Can A Blog Sell Your Professional Services?

If you’re a professional service provider such as a consultant, life coach, professional speaker or publisher, it might be difficult to see how blogs can help you sell your services particularly when those in the online world tend to refer to selling products - either digital or physical.

But the truth of the matter is that if you provide a professional service then YOU are your product.  Therefore, your services can be sold using your blog in much the same way selling a product online can be sold.

One of the great things I love about blogs and blogging is the credibility that you can build up over a relatively short period of time. 

You may feel that marketing online must be like planting a needle in a haystack and expecting your perfect prospect to find it.  But I want to give you two personal examples of my sites being found on the expansive world wide web over the past couple of months and the benefits for me.  The first isn’t related to selling my professional services, but has much to do with the credibility factor …

My Christian Womens website has been going since February 2006 and it’s hard, though not impossible to maintain it as a keyword focused blog because of the limited keywords, so I just "spoke from my heart!" :-)  And the sad truth is, my blog posts were not as consistent as I would have liked and, apart from writing the occasional blog post, I did little else to marketing the website.  And then one morning in late April, I walked into my office to find an email that said "Trish, we want to publish your story."

Well, I thought it was another one of those general emails sent to a list of 60,000 people until I read further and realized that the email was written specifically to me.  A company called GMA Publishing had come across my website and were looking for contributing authors for their upcoming Refined By Fire book series. 

Naturally I was intrigued to know why they didn’t want me to complete an application or anything and they told me that they visited my website and my vision resonated with what they were trying to accomplish.  in essence, before they asked me to become a contributing author, they felt as though they already knew me, through my website and blog.  Hard to do this on a website that tells the reader how wonderful you are and how long you’ve been established.

My story was submitted to GMA Publising in May and the book, Refined by Fire Women has been published and was released on July 1st 2007.  As a result of my website, I’m now a published author.

On the second occasion, I had a phone call from a man in the US (I live in the UK) who wanted his blog built for him.  This was a person whom I would regard as quite technical but he had a go at putting up his own WordPress blog and after struggling, decided he would get someone else to build his blog for him. 

Did he pick up the yellow pages to find someone who could build his blog?  No, he went online and found a blog that told him about blog building and blogging and then he telephoned me on the other side of the world to ask me - not interview me - to ask me if I would build his blog and how much would it cost.  Deal done, blog built and we’re both happy. 

So, I want to urge you, if you’re selling a professional service, whether online or offline, don’t wait another day to start blogging about your professional services.  It could bring in more business and, make you a published author and, who knows whatever other opportunities are awaiting you if only your prospects, joint venture partners and people willing to promote you knew your services exist.

If it’s the technology that scares you, let me help clear fhe fog around blog building for you.  Click here to find out more. 

To your online success,

 

 

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