Just getting your building and remodeling blog found—and read—isn’t your ultimate goal in marketing your business. Of course, if nobody finds or reads your blog, that’s a problem. But you want people to do more than just read. You want them to respond.
That means you have to give people a reason to respond. One of the best ways to generate response is to offer your readers something they want. We’re not talking about bribing people by offering them a free iPad if they fill out a survey (Besides, that will generate all kinds of responses from people who don’t care at all about your homebuilding or remodeling services—they just want a free iPad). You want responses from people who are seriously considering building a new home or remodeling the home they’re in. And these people are looking for helpful information.
You might offer readers a free “special report” along the lines of, Avoiding the 10 Most Common and Costly Mistakes When Building/Remodeling Your Home. Or maybe offer a report like Pergo or Hardwood: Which is the Right Choice for Your St. Louis Home?
Putting a good offer in your blog does a couple of things. First, it helps establish you as a trusted expert. You know this stuff and you’re offering (some of) your expertise to help people make good decisions. People appreciate that.
The other thing that including an offer does is to help you identify people who are serious about building or remodeling. Reading about flooring products can be fascinating—but only to people who are seriously considering building or remodeling. If someone is willing to give you their name and email address in order to download this information, they are probably pretty serious about the process. These are the people you want to have further conversations with. And by giving you their email address, they are giving you permission to follow up with them.
If you make an offer, you’ll also want to make sure you have a clear call to action. For instance, if we offer you a free report on Builder Marketing: 5 Ways to Reach Customers, we need to give you a way to respond. We could tell you to download now. Or we could make the title a hot link. Or we could include a button on the blog page that lets you download.
In short, if you want people to respond to your blog, offer them something that will help them and ask them to respond.
What do you have that you can offer to readers of your blog to get them to respond?