All over America, “Buy Locally” campaigns are springing up, trying to convince customers to buy and use local products and services first.
But there is really nothing more “local” than your customers home computers.
So capitalize on that fact and start gearing your sales incentives and advertisements toward customers who are regular internet users.
You don’t have to be a IT geek
One of the best ways to attract local — and also national — attention on the internet is to maintain a “blog” that both describes and praises your company’s products and services.
“But don’t I have to hire expensive IT geeks and fork out a whole bunch of cash for computer equipment first?” you might ask.
Not at all.
These days, blogs are really not all that hard to maintain.
For instance, currently there are several excellent online blogging platforms that actually format and publish your blog for you. All you have to do is supply content.
Both www.blogger.com and www.wordpress.com offer free blogs, publishing tools and blogging services to novice bloggers. All you have to do is plug in some photos, words and links and you’re done.
What kind of words should I write?
That’s up to you — and remember one fact: You yourself are the world’s best expert on whatever it is that your company does or sells.
You yourself are most excited about your product, right?
Otherwise you probably wouldn’t even be in the business. So Just write about the parts of your business that excite you the most.
But what about the fotos?
Everyone has a digital camera these days. Just go out and take some candid shots — then use your blogging platform to grab photos off your computer and insert them seamlessly into your blog.
Now that your blog is up and running, what next?
Next you sit down and decide what kind of readers and customers you want to attract — and then figure out how to attract them.
The best way to attract attention is to make sure that your blog-publishing site has a link to a web crawler that will periodically go through your blog and register its contents with various search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo search.
This way, your customers can easily find you when they type in key words. Then do some research regarding which key words your customers might type into a search engine and make sure that those key words appear in your text.
Another way to make sure that customers find you is to pay for services that automatically put your blog near the top of any keyword search related to your business.
The bottom line…
But the bottom line regarding the advantages of having a blog for your business is that your blog will offer possible customers a wealth of vital information regarding the product or service they seek — thus encouraging them to buy from you instead of from somebody else.
And not only that, but you may soon discover that blogging is actually FUN.
Are you using blog for your business? What is your opinion about finding more customers through blogging? Share your experiences and thoughts and leave a comment.
