Guest Article: How can Patience Provide Rewarding Sales Growth?

What lessons can we learn from the success of LightningLabels.com?

Summary: Over a 2 year period, Peter Renton's blog has helped him grow his website, lightninglabels.com, from zero visitors to 22,000 visitors per month (Compete.com, 2008). This is impressive for a business with such a small niche. Today, Peter is going to discuss the rewards of patience as you build your website and how he benefited from writing a business blog. Recently, Peter estimated that his blog drives at least $2,000 per month of additional business to his website. I hope you enjoy this article.

I believe every business should have a blog, but to launch a successful blog you need to be patient and committed. You simply cannot judge the success of your blog for at least 12 months, so you need to continually update your blog even when few people are reading it. Unless you are very lucky or famous, building blog traffic is a slow and gradual process.

A blog can do a number of things for a business. First and foremost, it should provide a more personal face for your company. The blog author or authors should be visible and be allowed to write in a personal, conversational tone. A blog is not about telling the world how great you are; you should leave that to your main site. Instead, you should use your blog to educate and inform, and possibly entertain if it is appropriate.

When you start writing your blog you should do a handful of posts and then announce to the world that you have a blog. You can do online press releases, contact industry publications, email your customer list and get the word out any way you can. This should provide an initial bump in traffic for you which will hopefully result in a number of regular readers.

Our company blog is now two years old, and is the oldest blog in our industry. For many months, though, I would write blog posts and look at the traffic and be disappointed. Here is the breakdown of approximate number of daily visitors and how it has grown:

Month	Daily Visitors
3rd	25
6th	31
9th	45
12th	65
18th	114
24th	147

The numbers above are for unique visitors viewing pages on the blog web site, but with any blog you can subscribe to the content without visiting the site by using an RSS reader. Our growth in the number of subscribers has followed a similar curve to that of daily visitors, and today we have about the same number of subscribers, around 140.

These are not huge numbers but for a vertical market such as digital label printing you can’t expect to have thousands of readers. One important feature that every business blog should have is a prominent link back to the company’s main web site. We get more visitors to our main site from our blog than any other source other than the search engines. People find our blog go to our web site and become customers. I estimate that we get around four new customers a month resulting in around $2,000 in sales directly from the blog.

So how do you grow the number of visitors to your blog? Here are a number of ways we have done it:

1. Search engines – every new post is indexed by the search engines within a day or two and after two years we have over 170 posts and more than 50,000 words written about our industry. All these words are indexed and able to be searched with more words being added with every post.

2. Promoting the blog – we promote the blog at every opportunity. We provide a link to the blog in our customer emails, press releases, articles, even in my email signature.

3. Commenting on other blogs – I subscribe to dozens of blogs and I regularly make comments on these blogs. These comments usually provide a link back to our company blog. One word of warning: be careful to make the comment meaningful otherwise it will be deleted as spam.

4. Blogrolls – Develop a relationship with other bloggers and you can get your blog placed on what is called a blogroll. This is a list of blogs (with links) that a blogger publishes on their blog.

5. Your main web site – a link to your blog should be prominently featured on your main company web site.

We get many people who visit our own main site, then go and check out our blog and place an order. We have no way of measuring the actual impact that our blog has on these people but I know the blog helps create the impression that we are an industry leader. Our blog is also mentioned in trade publications now and has resulted in speaking and writing engagements for me that increases our exposure in our industry. But this all took time and perseverance.

Peter Renton is the founder of Lightning Labels, Inc., the leaders in digital label printing and custom labels. He writes regularly about the label printing industry on his company blog at http://blog.lightninglabels.com.

References

Compete.com. 2008. "Snapshot of LightningLabels.com"

What is a blog and do I need one?

Screen capture from Blogger.com as I use Blogger to create this blog post. Tools such as blogger can save you time if you frequently write articles for your customers to read.

Summary: The technology world tends to get excited about new products and new ideas, blogging just being the example we’re going to discuss today. However, the average businessperson wisely views the technology world with some skepticism. We have learned that technology is never the magic pill to solve business problems. Blogs are no different. In themselves, they have no special power to solve business problems. Nevertheless, it is wise to ask, “What is a blog?” and “Do I need one?” This article will help answer those questions.

So, what is a blog? To start, this article that you’re reading is a blog. Put simply, a blog is a column, similar to a daily newspaper column, which is published on a website instead of in print. Just as a newspaper column can be a Dear Abbey, a column about sports, or a political opinions column, a blog can also be about any topic. Just like columns are a series of regularly published articles, blogs are a series of regularly published posts. Newspaper columns are typically read in print. Blogs are typically read online.

However, blogs are not exactly like newspaper columns. Whereas a newspaper column is published at most once per day, a blog can be published as often as you want. That’s because it’s cheaper to update a blog on a website than it is to print a newspaper. Some blogs are updated every hour. For example, just recently, a blogger published one post every hour for 24 hours straight about Kobe Bryant. Even the New York Times could not afford to print twenty four updates to their sports column in a single day. And who would buy all twenty-four copies?

Another difference between blogs and newspaper columns is that, while newspaper columns are controlled by the newspaper, a blog is controlled by you. You are the author, or someone you hire is.

As I mentioned earlier, this article you’re reading on my website right now is an example of a blog post. But what makes blogs so special? How is this blog post any different from any other article on a website? The reality is that to most people there is no major difference.

From the reader’s perspective, blog posts may look no different than any other article on a website. If this is the case, then why is there so much buzz about blogging in the technology world?

This brings us to our next question, “Do you need a blog?”

The easy answer to that question is, No. A business can operate perfectly fine without a blog. However, blogging provides some advantages that make it a powerful tool for publishing communications to your customers.

It is best to think of blogging as using a writing tool just like one uses Microsoft Word. Word let’s you quickly write what you have to say, save your document to a file, and print it or email it for someone else to read. Similarly, a blogging tool let’s you write your thoughts into an article, automatically applies a standard blog layout and format, and automatically uploads the blog article to your website to share with your visitors. The tool builds the web page for you so that you don't have to be a programmer to put articles on your website.

In summary, if you plan to write lots of articles for your customers to read, then a blog can save you time. A blog helps make authoring and publishing articles on your website faster.

Blogs have a lot of other powerful features that also help you. However, there are so many features that they can’t be covered in just one article. But you wisely don't start blogging merely because blogs provide cool features. Instead it is wise to start blogging because you have something of value you want to say to customers on a regular basis and you want to do that as efficiently and effectively as possible. If your goal is the latter, then the features provided by blogging might be just what you need.

In conclusion, blogs are just a way to publish articles on a website. Blogs consist of a series of posts published at a regular time interval on a website just as newspaper columns consist of a series of articles printed in a newspaper at a regular time interval. Blogs, in and of themselves, do not solve business problems. Nevertheless, if you wish to communicate with your customers through regularly published articles, then a blog is often the easiest way to do this. That's why I write articles such as this through a blogging tool. Using blogging as a tool can save time and make it easier to share your articles with customers and partners.

Additional articles:

Blogger.com: "What’s a blog?", PBS.org: "What Exactly is a Blog?", WordPress.org: "What is a blog?"