Nowadays, the online marketplace is incredibly commercial. The focus is on sales, and building a community, interacting with it and offering solutions to real problems that grows outwards from it. Creating content that sells often times is so difficult that we forget about its importance.

Why?

There are examples of companies that started out as opinion and community sites, which eventually evolved into profitable businesses.

What is now conveniently called content marketing, used to be mainly an effort driven by enthusiasm, quite distant from actual sales.

As bloggers and community sites experimented with what people like and share with others, they saw a window of opportunity for making a profit from their engagement with the audience. The practice was quickly picked up by giants like IKEA with huge success.

Now, let’s isolate the discussion to blogs.

Let’s see how creating content that sells can be done.

Content gives your company a voice, keeps your clients updated on industry news, what you do, all the while providing substantial SEO value.

Being active and social gives your website a huge leg-up in terms of traffic and search optimization, but does writing a blog can really bring you profit?

Short answer – yes.

The long answer – yes, if you optimize your blog with the rest of your sales funnel. Below are two strategies for making your blog a part of the moneymaking machine.

Selling without Selling

This is the most obvious way a blog can be incorporated in a sales funnel.

Let’s say your website and sales funnel is optimized towards selling carpet cleaning products. After that, you create a blog and constantly write about how to clean specific stains from a carpet. Focusing on very narrow problems enables you to target specific long-tail keywords like “how to get mac & cheese stains out of a 14th century Persian carpet.”

You give a solution to a problem, show off yourself as a professional, and in the end give your reader a cue that they can get more tips via e-mail after a quick subscription process.

And that’s it – you’ve suddenly got yourself a lead to use in your e-mail series. The prospect came in looking for a solution to a problem, and all of a sudden they’re in the sales funnel.

From there creating content that sells is simple. Gradually you have to nurture the leads. And driving the sales can be executed just like with a prospect who subscribed on your squeeze page. The only difference is that acquiring a lead with the use of your blog is less pushy and more social, compared to lead generation with a squeeze page.

Warming Up Your Leads

Here’s an advanced idea – how about if instead of using your blog to acquire new leads, you’d make your blog the piece of the puzzle that manages the leads  and moves them toward the actual sale.

Considering you already have a solid list of people listening to what you have to say, it may be worth gearing your blog towards sales, not lead generation.

In this scenario, you won’t be focusing on introducing yourself to a prospect. Your baseline is that people already know you. Having responded to your advertisements and marketing efforts and signed up for the opt-in list.

From there, you can use your blog as part of the lead nurturing strategy, driving traffic to your posts using your e-mail series. Reverting to the carpet product example, let’s say you have a list of leads interested in tips about how to get specific nasty stains out.

Now you can use your e-mail series to provide information about carpet cleaning in general. And adding a link to a blog post about how that one specific stain is easy to get rid of using your product is how you get the purchase.

Here your blog posts are more sales-y, and would often end with a clear CTA leading straight to checkout. In a sense, each of your blog posts becomes almost like a sales page.

Your blog is less social, but it gets straight to conversion, leaving the informative part of lead nurturing to your e-mail series.

In addition – people landing on your blog from the outside may also convert, despite never having been a part of the leads list.

Are you ready creating content that sells?

Blogging isn’t just a geeky hobby anymore. It’s a part of content marketing, and can help in both lead generation and lead nurturing.

See which part of your sales funnel is lacking, and use your blog to boost it!