It’s day 21 in the 31 Days Project today and I’ll keep it simple today – here are the reader submissions for today. Feel free to let me know about any blog tip posts that you post. Here’s the last 24 hours of submitted tips:
- Martin has written Should My Home Business Have a Blog?
- Michael has submitted Is your Blog Placement hurting Conversion
- Ignat wrote How to Benefit from Google Sitemaps
Martin had a great post, and it is relevant for more than just a “home business”. (I would have posted this comment on his site, but it does not allow comments).
He said, “But a word of warning. Don’t start up a blog just to push sales, offering little but mere “buy from me now” posts. This is a sure-fire way of actually losing credibility”. He is right. I did start my blog, partially, to promote my first book. Once I stopped pushing the book (I still do mention it in posts), I saw more sales occur.
Write original and useful information and you will have more credibility for your product.
Darren, that’s “Conversion,” not “conversation.” Thank you for linking. I hope everyone finds it useful.
Thom, thanks for the compliment on my post – it’s not really a post but a article I wrote within my blog (maybe I should let comments and pingbacks on my articles – would make sense). But then again it’s better if you comment at Darren’s blog as it’ll get me more exposure ;-)
Seriously though, I believe that’s where most bloggers are finding it tough – trying to get the right balance of the hartd/soft push. Push too hard and you turn people away. If you push too softly you probably won’t get any sales.
A little shameless self-promotion: I’m writing an ePublication (I hate the term eBook) entitled: Blogging for Business: Hard or Soft Sell? It’ll be due out on Sept 15 (now that’s called a hard sell ;-)
I think Darren is in that spot right now with his new venture “Six Figure Blogging” – just how much does he push it here. He’s developed a great reputation over time and people love his site and now he’s onto the next step: developing and selling a information product.
It’ll be interesting to see the reaction Darren gets on this.
In my situation, I started my blog to develop a reputation/credibility/authority with the ultimate goal of developing and selling info/audio products I’m passionate about. I’m going down the soft sell route so if I’m around this time next year then you know it’s been a success. ;-)
Good points made by all, I’m looking at blogging as a way to try and build some long forgotten skills, and improve my writing skills in general, as its not something I get opportunity to do on a daily basis (unless hacking out rpg programs day in day out can be counted as writing).
I think the hard sell from a blog, unless the blog is about hard selling :) is off-putting to the consumer. Softly softly approach is better, and more likely to win visitors hearts.
I just wanted to add a couple of tips to the 31 days project. Since my blog isn’t about blogging I thought I’d post them here ;)
~ When generating adsense code for your blog choose the option for pages with frames even if your site doesn’t have frames. Some search engines will put your page into a frame (I noticed askjeeves has done this) and the ads won’t show up. With the frames option you’ll make sure your ads always show up.
~ For those who have blogger blogs with sidebars on the right you can change them to the left to take better advantage of the heatmap by doing the following: Go to your template and change the float for the main section (it’ll be labelled main) to right and the float for the sidebar to left.
[…] You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your ownsite. […]
http://sleepyblogger.com/2005/08/google-adsense-for-search.html
I had to share with you my recent experience with Google Search. I have neglected this part of the program for too long, and I had some surprising results over the last 5 days. My search rate rose from 10 to 100 (roughly) per day.