Gateway Blogging

What do you call the people who visit your business blog, subscribe to it, and buy from you? Typically, blog visitors are thought of as readers. This would make sense if you followed an advertising-supported publishing model, but it is of limited use to a business blog.

On the other hand, a business thinks of the people who show an interest in its products and services as prospects. But in business blogging, there really is something more like a slow transition (sometimes it isn’t slow at all) between a reader and a prospect.

There is an invisible line that people cross when they shift gears and go from simply reading your blog to considering making a purchase or otherwise converting. Gateway Blogging is all about getting people to cross that line quickly and easily, and to do it happily and willingly.

I’ve combined the words reader and prospect in the most creative way imaginable: by sticking them together with a hyphen! Go ahead and smirk (I do, I admit it) but hear me out on why this is to your benefit as you read the rest of this article.

Enter the Reader-Prospect

So if you have a Gateway Blog (your blog is a gateway to your products and services as taught in the Gateway Blogging course), the people who visit your blog are more than the black-and-white definitions of readers and prospects. They’re still the same people regardless how you think about them, but how you think about them changes how you treat them, and that has an ultimate effect on your bottom line as a business.

When you know that a visitor is more than just a reader, you do more in your blogging to provide value to them and meet their information-seeking needs in order to gain their trust over time.

Gateway blogs aren’t like other blogs people read for fun or entertainment (although they can and should be fun and entertaining). If you do Gateway Blogging correctly, then when people visit, it’s because they already have a high interest in what you’re offering.

When you think of a visitor as only a prospect, you may not think about the long term value necessary to build trust. You might be tempted to oversell them too quickly. Reader-prospects are timid creatures. They are testing the waters of trust to see if it’s safe to swim, so the last thing you want to do is come in like a shark and scare them away!

Gateway blogging allows you to show reader-prospects what’s inside the gate of doing business with you. Gateway blogging is one big exercise in trust-building. This happens over time in most cases. You continue to provide valuable content that is very carefully aimed at showing them how you solve their frustrations and fulfill their dreams, and eventually they will sell themselves (what do you think I’m doing with this blog?). The purpose of the Gateway Blogging course currently in production is to show you why and how you create this kind of “gateway” content.