If your business model calls for consultative selling, a blog can be a tool to connect with prospects.  By writing blogs that answer prospective buyer questions, you link the reader to your product or service.  

Blogs can serve many purposes.  They can answer questions your prospects haven’t yet raised.  They can showcase your expertise. They can build credibility.  They can build awareness and grow your prospect base.

A blog is ideal if you are an expert, if you have a unique perspective or if you have tips and ideas to share.

A blog is publishing online.  As a blogger, you are in control of your content because you write it.  As a blogger, you can reach out to an audience of prospective buyers. 

Each blog entry is a webpage much like any page on a website.  Each blog page can be optimized for search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.  Your optimization objective is to be more highly ranked on search results.  A higher ranking in search results will bring more visits to your blog page.

Blog pages also have advanced navigation and graphics available to them.  In fact, many organizations use WordPress – blog software – as their actual business website.  The WordPress tools turn the blog site into a content management system, which allows non-technical users to edit the site with an interface as easy to use as a word-processer.

Write Benefits and Build Credibility 

Blogs are not sales pages.  The most successful blogs offer information of interest and merit.  The most successful blogs also publish regularly, whether it’s daily or weekly.  Once you begin a blog, be prepared to keep to your planned schedule – your readers will be expecting your next post.

The strongest audience is a repeat audience.  If you build a following to your blog, you can expect the greatest long-term traffic.  With a following to your blog, you increase the potential profit for your business venture.

Think of a blog as a place to help people.  Give away some information.  As you do so, you are educating prospects on the benefits of working with you.

If you have a business website, your blog can serve as a marketing tool.  A blog can also serve as a newsletter.  For businesses, a blog supports a larger marketing strategy, connecting specific information with prospects and customers.

Building Blog Traffic

Blogs can grow readership using search engine optimization (SEO), the process of building relevancy for keywords in your blog posts.  These keywords are the words typed into search queries when a person “googles” something.  In each blog, you use related, frequently-search terms – the keywords – to drive targeted traffic to your blog site.  Your blog software will include ways to build in SEO titles, SEO keywords and SEO summaries.

You can also build traffic from your social media, from services like Facebook or Twitter. 

Blogging Can Become an Income Stream

Bloggers can sell targeted ads on their blog pages.  They are called contextual advertisements and are the paid ads from services like Google Adwords.  Google’s computers assess the content of your blog and connect it with like-minded ads.  For example, if you write a blog about stainless steel cookware, ads for stainless steel cookware-like items would be placed on your page.  The assumption is that the blog reader is interested in the blog subject and, therefore, might be interested in buying a related product. 

When a blog reader clicks on an ad, they will be taken to the advertiser’s sales page.  You will be paid an amount of money for each click – it’s referred to as PPC, Pay Per Click.  If your blog generates high traffic, advertising can provide income though most bloggers find that it generates only a partial income stream. 

Blog Hosting Services

If you don’t have a website from which to blog, there are many blog hosting services available.  Three of the most popular are WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr.  Compare hosting services before making a commitment.  Each is free though premium services are available for some.  For each, learn whether you can acquire your own domain name or will be required to use the hosting service domain name.