The Blogger’s Guide to Indirect Selling

By Randy R on November 2, 2007 in Blogs

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If you’re blogging to promote your services, physical products or digital offerings, you comprehend that getting a return on investment for the time and effort you put into blogging is important. On the other hand, if you spend all your time relentlessly pitching your wares, you’ll find that you alienate a good portion of your prospective audience.

The problem bloggers face from a selling standpoint is that various readers are at different awareness levels, depending on how long they’ve been reading and how much exposure you’ve provided to your offer. I was reminded by the great Jack Forde of Copywriter’s Roundtable that this is not a new problem.

Jack recently pointed out that Eugene Schwartz tackled the issue in Breakthrough Advertising back in 1966. Schwartz broke down prospect awareness into five distinct phases:

1. The Most Aware: Your prospect knows your product, and only needs to know “the deal.”

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2. Product-Aware: Your prospect knows what you sell, but isn’t sure it’s right for him.

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3. Solution-Aware: Your prospect knows the result he wants, but not that your product provides it.

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4. Problem-Aware: Your prospect senses he has a problem, but doesn’t know there’s a solution.

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5. Completely Unaware: No knowledge of anything except, perhaps, his own identity or opinion.

As usual, we often find that the challenges we face in modern marketing have already been thought through decades before by very bright people like Schwartz and David Ogilvy. Let’s take a look at how the 5 stages of awareness contained in a 40-year-old book can help you craft content that works for your blogging goals.

The Five Stages of Reader Awareness

1. The Most Aware

These are long-time readers who might have been specifically attracted to your offer as well, but have held off on becoming a customer for one or more reasons, even though they’re interested. These are the people you can talk most directly with, but you’ll need to make sure your direct messages are not hurting your chances with those at different awareness levels.

Strategies: Take these readers “off road” for periodic offer specific messages delivered via another channel, such as an email autoresponder. You can also do occasional offer announcement posts in between regular content, or tack on a P.S. to a relevant article.

2. Product-Aware

These people are still not sure if what you offer is right for them, even though you’ve educated them about it with a white paper or other tutorial. They don’t want to be pummeled with offer information, because they’re hung up at an earlier stage of the process.

Strategies: Often, a white paper or tutorial series of posts is not enough to convert these people. This is why there is value in establishing a second content channel, either by autoresponder or a separate blog (or both). The key is to deliver real content with independent value, but that also demonstrates a benefit of your offer and a link to your sales page at the end.

3. Solution-Aware

This person has a need, perhaps subscribes to your blog, and yet doesn’t know you offer a solution. This the perfect person to offer a white paper, free report, multi-post tutorial delivered by email or simply from a dedicated part of the blog.

Strategies: Keep in mind that without a specific way to follow-up with this person related to the educational content you’ve provided (see above), you’ll have more fence sitters than is desirable.

4. Problem-Aware

This is the classic example of the person who needs to be convinced to subscribe to your blog and begin a relationship with you. They might have arrived via search engine but they don’t know or trust you. While strong content with independent value is critical to all readers of your blog, these people most need to see the value up front to get on board as a subscriber.

Strategies: We’ve covered this topic quite a bit, so if you’re a new reader, check out these posts:

10 Effective Ways to Get More Blog Subscribers

Four Easy Steps to More Blog Subscribers

How to Get 6,312 Subscribers to Your Business Blog in One Day

5. Completely Unaware

This is your typical social media news traffic. They aren’t necessarily looking for anything about you or your offer, but they’re responding to a piece of content you put out. This is the reason why I don’t favor link baiting with off-topic content. Sure, you get backlinks, and that’s good. But wouldn’t it be better if you got links and boosted your subscriptions too?

Strategies: When you’re creating content that is specifically designed to attract attention and links, keep it related to your ultimate goals. Traffic just for the sake of traffic is a waste of time when you’re selling something other than ads.

Value First

The blogs that attract audiences in the first place offer valuable content—it’s as simple as that. While pitching relentlessly from your blog might work for a limited group of Internet marketing types, it likely will ruin your blogging effectiveness for most businesses.

Again, you’re blogging in the first place to promote your business, and there’s no reason to be shy about that fact. But if the vast majority of your posts don’t offer independent value, you won’t have as much trust with your audience, and you likely won’t have much of an audience at all.

P.S. If you’re not selling something with your blog (or even if your are), you might check out how to add a substantial revenue stream with a membership site. The Teaching Sells $97 Charter Member special (over 600 members so far) expires tonight as midnight Eastern, so sign up before you head out trick or treating. 😉

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