Gateway Blogging

I wrote a post on my business blog called When is a Blog not a Blog? Two Client Examples Showcase Blog Flexibility.

The next day I had a new client.

Just before the weekend, I finalized the details of the project with the client, including a nice deposit on the work. This was not a coincidence, because I knew exactly what I was doing when I wrote that post. I deliberately set out to attract the right kind of person who is my client. I used two specific Gateway Blogging techniques to accomplish this.

Content Framing

The first technique I used is nothing other than knowing what your potential clients really want, which is part of an aspect of the major Gateway Blogging component of Content Framing. Content Framing is literally framing your content so that it appeals to and is findable by your prospective customers. To succeed at this, you must understand your customers in a deeply empathic way. When you understand your customers at this level, you know what to say to them.

Customer Success Stories

The second technique I used is customer success stories, which are an aspect of the major Gateway Blogging component of Storytelling. The idea behind customer success stories is that by showcasing the success of your existing clients to potential clients, you make it much easier for those potential clients to reach a buy decision. Potential customers see the success of your existing customers and they desire it for themselves. There’s only one way for them to get that, and that is to go through you.

Although customer testimonials are powerful social proof in marketing, it’s hardly probable that you will get your customers to write blog posts to sing your praises. But you can tell all the stories you want about your customers, as long as the customers are ok with you naming them and the story is verifiable (as soon as my client’s blog is about to go live, you will know who he is–I will make sure of it, because it’s a very exciting video blog project).

How do I know that this was not the result of some oddball coincidence? How do I know that my client reached a buy decision because of that single post? It’s simple: He told me so. He told me that he really liked what I had done with those sites. It put him past the tipping point into action, and he contacted me.

This Isn’t The First Time

This isn’t the first time this has happened. In fact, after I wrote the post Moving from WordPress.com to Self-Hosted WordPress in Plain English, I landed not just one, but two clients, both of whom needed their blogs migrated from WordPress.com to their own self-hosted solution.

If I can point to specific posts I’ve written that have landed me clients and made me thousands of dollars, I don’t think there’s any question about whether these techniques work. Clearly, they do. The Gateway Blogging Learning Program will teach you how to get these results for yourself.

Some of what you need to learn how has been revealed in this post. You can learn how to write blog posts like this in the Gateway Blogging Learning Program. The program won’t be ready until the fall, but you can still sign up for free to be an alpha tester. I haven’t closed off access to the alpha sign ups… yet.

Get on the list for alpha testing now:

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