Blog Evaluation: SoldByStyle (Blogging When The Purpose Is Getting Leads)

Today, I continue with my blog evaluations that I promised as part of the Only72 promotion a month or so ago. They were on pause due to the Blog Masters Club launch, and now we’re going to begin wrapping these up over the next couple weeks.

Today’s evaluation is of Sold By Style, a business blog for a home staging company up in Canada. And, in this evaluation, I talk about it from a different standpoint than many other bloggers – generating leads for an offline business.

Here’s the video….

Simply put, a blog is a powerful marketing tool for any business, online AND offline. The thing is, one has to keep in mind what their intentions are.

For most offline, service-oriented businesses, lead generation is the top priority. What I see too often is a business blog which is acting like any other run-of-the-mill blog. When you read blogs about blogging in an effort to improve your’s, it can easily lead to the idea that you do what they do in order to succeed. That isn’t necessarily the case at all. People like me cater to bloggers, and that’s an audience with a specific set of typical traits. What I do on this blog is designed to cater to those traits. For an offline business, you are catering to a completely different crowd, with their own set of traits, and a different goal.

If you want a LEAD in your business, you want (a) a phone call, and/or (b) an email address. So, the entire purpose of your site should be to get those things. Anything which distracts from that is just that – a distraction.

Most business blogs don’t need to ask for RSS subscribers (the target clientele is very likely to not even know what RSS is). They don’t need to ask for retweets because, in most markets, the target clientele doesn’t use Twitter. The phone number to the business should be obvious and on every page.

The best use of a business blog is to create great content designed to attract interest and then funnel the reader directly into your goal – a lead.

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