Attract Customers Like Magic to Your Business Blog

Business blogs are often described as a way to reach customers, but it’s not true. Blogging does not help your business reach new customers.

It is the exact opposite which is true.

A business blog is a way for your customers reach you.

This is much more than a clever switching around of words. We have an entirely different dynamic at work, here. Understanding this dynamic makes a significant difference in how business owners understand the online customer acquisition process, set their marketing goals, and create the objectives to reach those goals. These must happen in order to attract customers, engage them, sell to them, and keep them.

“How do I reach customers with my blog?” is not the right question. Instead, ask, “How do I make my blog easy for customers to reach?

This leads us backwards to a preceding question: How are my customers looking for me, now?

And so the fun begins!

Your customers aren’t looking for you, precisely. They don’t know you exist, yet. They don’t know your name or your brand. All they know is they have a need or a problem, and they want answers. They’re looking for information to help them make a decision. They’re looking for trustworthy, authoritative information.

How do you make your blog the most attractive, most easily found “answer?” I’ve identified two major strategies:

• Be everywhere your customers are, so they have a greater chance of running into you.
• Have the most trusted, authoritative answers to their biggest questions.

How do we make these things happen?

Be Everywhere Your Customers Are

Being everywhere your customers are gives them a greater chance of running into you. You have to know where your customers are so you can get in front of them. This means you have to use tools like search engine optimization (SEO), guest posting, social media, advertising, and live networking events.

• Search Engines: Your customers almost surely find services via  search. Hardly anybody uses the Yellow Pages, anymore. That means you want to appear as high as possible in search engine results (#1 is good ). You want your blog’s SEO to be so good, you dominate search for the important keywords (search terms), and lock out your competitors.
• Online Advertising: If you can’t rank organically (natural results which are not sponsored) in search high enough and fast enough, you can engage in online advertising through Google AdWords, Microsoft AdCenter, StumbleUpon advertising, Facebook ads, or banner ads. Running ads on the search engines themselves is called search engine marketing (SEM).
• Customer Communities: If your customers read certain other blogs, then regularly commenting on and writing guest posts for those blogs would be a good idea. If your customers use a certain social network, then you should, too — even if you wouldn’t use that tool personally. For example, if your customers are on Facebook, you need to be on Facebook. If your customers are in a niche social networking site for the niche you serve, you want to be there, too. If your customers are found online in certain forums, you want to be in those forums, too.
• Live Events: Where you customers gather for live events, such as conventions, conferences, trade shows, expos, and the like, you want to be there, too. And not just as an attendee, but as a sponsor or at least an exhibitor.

Bottom line, if you know where your customers are (online or off) and you have the message they really want to hear, they’ll respond.

Have the Authoritative Answers Your Customers Trust

Being in the right places is the first step, but what do you say?

To have the most trusted, authoritative answer to the “big problem” questions your customers have, you have to know what those questions are. You also have to know exactly how your business is the answer to their questions. In other words, you have to be crystal clear whom you serve, and what problem of theirs you solve.

How can your customers reach you, if you don’t know exactly who you are to them, or what your offer is? You’re invisible to them until you figure this out. Once you have this, work it into your blog posts (SEO & content strategy), search engine marketing (SEM, or, Google AdWords), and social media activities. Your customers will seem to find you as if by magic. If you sell physical products via ecommerce, this may not seem as much of a big deal, but I believe any business can refine its approach here and improve greatly.

When customers feel that you have gotten inside their heads and you understand exactly what their fears and fantasies are, they will believe you have the solutions to dispel those fears and make those fantasies come true. Fantasy may seem like an odd word, but it fits. What sort of “mind movies” of success play in your customers’ heads? Those are fantasies you can tap into. You must tap into that if you’re to show you really understand them.

For example, if you’re a business process consultant, people hire you because they have a fantasy of having their business run like a well-oiled machine, practically on autopilot, while they’re freed up to spend more time with their kids and family (and count their money). If you’re a web designer, your clients have a fantasy of showing their customers a website that impresses and gets sales.

If you focus your blog content in this way, while your competition is doing the usual blog navel-gazing or superficial “customer outreach” kind of crap, your blog will stand out like a beacon in a dark storm. Your authority will be self-evident, and trust follows closely behind.

These kinds of fears and fantasies tie closely with the content strategy I outlined in Unstick a Stuck Business Blog with This One Amazing Tip.

The Specifics Are Up to You

It might seem at first glance that I’m giving away the farm, here, but I’m not. Although this article is much more specific on how to attract customers to a blog than anything else you’ll find online, the specifics are still up to you. I understand that can be a challenge. That’s where people have their blind spots. And of course, subjects like SEO or online advertising are too big to get anything but a brief mention here. By necessity, this is where the “free line” must be drawn. This is the dividing line between the free content on the blog and what I charge for as a blog consultant.

I’m all for it if you can take the information in this post and figure out the specifics for your blog, your industry yourself. If you need a hand with that, that’s what I’m here for, what I do. Assistance comes in two flavors: one-on-one blog consulting and group blog coaching. You’re warmly invited to get in touch, let me show you how you can attract customers to your business through your blog.