I’ve been creating video’s today for my list building course, and one of the aspects I talked about was the need to create a blog. So without further ado here’s a list of excellent reasons why you need to start a blog…
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As the graphic headline tells you, branding. With the way the world economy is heading it looks like we might all end up being self employed freelancers, so what better way to show the world who you are, and what you can do. If you haven’t already done so please go and buy yourname.com or something as close as possible if someone has beaten you to it. I know from looking at my stats that lots of traffic from this site comes from google for the term “andrew stark” so blogging is a fantastic way to control what people find out about you when they are searching.
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It’s a central hub for all your traffic. In this day and age a new must join social media site is popping up all the time. These all have profile pages that need filling out, so again building on the branding aspect you now have a constant url that you can enter and it gives you a more professional look than putting in an affiliate link. What’s more is that with plugins you can automatically post updates to multiple social media sites, and if you’re content is good enough it’s ready to start going viral.
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It allows you to show your personality. If you’re looking to create a mailing list and sell affiliate products it’s important that you have a relationship with the subscribers of your list. Blogging is ideal for this, it let’s you put down your thoughts and share them with the world, suddenly your promotion emails become friendly recommendations rather than hyped up emails that get deleted.
I think this is a very powerful message
- Product Creation. I personally think that to keep a site alive you need to write a new post roughly once a week, and doing this based on a subject you’re passionate about leads to you developing new skills. For example if you decide to write a “list post” you will need to go and do some research, and this research will help you when it comes to ramping up your business and becoming a seller of information product. If you’re like me you may find writing long posts such as this is a difficult chore, so taking the plunge and creating videos posted on youtube is a fear you need to overcome. Once you do it’s another great step forward in personal branding and building up the relationship required if you are to become a successful affiliate.Lastly it’s amazing how many people are releasing a “new report” during a launch period that is actually just an old blog post that has been repackaged with an e-cover and turned into a pdf file. If you write 10 posts on a specific niche topic then you can also collate all of the content and easily sell it at the $7 price point as an entry level product to your marketing funnel.
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Traffic Generation. As you’re passionate about what you write you already spend time at niche forums and other blogs. When you post it normally allows you a link which drives traffic back to your site. Once you have a good sized bank of quality posts you can go out and start writing on the more established sites, and really leverage your ability to create content that makes you stand out as a leader within your niche.
For example if you have chosen a niche with magazines make sure that you’re following the editors of the magazine on twitter. These people are always on the lookout for fresh content ideas, image how cool it would be to see you’re site featured in a magazine you read – talk about instant authority to new visitors
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The Ultimate Marketing Funnel. I was reading about this on several other marketing sites. When you look at the big professional blog networks they are all using their blog traffic to generate sales for their main products. For example Copyblogger sells the genesis wordpress theme, Problogger sells books and courses on blogging, and Think Traffic sells a course on traffic generation for bloggers.
These sites all have one thing in common, they take free traffic, and become authority figures that sell tons of information products based on what they are passionate about. It’s the same for offline marketing consultants and authors. These people are all starting to blog, it allows then to keep in touch with fans, and build up anticipation of a new product.
Whilst many of us won’t be starting a blog as a best selling author it can be used as the platform to become one.
That my friend is the reason why I believe that everyone needs to start a blog today
