guessable, and you will make it that much tougher for them to compromise your web properties.

Continue Reading