How will this blog help me sell my product?

Recently, I took on a client who is looking for a new approach to selling a product whose sales have flattened. (Sound familiar?) The product is a book full of healthy recipes geared toward diabetics, his question was: how can a blog can help to generate its sales?

Two sentences in my response, I realized that this material is murderess, which applies generally in all types of business models. Here's what I said to her:

There are a lot of other people out there who sell books online, right? But only a fraction of selling cookbooks, and an even smaller proportion selling cookbooks, and ultimately only one of them combines easy diabetic-friendly recipes, useful anecdotes, a nice writing style and a low price - you. (I suppose I will represent at least reasonably well?)

The same trickle-down effect applies to people who buy books, cook books buy, buy, diabetic-friendly cookbooks. And among these there will be people who want exactly what you're offering. Your first goal is to define very specific category in which you and your products are # 1 - and define your target market with the same level of detail. (For those who remember, this same concept was illustrated in a post from August 2007 on marketing to the Long Tail).

Then the blog is how to connect them in a few easy steps.

1. Define your voice and subject content.

For example, you can define your blog as a "lite" version of your book: stories about your experiences as a diabetic, the record show that the food laid out in the cookbook are increasing in popularity, the occasional recipe, and so on. Alternatively, you can make your blog more than a forum for others with diabetes to share their "wish lists" for diabetes-friendly recipes.

2. Pull information from different sources.

You cruise the Internet content consumption in relation to the kitchen, diabetes, healthy eating, etc? If what you find is relevant to the topic of your blog, bookmark it and use it for all future messages! Example: a chart that documents trends in healthy eating, a new bestselling cookbook (and what is missing, that you did), another blogger personal accounts of the difficulties of eating healthy with diabetes. This stuff is all out there. Surfing the Internet, especially with search engines like Google, is a valuable skill - very evident in an exercise like this. (Search Engine Guide has some very user-friendly tutorial for beginners on how to effectively search the Internet.)

3. Write and write often.

Search engines tend to favor active dynamic sources of information. A web site that is published and never changes rarely reaches its full potential, because the search engines Google, Yahoo! and others do not trust me so much. If you, the blogger, demonstrate competence and dedication to updating the site with new content on a regular basis, immediately establish its authority and jurisdiction in matters at hand. As a general rule, if your blog's primary goal is to sell products or services, you should write once a week minimum. Many bloggers message once a day, or more.

Your goal is for the content of your blog to become link bait - the type of content that people read, read, forward and post everything on the internet from their will. Once you get really good, hard work will be to create link bait on a regular basis.

And then something remarkable happens. After several months of regular activities dedicated search engines will begin to take note of the frequent mention of keywords that are relevant to what you sell, for example "Healthy Eating", "easy recipes", "low calorie", " diabetic-friendly ", and so on. Meanwhile, visitors begin to interact with content, posting comments of all kinds: to support your ideas, to contradict them, elaborating on them, and so on. If some of these people are bloggers themselves, visibility begins to multiply. Your blog begins to climb higher up the ranking of these research topics.

A significant proportion of people are typing these terms, along with "cookbook," the word in Google and other search engines. They are the customers-and someone, if the blog links back to your site e-commerce enabled web, they're yours and you're halfway to making a sale. With each of them. In fact, what you've done here is to humanize your site, attract people and engage with your content unique and stand out in their mind the next time you are presented with a dozen options to purchase cookbooks.

There is no doubt that this is a significant time commitment. But patience is a virtue, and like all marketing projects, you get what you put in! Have fun with it, and the advantage is all yours for the taking .......