Blogging for Dollars, the Beginners Guide to Mining Sales on Your Blog!

As bloggers, we all want traffic to, hopefully, sell our wares on Etsy or any other venue where we sell. To begin with, let’s define our current selling mode. We make our wares, take good pictures, write a description and hit the list button. From there we hope to have viewers and ultimately buyers.

In terms of Blogging, we use them to promote our stores, get more eyeballs on our product and hopefully convert those eyeballs to dollars. This tutorial is about using your blog in a more proactive way to sell your wares.

I draw from 35 years of selling and teaching the art of the sale. Never lose site that your blog is a selling tool and used properly it will garner you fantastic results. However, there are some basics that I will list in this tutorial guaranteed to increase your blog views. I will also cover some of the most common mistakes.

Yesterday, I read a blog article that should be required reading for anyone with a blog. How not to blog. I found this article to be “spot on” about the “don’ts” of blogging. But I digress, on to the positive.

Understanding how the internet (or Google) works is imperative when using a blog as a vehicle to sell anything. On a daily and sometimes weekly basis (depending on your content), the Google Bots scan web pages for new and relevant content. Using tags for each and every blog post is one of the most important things a blogger can do. The bots find the tags first and pages second. If you only blog once a week, the bots will literally skip your blog until there is new content….and when I say content, the bots scan the first page ~ that’s it.

Using pictures in a blog post keeps it interesting and fun for the reader. However, the bots also pick up the name behind the picture ~ really! Your camera automatically names the picture something like this; 12345.whateverprogramyouuse. That tells the Bot nothing. When doing the photo edits, name your picture as to what it is OR better said, a strong name relevant to the actual post. Believe it or not, a posted picture that has a name is actually another form of tag and the Bots recognize it! Odd but true.

Solution: After adding your photos to your post, click the edit HTML tab (top right).  You image will have a code that looks something like: <img src="URLHERE">  The actual code will be much longer but look for that part and right before the > add alt="YOURTAG"  Alt stands for alternative text and is the text that bots will use to identify your photo.

Telling is not selling! People don’t buy drills they buy holes. Every blog should be at the very least interesting in content; but if used to generate sales, find the “wow factor” for your article. When I say article, I mean a real honest to Gawd article! Posting pictures with a sentence between isn’t enough to keep your reader interested. You may get the “nice pics” comment but that’s not what you are looking for. You are looking for “clicks” pure and simple. Recently I read a wonderful article about winter wear and it was so well written that I clicked on a store and made a purchase!

While give-a-ways are typically a good way to generate traffic, I guarantee you; well written articles will keep your followers coming back. Telling your reader what you do isn’t selling them on what you do. Constantly adding links away, I said AWAY from your blog is losing an opportunity. If you’ve taken the time and brain cells to write a “great” article, why would you promote a link that isn’t going to result in a click-through to your store? This is not to say that promoting other blogs is a bad thing, but there is a time and place for that kind of promotion ~and will be covered in another tutorial. The rule of sales is;

tell your customer what you are going to do; tell your customer what you want them to do; and lastly, tell them again what you want them to do! If you keep those three things in mind and incorporate this method into your blog post, you will see more click-throughs for more sales.

This article was written by Karen of the Etsy Blog Team.  You may know her as CremeMagnolia.

http://queennmyownmind.blogspot.com/