I’ve talked before about the importance of a blog in professional branding. Personally, next to a LinkedIn profile, I think it is the most important component to establishing yourself as an expert.
Having your own personal blog serves many purposes including:
- A central source of your written expertise
- A location to sell your personal services or products (or your companies if you choose)
- A foundation for people to find you through search engines that constantly grows
- A top ranking site for your name [Johnny Bravo] or main keyword [Property Management Software Los Angeles]
- A reason to further develop your skill set (writing, website design, HTML, sales research, etc)
- Motivation, inspiration, and accountability (If you tell people you’re going to do it, you’re more likely to do it)
These are just a few reasons I came up with in just a couple of minutes. If you can think of more reasons why every sales person should have a blog be sure to comment below.
The thing is that a blog is yours to do as you will. You have complete control over it and are able to steer it in the direction you want.
Imagine your sales blog as a tree. Your idea or main keyword is the seed. The first page, the main site, is the trunk of the tree. The pages that you add as you build the site, those are the branches. And your posts, those are leaves.
But most importantly the products and services you sell, whether your own or your employers, are the fruits and flowers of the tree.
When you imagine what your tree will look like I don’t want you to limit yourself by thinking about the every day trees you see on the sides of the street. I want you to think about trees beyond belief. If you’ve seen the movie Avatar then you might remember the home of the native people. A massive tree known as “Hometree”.
This is what I want you to imagine. Something that started once as a small seedling and turned into a gigantic force firmly planted in the world.
Like this site which started with the home page and has developed into so much more. And of course will continue to grow as I write posts and come up with new ideas that will help me as a salesperson.
If you haven’t already read them be sure to check out these two posts about why blogging is important for sales.
And these if you need help starting your own blog.
No New Posts In Months -> Still Getting Leads
The original idea for this post came from my old sales blog about polybags. Prior to my current job selling property management software in Los Angeles, I was working for a plastic manufacturer in Downtown Los Angeles.
They were a SMB and didn’t have a solid marketing program in place. So I decided to start my own marketing initiative through content marketing. At first I was writing on my EzineArticles page until I made the leap to start the site.
My last post was Jan. 5th, 2013 but because of a job well done, I actually still get quote requests. Can you believe that. It’s been six months and nothing has changed on the site. But I am still getting HOT leads.
Imagine if I had stayed in that industry and continued posting articles that made me an expert in the field. How many sales would that have led to? How much $$$ in commission?
There is hard dollar return on investment that can be measured from having your own website. In all honesty it doesn’t take a lot of money to start a sales blog. The cost of hosting is really all you need. You can get that pretty cheap from a hosting service like Bluehost (affiliate link) which I personally use for all of my sites.
Other than that the only trade off is time. And yes time is money, but again there is a measurable ROI from starting a blog.
What Are You Going To Do?
Are you going to keep doing what you’re doing? Or do you have the gumption to try something new?
Are you going to freely share your knowledge or are you going to horde it with clenched fists?
Will you start a blog? Or will you start a new career? The choice is yours.
~ Johnny Bravo
Image courtesy of dan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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