MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

How to use a Blog as a Source of Com­pet­i­tive Advan­tage to Boost Your Site Sales?

We’ve found that a blog can be a great source of com­pet­i­tive advantage.

Ever been in this situation?

You own a site sell­ing a spe­cific niche prod­ucts — say dog food. There are 20 other sites com­pet­ing with you. PPC costs are through the roof. How do you move miles ahead of the com­pe­ti­tion? You see, the top site always gets expo­nen­tially more than the competition.

It’s just like salaries in the NBA, the top play­ers get so much more than the ‘also took part crowd’; take Shaquille O’Neal for exam­ple, in 2004/5 he got 28 mil­lion dol­lars, a whop­ping 10 mil­lion more than his near­est rival!

How can you get to #1? Get­ting there will not boost your rev­enue — it will EXPONENTIALLY grow your revenue.

The good news is, for many niche areas, there are no #1s. Who’s the num­ber one expert on dog food? Who knows? But you can aim to be.

Believe me, this is such an easy tac­tic to pur­sue, and here’s the best part — 95% of your com­peti­tors won’t be using it. This was cer­tainly the case for Joe. Joe wanted to posi­tion him­self and his online store as the pre­em­i­nent place for dog food.

A Strat­egy of Preeminence

Pre­em­i­nence Defined

The word comes from Jay Abraham,who said

“Why do some entre­pre­neurs gain lev­els of suc­cess so much higher than oth­ers? Most often, it’s due to the fact that they have a bet­ter philo­soph­i­cal strategy.

They approach deal­ing with prospects and clients with a deep desire to really help and solve their problems.

They have an exter­nal focus of how they can serve and not an inter­nal focus of what they can get. I call it the Strat­egy of Preeminence.”

 

 

If you value your cus­tomer and serve them like nobody else in your niche then you can set your­self up as the num­ber 1 author­ity in your field. The more and more infor­ma­tion you give the bet­ter your rep­u­ta­tion will become and you’ll have estab­lished a healthy rela­tion­ship based on trust and crack­ing infor­ma­tion — browsers will lis­ten to what you have to say and heed your advice. This is the pur­pose of your blog.

Here’s what Joe would do to posi­tion him­self as the pre­em­i­nent per­son for dogfood.

The obvi­ous way is to write a book. But this is hard to do and requires a pub­lisher. They other way– almost as effec­tive is to run a blog.

This is the strat­egy we’re sug­gest­ing. Joe would cre­ate a blog focused on food for dogs. He would write about noth­ing else but dog food — var­i­ous brands, nutri­tion arti­cles, tips etc.

He would then link to his blog or posi­tion his blog on his ecom­merce site.

Now pic­ture what the prospec­tive buyer sees. On Joe’s site the buyer sees the same prod­ucts as the com­peti­tors site. But Joe had one advan­tage — on his site, there is a link to his blog (eg. feedmydog.com). Now all else being equal, the buyer would have a stronger sense of trust with Joe. Joe would know what he’s talk­ing about.

He moves from being just a seller — to being an expert. His  prod­ucts get more cred­i­bil­ity. And what he rec­om­mends is more desir­able to the buyer.

Here’s how Joe would struc­ture his blog

1) Focused Articles:

Joel’s an expert in his field, but he needs to let the world know this through great arti­cles. He could write say:

“The Pros and Cons of Wet vs. Dry Food”

“Do Dogs Need Mul­ti­vi­t­a­min Food?”

“What Ingre­di­ents should every dog have in their food?”

 

2) Cre­at­ing a buzz:

OK, this BONUS TIP is a bit far fetched, but believe us gim­micks can work with great effect. Joe could put up a pic­ture of his dog on his site and describe him as the offi­cial food tester. He could then have his dog ghost write and post reviews of all the prod­ucts. This may cause a bit of a stir and really con­nect with their readers.

We tried this at Mind­Val­ley - Ozzy the Labradoo­dle direc­tor of PR caused a bit of a stir. (read about it here)

REMEMBER — SERVE, SERVE, SERVE your customers

3) Link Arti­cles directly to your ecom­merce site

So you’ve set up your own blog with extensive,quality infor­ma­tion and estab­lished your­self as an expert in your field — What does this mean for your sales site?

From this firm foot­ing is an immensely pow­er­ful spring­board from which you can direct buck­et­loads of traf­fic straight to your sales web­site by link­ing from every post. You can also have your own adverts point­ing straight to your web­site. This is one sure­fire tac­tic that will rapidly increase your web­site traffic.

The Beauty of this Strategy

This is cer­tainly not too stress­ful a tac­tic — Joe only really has to write one post or arti­cle every week to see results. If he uses SEO for these posts the results could become even greater. We’ll cover this in a later post.

The strat­egy of pre­em­i­nence is one that we love and abide by at Mind­Val­ley. By offer­ing so much con­tent on this blog and great infor­ma­tion we strive to SERVE, SERVE, SERVE our browsers — we really have a deep desire to help and solve your prob­lems. And from this plat­form we offer to you our INTERNET MARKETING COURSE.

Does it Work?

The Sta­tis­tics:

We’re cer­tainly using this strat­egy to sell our products.

We’ve found that at least 1/4 of our prod­ucts sold are because of this blog. And many peo­ple who have bought our prod­ucts have iden­ti­fied sin­gle blog posts to be the main rea­son for buy­ing our prod­ucts such as AdWords Sys­tem Exposed and Chain Reac­tion Mar­ket­ing.

Read More to:

Explore more on the strat­egy of Preeminence

For a more exten­sive blog­ging strat­egy read more on a:

 Source of Com­pet­i­tive Advantage»

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About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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