Introduction
Today it seems that everyone has their own blog, or web journal. People use them to comment on everything from politics to business and digital photography, but as a web designer with your own business, have you ever thought about starting a blog to attract new clients? If not I’m about to teach you how to do just that.
When used correctly a blog can be your most profitable marketing tool. The idea behind using a blog to promote your web design business is simple. Instead of finding clients and then hard selling them on your web design services, you instead use a blog to educate them, which then earn you their trust and then their business.
Getting Started
Once you install the blogging software you should setup a few different post categories. When you create a new post on your blog you can categorize it so that visitors can easily read articles based on how they are organized. You can create as many categories as you like, which will help make it easy for visitors to read only the articles they are interested in.
Posting on Your Blog
The first post you make on your blog should be a welcome post. You should talk briefly about your web design business and explain why you started your blog, which is to educate and provide honest advice and tips about web design for small businesses.
For the first few weeks you should write about topics you think your readers will be interested in, such as how to choose a good web designer, why a professional website design is important, how ecommerce websites work, etc.
After 10 or 15 posts you will start to see that certain topics get more comments than others. These are the types of posts that you should aim to write because they encourage the most feedback from your readers.
One of the most important things to remember is that although your blog is a marketing device, you should never promote your web design business on your blog. Sure you can have links to your home page on your blog’s menu bar, but never try to hard sell your service on your blog because you will come off cheap and unprofessional which is never a good thing.
Generating Leads from Your Blog
So if you shouldn’t promote your web design services from your blog then how can you use your new blog to generate leads? Good question. The best way is to add a page on your blog called Inquiries. On this page you can add a contact form that invites readers of your blog to contact you with web design questions and/or to request a quote for their web site.
When people ask for a quote or request more information by filling out this form then you don’t have to do any hard selling because half of the battle has already been won: they contacted you and sought out your advice, and not the other way around. They will be receptive to your advice and eventually when you do provide them with a quote they will be more likely to want to work with you because they trust you from reading the expert advice you’ve provided them with from your blog.
Replacing Your Website with a Blog
A blog is just another way to present information online. A blog in itself can even be used as a website. You can create a different category for each section of your website (such as case studies, services, etc) and add new posts in each category. A good example of how to do this would be to write a new post for each client that hires you.
Create the post by stating the client’s problem first and then explain in a casual and relaxed manner how you were able to help them by providing them with a solution to their problem.
Promoting Your Blog
Because your blog contains useful and relevant information there’s a great chance that once the word gets out other blogs will start linking back to you, which helps to increase the ranking of your blog and website in the search engines, thus leading to more clients.