When I’m talking with customers who are wondering what to blog about, I always suggest starting with their frequently asked questions from their customers – what are the common problems that motivate a customer to reach out to them. Pick one of those and write a blog post exploring the question and then your answer.
“But wait,” they say. “If I give them the answer, they won’t hire me.”
Sometimes, yes. But if that’s the case, they probably weren’t going to hire you anyway. They were probably looking for an answer to be able to do it themselves.
But the next time they have a problem that you can solve? They’re more likely to want to hire you because they already know you can help them. And I know this works because it has worked for me.
Several years ago, I published a video about my favorite WordPress backup plugin and how to use it to move a site, or how to restore the backup, to my fledgling YouTube channel. Imagine my surprise when I received an email from a viewer who wanted to know if he could hire me to help him do exactly what I just explained in the video. He said that it seemed simple enough, but he hadn’t done it before and wanted to make sure it was done right.
I literally told him how to do it, and he still wanted to hire me. Because in that video I had shown that I knew how to do it, so he felt more confident that it was going to get done right and without issues. That was the first time I got paid for teaching someone how to do something on their website. (Which led to me realizing that I LOVE teaching people how to feel more confident about their websites, but that’s a topic for another blog post.) And then I found out he was in Costa Rica, and it was even better because this was my first international client.
But wait, there’s more!
(I’ve always wanted to say that.)
After I helped him move the new site he was building to it’s new home, he kept coming back to me for more assistance with other tasks. He was a marketing guy, and he knew how to write the great content to get traffic to the site. And while WordPress we super easy for a not very technical person like himself to be able to get started, he needed help with the more technical stuff.
I ended up working with him and his team for a few years, helping with various things from that initial website backup & migration to a much more involved project of moving a 30+ multisite install to a new host and restoring access to the dashboard for the SuperAdmin.
If we look at the entire customer journey as a funnel, the YouTube video was the lead magnet, and that initial training call was like the low-cost offer that can be used to strengthen the relationship with your customer.
The best part about all of it is that I didn’t need to sell the customer on anything. I hate selling. I hate feeling like I’m being pushy or aggressive, which is probably the biggest reason it took me as long as it did to build up my business. I’m not at all saying that everyone who does this things is pushy or aggressive – just that I feel like I am when I try to do a lot of typical “sales” stuff. So working with this customer was great because my experience and skill did the sales for me.