People set up business blogs thinking that somehow the blog will help them with their business.

However, it is important to remember that business blogging software is only a software system to manage your articles.  You need to write regularly around topics that are important to your target audience.

If you do this well, then you will experience some traffic to your business blog.

But traffic does not make you money.

You need to have a strategy to either make money via affiliates and advertising, or you need to do lead generation for your business.

A lot has been written about how to generate affiliate income in this way.  But what is less often written about is how to create real leads for your business from a business blog.

Here are some ways to do lead generation.

1. Download a white paper – Offer free white papers or reports to visitors in exchange for their contact information.
2. Autoresponders – You can use autoreponder tools to create automatic email courses or sales funnels.
3. CRM Integration – If you use a good CRM, it will have web forms.  You can use these forms on your business blog to invite people to schedule a free consultation or demo.
4. Social Media – Make following you in Twitter, FaceBook or LinkedIn easy.  These people will keep getting regular messages from you if you use the tools, and some may become leads eventually.
5. Webinars – Invite people to sign up for your webinar or teleseminar.
6. Video Download – Very common now – people will happily add an email to a form to watch a video with a great tip or secret in it.

There are many more ways to do lead generation with your business blog software, but these are some of the most common.  Just remember, when you get a business blog set up, that is your starting point for lead generation and writing.  It is not the final product.

If you are a small busines you may be thinking about doing some business blogging.

Do you want a free blog, a traditional blog you host yourself or do you want to invest in corporate blogging software?

Before you even start thinking about your corporate blogging platform, you will want to consider what goals you want to accomplish with your business blog.

The mistake people make with new media tools is that they hear they should have a business blog, they should use twitter or facebook, they should – they should.

It certainly does not hurt to go set up a facebook and twitter account.  I would even suggest setting up a free blog or two, depending on your time.  However, you need to really have a strategy around these things if you are going to use them for business purposes.

And a clear goal.  By goal, I do not mean the number of followers you have.

I mean the actual amount of money you will make and how your social media strategy will funnel the right people to the right products and make income for you.

This is important.  If you are not expecting anything from it up front, why would you invest in corporate blogging software solution?  Just go with a free business blogging option.  Probably more than half your visitors will not know the difference.

But did you want to make money with your blog?

If you expect to get something out of your corporate blog you are going to need to set up a blog and use it with specific goals in mind.  Or, you can hire a professional business blogging company that will set up and host your corporate blogging software and set specific goals as well as help you measure your results.  When you approach it as a real marketing effort instead of a thing you heard you should do, the entire experience changes.

Now you start out doing keyword research and targeting customers.  Then you buy a corportate blogging solution that will build a virtual keyword blog targeting each keyword.  Then you make a clear call to action that drives targeted visitors to your corporate blog to become a sales lead for you.

Blogging is exactly like normal websites.  You can set up a free website, you can set up a basic business website with no goals, or you can spend some money and time and set up a money engine that will pump your sales funnel full of targeted sales leads.

The most importat thing is to know what you want to achieve before you begin looking at corporate blogging software and other options.

Business Blogging Software can be one of the best investments your business will ever make.

Sure, there are great free blogging tools out there, but real business blog software has some important differences.

1. Business Blogging Software is optimized for search engine results.
2. Business Blog Software measures traffic, SERP and ultimately will demonstrate a strong blog ROI.
3. Business Blogging Software is going to really focus on conversion. Conversion could be direct sales from the blog or it could be lead generation. Blogs are great tools when used by businesses to generate targeted leads on the web.
4. A Corporate Blog is going to have multiple authors. Many of the free blog tools on the market are nice but do not allow multiple users.

In addition to these four business blogging software points, if you hire a company that hosts your business blog for you they should provide support, guidance and a dependable hosting environment for your business blog. Just try to back up your business blog on one of the free sites and you will quickly see how much time you are wasting.

Demo Business Blogging Software

Schedule a demo of great business blogging software today.

What you will find in the blog software demo is very little in the way of features. That is because the entire search engine optimization process is automated and businesses only have to worry about writing occasionally and following up with the leads that the business blog is generating.

Keys to Success with your Business Blog

• Target Niche Keywords that do not have extensive competition
• Use business blog software that builds a virtual blog for every keyword you are targeting.
• Focus on lead generation with your business blog.
• Do not distract visitors with options that are outside of your business goals.
• Work with a company that has been generating leads for years with business blogs.

Anyone can set up a business blog, but unless they fully understand how to optimize the business blog software to target niche keywords by building virtual blogs for each keyword, you are not going to get as good of an ROI on your business blog.

Also, your plan must include inbound link building. A blog, business or otherwise, that never gets any links will not rank well and will not produce leads. The business blog software and regular writing with no supporting strategy is not going to be in your businesses best interest.

Are you a sales gardener or a sales hunter? Can you be both?

Every organization should have a combination of great sales hunters and some good sales gardeners. In some ways, the sales gardeners are more like marketers vs salespeople. They work to master Inbound Lead Generation

However, while a marketer may concern themselves with brand awareness and advertising a sales gardener is going to plant seeds to get customers to come to them.

A successful sales gardener is someone that uses Inbound Lead Generation effectively to more easily close leads that come to them. They might use business blog software, twitter or postcards. There are actually many different kinds of marketing techniques that will help a sales person attract the right kind of leads to them.

What are the keys to attracting the customer?

• Asking for Referrals
• Free White Papers or reports
• Search Engine Optimization
• Encouraging ongoingWord of Mouth

In reality you need to do as many things as make sense for your target market to keep you top of mind and make yourself easier to be found. That is why you must be patient to be a sales gardener.

Search Engines are the new yellow pages, and they are where many people go to find product and services. Not only will they look up where to find something, but they will look up reviews, word of mouth, comments and search for discounts.

To be a good sales gardener, you need to plant seeds of information all over the web for what people will be looking for. If you are selling pizza, you should have a web page optimized for pizza coupons in your city. Simple, but most companies and most sales people overlook this critical part of Inbound Lead Generation.

Selling to target market looking for your product is much easier than selling to someone that is not interested. A sales hunter will go out and produce generate leads quickly. But chances are they are going to have to keep working hard every day to keep producing results. A sales gardener is going to get a slower start, but they will build resources that over time will produce better and better results with the same effort.

You also do not have to be just a hunter or a gardener. You can be a sales hunter by day and a sales gardener by night. Many of the marketing attraction methods include writing articles and getting published, and doing those in the evenings will give you the best of both worlds. If you set up a lead capture form on the web, every morning the sales hunter in you can wake up to a fresh list of interested prospects that are waiting for you to call.

Will a typo hurt lead generation?

Obviously the answer is yes.  However, it is not as simple as saying your lead generation efforts are getting killed by typos.  The color of your headline or one, perfectly spelled, grammatically correct word can kill your lead generation.  There are many factors that effect if someone buys from you or surfs away.

For this reason it is important to test and retest all of your marketing.

Typos, even the smallest of errors, turn some people away but not others.  A certain number of people will be turned off by a typo in your marketing depending on your target market.

Some people may say actually connect better with you because they are prone to make mistakes too.  (I am not advocating typos.)

When you are regularly blogging and writing content for blogs and websites, you know you will sometimes have a typo in there unless you are really talented at being your own editor.

So what should you do?

One safe way to get the get the best of both worlds is to have your website very polished and spell-checked by editors.  Error free and not updated too frequently.

On the site have a blog on a different domain or a sub-domain that is away from your main sales website.  The blog is a great lead generator but has a more personal feel and is used to drive people over to the main website to close the deal.

Some people will argue that even the blog should not have errors and I agree in principle.  However, the practical reality is that given the difficulty of producing regular content, it may be better to be careful, but not too careful, since you need to get information out there.  And sometimes a typo that is the same kind of misspelling a prospect might make will produce surprising results (Again, not advocating it.)

Ultimately, people are too diverse to make one broad statement.  Some people will not do business with you for the slightest error while others that are active in social media and blogging may not even think twice about it.

Buzzoodle Update

We have quietly made a significant change to our business.  While I enjoy many different social media tools, but in this economy especially, it has become necessary to really focus on doing more with less and getting the outcome you need to be a viable business.

I am happy to report that we have already helped a couple of our initial beta users boost profits.

Let me encourage you to do the demo and see how we can help you generate more sales leads.

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If you are comparing options for your online marketing spend, here is a comparison between local directory listings and inbound marketing.

A local directory listing is usually a webpage that shows off your company.

Local directories usually do a nice job of helping local people find your company – maybe in your main topic.  They are usually fairly low cost and are a good inbound link to have to your site.

Inbound Marketing can accomplish the same thing, but is has a little more diversity.  With Buzzoodle’s Inbound Marketing program you will attract people that are looking for a solution to their problem.  The very same problem your company solves.  Because it optimizes more content for your topic and is always trying to close the sale, Inbound Marketing will perform much better than a local directory listing.

That does not not mean you should not do local directories.  The more top 10 spots you can lock down in a search engine, the better.  If you are thinking about using a local directory and you have the funds to spare, it will not hurt and will help some.  But if you are serious about lead generation from targeted prospects, you should look at a focused Inbound Marketing Strategy.