Sell Products and Services on Your Mom Blog

By Wendy Piersall from Mom Blogging For Dummies

Blogging is an extremely effective way to promote your own products or services to sell. Blogs will help you build trust with customers, get found in the search engines, and give your potential customers plenty of reasons to buy from you.

While there are similarities to selling both products and services, they can actually be quite different from each other.

In order to persuade your visitors to make an online transaction and buy a product, you need to convince them that their payment method and personal information are safe; they are getting a quality product for the price; you’ll send them their purchase as promised, and in the condition described; and that they can’t find the same product elsewhere for less money.

And these are just the tactical basics; you also need to convince people that your product is something they want or need, which is a more subjective matter.

In contrast, selling services requires a different sales process. In this situation you need to convince people that you are an expert that can deliver results for clients; you have the past experience that demonstrates you can handle the clients’ specific project requirements; you are a better person for the job than others who are also qualified to do the same; and they can trust you with their confidential company information.

In both circumstances, the primary goal is to build trust so that clients feel comfortable buying from you. Trust-building is a critical and never-ending process that touches every aspect of your business:

Branding: Your brand is the first impression you give to everyone, and there’s nowhere first impressions count more than in the online world.
Site design and functionality: Your site not only needs to look professional; it needs to act that way, too. Broken links, error pages, and layout problems will immediately send the message that your site can’t be trusted to function properly. If your site can’t be trusted, people won’t trust you, either, especially if you’re asking them to enter sensitive financial or personal information.
Product development: Your products need to be what customers want to buy, which might not necessarily be what you want to sell. Even if you’re selling services, you need to present your skills in a way that’s immediately understandable and meets a clearly defined need.
Writing and content creation: Your blog is the most effective way to publish your thoughts and ideas that demonstrate your knowledge and expertise. This is even true when it comes to the little details such as word choice, grammar, clarity, and professionalism.
Social conversations: How you interact with people in your blog comments and on social networks says more about you than your website does. Your personality and actions need to be 100-percent congruent with your professional content and marketing messages. If they aren’t, your visitors will tend to believe the worst about you instead of the best.
How you manage disagreements or disputes: Everyone makes mistakes, and customers know this for the most part. While they like to expect perfection from companies, people are far more forgiving if they see a company correcting mistakes instead of ignoring them. Worse, if a company or a person is defensive or antagonistic, it can lose years of goodwill in a few seconds.