The Best Blog Strategies To Increase Sales For Small Businesses

Genius Blogging is a super-powerful, revenue-impacting blog strategy and content planning tool that saves you time and helps improve your bottom line. Use the planner and follow these steps to create more powerful and impactful blog posts that boost sales.

In this post, I'm going to show you how to:

• Easily organize, create, and follow a blog content plan

• Effectively create easy points of entry for customer access

• Improve your productivity by reducing your work quantity without loss of quality

• Identify and appeal to your customers needs

• Inspire and motivate your customers to take the. action you want

• Quickly, easily and happily write better stories, headings, and subject lines — even if you aren't a great writer.

• And all the most innovative and practical tools for the job!

First, Get Organized And Create A Plan

Schedule Research And Planning Days

Plan your blog topics around business goals. Once every two months or once a quarter (no less), sit down and plan your blog topics and strategy. Optimally, they should align with your business and marketing plan for that upcoming quarter. 

If you have a cohesive marketing strategy, your blog should align with your planned product launches, IG posts, and marketing emails for that day or week.

Create spreadsheets and docs to track and manage your blog posts (get a full template and guide here) — for example, a spreadsheet with columns for the topic, post date, writing date, keywords, inspirational words, and goals.

Schedule Dedicated, Focused Writing Days

Set aside a couple of hours every other week or once a month to draft your blog articles. I prefer writing my drafts in one week and then revisiting and finalizing them the following week.

Create Multiple Points Of Entry To Each Blog Post

Brainstorm, plan for, and create entry points for your ideal customers. For example:

• Interlinking within site and blog articles help SEO but also can sell products or services 
• Include a CTA with every post 
• Guest blogging shows expertise, plus you get linkbacks
• Link out to trustworthy and reputable websites

Devise Plans To Make Your Blog Posts, Work Overtime

Repurposing blog posts never get old. From Instagram posts to YouTube videos — see the list of ideas below.

1. Tweak and repurpose blog posts as podcast scripts. 
2. Tweak and repurpose as bullet points for Instagram Live sessions
3. And record that Instagram Live session from your laptop or another camera and posted to YouTube. 
4. Share a link to your post on NextDoor's community social platform.
5. Share to Instagram — place screenshots of the blog into a post or use it as a story or write an intro, then link to the actual post. 
6. Share as a link to Facebook.
7. Share as a link to LinkedIn and Twitter. Add an excerpt as a caption.
8. If the post gets you a lot of traffic or likes, run a low-cost paid campaign and repeatedly promote it.
9. Then within this hot blog post, include links to products you want to promote/sell.

Second, Inspire And Get Inspired

Questions You Need To Have Answered

If you want to know something, ask, and before you begin crafting a blog, there are questions you need to answer for your blog strategy to be effective. Examples of questions to answer:

• Who is your ideal customer?
• What are their pain points that you can address?
• How can you help them solve their problems?

Find Inspiration For Content Ideas

Once you have clarity on your ideal client, you can begin looking at what content you can write and how it can help them solve a problem. 

 For content ideas, ask yourself:

1. What do they want to know?
2. What solutions are they seeking?

Numerous tools are available to help you stay on the right track, including websites where your ideal clients are already posting questions and seeking answers. 

Tools for blog content inspiration

• trends.google.com
• Facebook threads/discussions
• answerthepublic.com
• quora.com

DOWNLOAD The Genius Small Business Blogger's Sales Strategy and Content Planner — to increase sales for small businesses

Research Consolidation And Planning Template

So you've done all this research, gathered valuable data, and created a planning template. It's time to consolidate all the data and add details to your template. You will be counting on the repetitive use of this invaluable resource.

Plug dates beside each topic. Your dates should align with your overall business plan (including product launches and announcements). For example, if you're a baker planning to launch a new cake around the start of the holiday season, write one or two relevant articles in the four preceding weeks and begin repurposing that content. You now have a plan for your discussion points in each blog post.

Third Write, But With Keywords For Feeling And Emotional Responses

You'll want to use emotionally powerful words. Each of your posts should make an emotional appeal or build curiosity. Your words should deeply resonate and connect with the potential customer. A list of power words is included in The Genius Small Business Blog Strategies and Content Planner — to increase sales for small businesses. Be sure to grab your complimentary copy.

Types Of Powerful Emotional Words

1. Power words that imply safety
2. Power words that encourage
3. Power words that result in lust
4. Power words that inspire anger
5. Controversial power words
6. Power words that cause greed
7. Power words that indicate the forbidden

Example: "I was in absolute agony"

Using power words is effectively communicating with your audience and appealing to each person where they are. For some, this feels clickbait-ish. It's not. Clickbait means engaging in "bait and switch" behavior. Using power words isn't clickbait unless the power words used do not lead to the content it promises. 

Get Smart About Keywords

Numerous resources help you know what your ideal client wants and is searching for. Some tools allow you to see the keywords and keyword strings used when consumers search for information online. Using these tools puts you at an advantage.

What words are your ideal customers using when searching? 

Well, Google has already gathered all of the data for you. Your job is to collect and use it. Knowing their search keywords is vital because you want to include them in your blog so your posts appear in search results. 

Suggested Tools

1. Google Trends
2. SEMrush
3. Ubersuggest

Write Better Blog Copy

You've done all this research and armed yourself with the tools needed to attract and appeal to your ideal client to convince them that you can meet their need and trust you to do so. But what if you are;t a great writer?

Many of us aren't great writers, and the thought of writing can, for some, be intimidating. I've learned a few things over the years using tools like Grammarly — one lesson is that I don't know where to place my commas! But I've also seen considerable improvements in my writing skills. 

Numerous tools (some free) are available to help you with grammar, spelling, and punctuation. I've included two examples below.

Writing and editing tools for bloggers

• Grammarly 
• Hemingway

Headline Analyzers

Subject line testing tools are already tied to data pulled from researching millions of email opens and blogs. These subject line testing tools will grade your blog subject ideas so you can choose the one most appealing to human emotion. There is no need to shoot in the dark. That's like running in place and hoping to end up in a new location or running in random directions and hoping to achieve your intended goal.

Here are four subject line testers I like to suggest

1. coschedule.com
2. optinmonster.com
3. subjectline.com
4. hubspot.com/blog-topic-generator

Which of these steps will you give a shot? Add your thoughts in the comments below. And don't forget to grab this free download — The Genius Blogging Strategy and Content Planner.