How to Use Blogger to Build Your Mailing List and Drive Traffic to Your Website

I love my blog. I hope you do too. I love sharing ideas and resources with resume writers (and the occasional jobseeker who wanders across this blog as the result of a search engine).

When you blog, you can connect with your target market and promote your resume writing services in a way that is difficult to do through other marketing tactics. Blogs allow you to share in-depth information with jobseekers -- you can post about frequently-asked questions and then simply direct clients and prospects to the blog when they need answers.

While Wordpress gets a lot of the attention nowadays for bloggers (and there are some cool tools -- like LinkedIn's integration with Wordpress -- that are exclusive to that platform), I like using Blogger.

Blogger is a free, easy-to-use blogging service offered by Google. Using this Blogger to host your blog can be a great way to market your business. You can write a blog post and, at the end of the post, you can add a line, "For more information, [link to your website.]" This can drive traffic to your website.

Once you start creating information products to support your career services business, you can promote the special reports, membership sites, and ebooks with your blog posts. People are more likely to read a blog post (which comes across like an article) than a sales letter.

Blogs serve as a great communication tool.  You can keep your readers up to date with any changes you have made to your site, provide information on new services you are going to be introducing (i.e., LinkedIn profile development), and receive feedback on the types of services your customers wish you would develop.

Another way to communicate with your target market and position yourself as an expert is to establish a "Question of the Week" feature to your blog.  Simply have your readers send in their questions, and then, one day each week, choose one of the questions to answer. Your readers will look forward to this interactivity and will take note to visit each week to see if their question was chosen. The archive of questions you build up on the blog also serves as a powerful reminder of your expertise as a professional resume writer.

You can also use Blogger to increase the size of your mailing list by adding a sign up form to your newsletter or other autoresponder list. (You'll note I have a signup form on the right-hand side of this blog page!) Once people are subscribed to your newsletter, you can continue to market to them.

As I mentioned earlier, you can also create links back to your website on your blog that will also help your website gain search engine traffic. The search engines crawl the Internet, and when a site has a lot of links coming into it, the search engines take notice.  This can help your website rise in the results pages when someone performs a search using one of the keywords on your page.

These are just a few of the reasons why it is important to have a blog and how you can use a service like Blogger for marketing purposes.  As you get more familiar with blogging, you can add an RSS feed to your blog, which will notify your readers that you have created a new post.  This will keep your readers coming back regularly, and further help your marketing efforts.