The Shocking Truth About Blogging for Profit : Okay, you may not be shocked by this, but if you read this to the end, you will learn the truth!
Are you a Marketer? Or just a Blogger?
This is an important question and there is a big distinction between the two.
*Marketing and Blogging have some differences
*Marketing requires strategy
*Traffic is Important, Conversion is King
*Tracking is necessary for successful sales
-Marketing and Blogging have some differences
A marketer is someone who moves product or service. By moving I mean creating a process whereby people are informed, influenced and sold something based on strategy.
When you click to buy, it’s no accident that you made that choice. Somehow you were convinced that by clicking, buying and consuming this product will make your life better.
A blogger is someone who writes, posts, shares and expresses through the written word via stories, anecdotes, pictures, etc. A blogger is not necessarily a marketer. A marketer is not always a blogger. In the online world when you’re trying to connect with others to sell your product, you would most likely do both.
-Marketing requires strategy
One of the big differences between marketers and bloggers is that marketing a product or service requires strategy and campaigns. If you’re going to build traffic to build your list, you have to have a system – a process for people to enter into – so you can help them with their problems. Building a funnel is key, but understanding traffic and conversions is paramount to succeeding online.
Let’s assume you’re a marketer. Let’s also assume you know that building traffic is important. You would be right, except that without conversions, traffic is just potential.
In online sales, you have a point of entry into the funnel. It starts with your *free offer* which leads to your email distribution system which drips information to your prospect, which sells your product or service (back end offers).
The main thing that does the influencing is copywriting. The message has to speak directly to the consumer and solve a problem. There is strategy to writing good sales copy.
Without a business model and a funnel that works, traffic is worth nothing.
-Traffic is Important, Conversion is King
There are 2 primary elements that every online business model performs:
1) Traffic
2) Conversions
Here’s the formula:
Traffic + Conversions = Profit
Traffic without conversions = nothing
Conversions without traffic = potential
So if you haven’t made a sale online yet but you have a great product or service to share, you have potential.
In direct response marketing, the term conversion means measureable response.
As online marketers, we need to learn how to measure and test the responses to our blogging and copywriting efforts.
Traffic is the flow of people coming to your website. A conversion is moving a prospect or customer to the next desired outcome.
Traffic is someone coming to your website from your Facebook page or from an internet search. A conversion is a click to the desired response. You need to know what your desired response is – what you want to sell or want people to do.
Ann Sieg says that “Once you know how to do this… once you acquire the skills to generate traffic and convert it, you will have more than just your business opportunity to offer people. You will have real value to offer. Real skills.”
-Tracking is necessary for successful sales
Successful marketers track the activity of their website(s). Tracking tells you what traffic is working, where it’s coming from, how much to spend, what parts of your marketing is working, etc.
Tracking is supremely important. It helps you to know what’s causing what and how you can make changes to improve results.
If you have a website and you want to track how many visitors you have, where they come from and what they are doing, you need to have a tracking tool.
Here are some Blogging tracking tools you can use:
#1) Google Analytics – Site Traffic, can be integrated with many platforms (email, ads, etc.)
#2) HyperTracker – Simple URL based tracker – Works great for some types of advertising platforms, but many ban redirects, do be careful using this.
#3) ClickTale – can provide heatmaps for your websites to see how users are interacting with your site. Great to see where users eyeballs are going.
If this concept of tracking is new to you, consider that from a marketing and profit standpoint, everything boils down to Traffic, Conversions and Tracking. In other words:
* You can have the best product in the world but without people to sell it to it will do you no good.
*Traffic is great (and necessary) but conversions are what put money in your bank account.
*Each traffic source is different and the response to your offer varies from one traffic source to another.
*Remember always that every aspect of your marketing is designed to bring your visitor/prospect to the next desired step of action.