Flog a Blog: A New Sales Device

Since sometime in 2004, when bloggers scooped major news organizations in a scandalous faked-document incident, blogs have been on the radars of most people interested in the Internet. And the use of blogs as sales devices has increased over the same time.

Blogs, short for weblogs, are fairly-informal online serials that often read like personal journals. When you read a blog, you feel as if you're getting to know someone intimately. This first-person intimacy is a very old literary technique dating back about four centuries. By reading their words written in a manner very close to the way you'd expect them to think, you feel almost as if you're crawling inside their heads to share their thoughts.

Because when you give trust, you get trust, trusting a reader with this intimacy usually results in an instant rapport, and this can be incredibly valuable in the world of online sales.

Using Blogs As Sales Tools

Blogs are not for everyone. They take a significant amount of time to maintain and fill, and if you're not willing or able to put in the time, you shouldn't start one. But if you think you can maintain it, there are a few things you should know.

First, blogs are probably the most informally written texts you'll find online. This means you don't want to take an authoritative tone when you write them. And you don't want to worry too much about sounding brilliant. The main crime committed by bloggers is boringness. Being dumb is often forgivable, particularly if you admit your stupidity later.

Second, undertaking a blog is a commitment, and if you stop the blog or if you don't post to it for a long time, your audience is likely to drift away with a vague sense of betrayal. When you blog, you're inviting the world inside your head, and once guests are invited in, they have a hard time understanding why you want them to leave. You should be ready to maintain that commitment, or lose everything your blog has achieved and perhaps more.

Posting Articles to Blogs

In a blog, articles should never feel like articles. Instead, they should feel like a good friend telling you things you want and need to know. For this reason, posting an article just as-is to a blog often does not work. You must, at the very least, note that it's an article. At best, you can edit it, or have it edited, so that it reads like a blog posting – informal, friendly, and to the point.

Blogged articles can be very effective sales conversion tools. When someone's in your blog, they are probably feeling significantly more trusting than they would on your website at large, which means that whatever you tell them at that point will be met more openly. You should never try to sell anything through your blog that you yourself don't intimately believe in; an unhappy customer who's purchased something in this way will feel much more betrayed than one who just clicked on an anonymous link.

But what if you don't have the knack for blogs, or for articles? What if you can't write?

You don't have to be able to write to use articles and blogs to convert your ideas into usable information. Did you know that most CEOs today who are "blogging" are actually directing a professional writer on what they want written? You may feel as if you're getting to know the executives at GM through their blogs – but you're actually having their ideas and information translated into a blog by a professional writer.

Hopefully, your impression of GM has not just been shattered! The point is, you can do the same thing. If you want to begin and maintain a blog, you can hire a professional writer to do one for you. If you feel comfortable with a blog to a certain degree, but you want someone else to write articles for posting on it from time to time, that's fine as well. As long as the information on the blog is your information or information you would have put there if you had the writing ability, you're not being dishonest.

You can even post articles by other people and note that these are by other people. Not everyone knows everything, and your customers will respect your honesty when you tell them about other ideas that have come to you. The all-knowing guru is fine as someone to come to when you have a problem, but when people read blogs, they're looking for someone more down to earth, someone more like a friend. Don't be afraid to give them that.