Get More Permission Marketing… Using Your Blog

By Chris Frerecks • February 19th, 2009

RSS Subscriptions are Permission MarketingPermission Marketing is a term used by the infamous Seth Godin. His thinking being, ‘you will sell more of your product or your service if you do it with the leads who have given you permission to sell.’ Heck, most all forms of advertising, particularly the pure opposite of subscription – push email, is an interruption. In fact, advertising to folks who have volunteered their direct subscription has become a modern day Internet Marketing standard!

Competitive search engine indexing is something we all strive for. For business bloggers, it’s pretty much the common goal; however, as we move our blogging effort along its trajectory ‘the direct voluntary subscription’ becomes powerful! As an expert, your knowledge-based [publishing to the web or] blogging is a form of trade media. If committed, you will attract permissions and a voluntary subscriber base of sales leads!

Top 10 Ways to Drive More Permission Marketing with your Business Blog.

  1. Make subscription easy for visitors – Are your RSS and your ‘Subscribe via Email’ icons highly visible to all visitors? Are they above the fold?
  2. Offer email subscription - Regardless of how routine you may think RSS is, many people do not. Maybe they’d rather not use RSS. Offer them ‘Subscribe via Email’!
  3. Use every page you have - Are your RSS and your ‘Subscribe via Email’ icons visible on every page and every post?
  4. Use your Blog post signature – Add an invitation ‘to subscribe’ to every Blog post. Put in your signature!
  5. Use [layperson friendly] education - Not everyone is aware of their subscription options so add a page that educates the layperson about them, including on the RSS Newsreader. We even use a little video embed from the great Common Craft.
  6. Use on page guidance - Near your RSS icon, for those who aren’t familiar, add encouraging words like ‘subscribe for the latest news’ or ‘subscribe to our RSS feed’!
  7. Submit to feed directories – This can be tedious work, but if you think a directory has an audience get your feed there for them to see. For a small fee, we help submit clients to 85 feed directories.
  8. Check your feed to be sure it’s working – RSS feeds often break, so be sure yours hasn’t. One strategy might be to subscribe… to you.
  9. Leverage Social Media - This post automatically propagated itself into other social media environments like Facebook & Twitter. Who knows, maybe someone or even several will have an interest in what you know?
  10. Blog timely & well – Blog with all the enthusiasm you truly have for your craft. What you see, hear, know and have to offer. Cover the most current subjects, giving them your consumer even greater motivation to volunteer their subscription. Share your knowledge generously and they will subscribe!

At the end of the day, you want to build an online brand that demonstrates your value, builds trust and that translates to qualified leads. Your consumer has the power to search and they can easily subscribe. By genuinely transferring your knowledge-base to the web you’re going to satisfy their challenge… and you will get more and more permission-based marketing!

Comments(0) BLOG RSS, DIRECT MKTG

Comments

By Joseph Manna, Infusionsoft on February 19th, 2009 at 7:25 pm

I agree with the points you’ve shared above, but you’ve forgot one.

LISTENING. Listening to the blogosphere is just as important as contributing to it. Not everything necessarily needs to be published as a blog entry, but could be Tweeted or Facebooked, or even just commented on a blog.

I recommend people to listen 3x as much as they post to be sure they are getting the most value from social media and so they can provide valuable content like others. I’ve also seen people’s writing quality, knowledge of the industry mature, and awareness (and empathy) to bloggers increase when they read them more.

I run the Infusionsoft blog, which focuses on small business, marketing automation, entrepreneurs and company-related information. Permission-based marketing is how we’ve grown the readership of the blog 900% in just six months and still growing. You and others can check out what we’re doing at http://www.infusionblog.com or follow us on twitter as @Infusionsoft.

–Joseph

By admin on February 19th, 2009 at 7:36 pm

Completely agree Joseph- Thanks and we’re looking forward to listening to your blog.

By the way, does your software do a hand shake with Quickbooks?

By admin on February 23rd, 2009 at 7:02 pm

Hmmm… so much for listening.

 

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