The Client Letter
August 15, 2011
Sedona Arizona
RE: Is blogging worthless for attracting clients?
Last week I wrote about the importance of creating a lead generation system for your business.
Imagine having 100 leads competing for one spot on your calendar?
When that’s the case, you do business on your terms period.
So have you done it yet? Have you invested real thought and real action into building your own lead generation system? Just a friendly reminder that it’s not going to build itself.
Today, let’s talk about one of the most common tools independent professionals use to start attracting leads: a website and/or blog.
I think these days you probably wouldn’t want to go without a website. There are too many valuable ways to use it to increase your marketing results. So I’d recommend you get one if you don’t have one. That’s pretty much common sense.
But a blog (where you regularly post new articles), on the other hand… Well, just look around at most of the websites of freelancers, consultants and professional service providers.
Everyone is blogging. And that’s the problem.
All you need for blogging is a computer and an internet connection. You don’t even need something important or interesting to say.
With the bar of entry this low, starting a blog to generate clients means you’re competing with a lot of noise.
Everyone has a blog. And for the most part, they’re spending time writing things that no one is reading.
I’m not saying don’t have one (more on that in a moment), but I am saying, don’t kid yourself into thinking that’s going to get the clients knocking your door down.
And as Earl Nightengale said:
In my opinion, a blog is pretty worthless for client generation.
That’s because, unless you already have a large readership, no one even knows it’s there.
I can’t think of one paying client I’ve ever worked with that was generated from something I wrote on my blog.
The biggest problem I have with blogs is that posting on them makes you feel like you’re doing something when you’ve actually done nothing to increase your chances of generating a client.
So you get done writing a post and think that’s good enough for your marketing efforts.
A blog is not marketing all by itself.
Marketing is getting your offer into someone’s hands so they actually look at it.
So here’s a question… if I think blogs are relatively worthless for generating clients, then why do I have one?
Simple.
My blog does have value of course. But it’s not what you might think.
My website and blog don’t attract clients, they simply fill in the holes and build credibility after the initial attraction happens.
That’s why I don’t do PPC. That’s why I don’t mess much with SEO.
And that’s why (after something like 200 articles), I don’t really post there much.
Because it’s simply not effective to go about your business in the same way everyone else does.
Who wants to read another blog post?
Posting on a blog and sitting there waiting for the phone to ring is not an effective business building endeavor, in my experience.
Compiling a list of targeted names and sending them something is much better.
How much better could your business be if you stopped blogging and started marketing?