Selling the Vision via your Unique Value Proposition
In Gateway blogging, you show your potential and existing customers what you’re all about by how you blog so they can make or reaffirm a decision to do business with you. If you don’t uniquely position yourself and shine like a lighthouse in the foggy night across an ocean of undifferentiated business blogs, that purchase decision will not be made in your favor.
Positioning and Branding has 3 Aspects:
- Blog design
- News as differentiation
- Vision posts
Blog design
Gateway Blogging is mostly about what you say and how you say it on your business blog, but design plays a vital role, as well. One factor that sets you apart from the crowd–and therefore means what you sell is worth paying for–is a unique and compelling business blog and site design.
If you’re just starting out, and you are not a web or graphic designer, it makes financial sense to use a freely available template or theme for your site. But chances are thousands of other people are using the same one, so you are not branding yourself as unique. The blog theme you choose may look nice, but it looks just as nice on five thousand other blogs, too (yes, it really can be that many and more). As soon as you are able, you want a professional design for your business blog.
Even before the advent of the web or blogs, it was always solid advice to have a compelling logo and other materials professionally designed for your company. Your office location needed to be designed in a way that created the desired impression and branded you. In today’s world, your “company” may consist of only one person and the only location for it that really matters has a dot com at the end of its address. You still need a compelling logo and a great design to brand your online location.
The visual design of your business blog speaks volumes in split seconds during the first impression created when a stranger visits. It can say “I look like everybody else and I’m not worth hiring” or it can say “I’m unique and different and you’re invited to a closer inspection to find out why.” If you think of your business blog as a gateway, would you then want to enter that gateway if it didn’t look appealing or compelling? An attractive gateway invites entry, plain and simple.
News as differentiation
With so many business bloggers echoing news items, it’s no differentiator if you do it, too (who wants to be the 2000th blog repeating the news that Google just updated their PageRank algorithm?). At worst, you are just wasting your own time creating unoriginal link posts to news items which can be found elsewhere. This is exactly the kind of thing that causes people to unsubscribe from your blog.
In Gateway Blogging, the idea is to use the news as a means of differentiation. This is where offering your opinion is much more acceptable, because you are using an industry news item as a springboard to show your unique value proposition. This is better by far if you can tie your opinion to specific action that you took on behalf of a customer which had a successful outcome. As you can see, this overlaps the idea of customer success stories. The 3 major components of Gateway Blogging are not mutually exclusive or easily separable.
Vision posts
A primary goal of Gateway Blogging is to present the idea that on the other side of the gateway is dream fulfillment. That may sound audacious, but it’s true. People make purchasing decisions based on emotions, even though they may firmly believe they are deciding based on facts. When you present a dream or a vision, you create a powerful attraction and invitation to join in with the vision. If two lawyers in the same area of law each have a blog, and one posts news and gives some advice and offers the usual blog content; and the other one shares a vision of justice, fairness, and a better life (or of winning difficult cases), which lawyer do you think is going to have more clients and be able to charge higher fees?
Companies often draft vision statements which are soon forgotten and ignored (and that are often nothing more than mediocre marketing drivel). But a Gateway Blogger can write a mini vision statement in the form of a blog post at any time and with some frequency. I call these mini vision statement posts vision posts.
In a vision post, you are presenting your dream, except that you are presenting it in the form of your clients’ dream. Personally, my dream is that you hire me as a blog coach and pay me well for great work, but I present a vision on Remarkablogger of you landing more business and of you getting paid well for great work as a result of your blog, which is the result of you hiring me as your blog coach.
Vision posts have the following structure:
- present the problem
- present the vision
- affirm your work to fulfill the vision
Notice that you do not present yourself (your products or services) as the solution to the problem overtly, but it is inferred when you swear your dedication to making your vision a reality.
I see vision posts as an extraordinarily powerful attractor. They are mini-manifestos, but they are rooted in real actions you are taking, and they are designed for the benefit of customers, which takes away the negative tone sometimes found in manifestos. Because they are focused on the benefit to others, they are not selfish like other types of “rants” or manifestos found online.
An Example
One post I have written specifically as a vision post was The Secret to a Successful Blog: Sell without Selling. You can see how it presents the three steps above of presenting the problem, presenting the vision, and then promising to work towards fulfilling the vision of solving the problem.
When I wrote that post, I didn’t tell anyone I was testing a formula for a vision post as part of the Gateway Blogging system. Since I wrote that post, my readership has grown significantly, but at the time, getting 20 comments and 5 trackbacks on a post was a spike. Considering the number of comments and trackbacks this post received, I judge it a successful test of a vision post.
Do You have a Vision?
Obviously, you can’t write a vision post unless you have a vision. Greg and I have a vision of what business blogs can really be. We can (and will) create a number of strong vision posts about this, each one allowing our readers to identify with us and align with our vision for business blogging.
So what’s your vision? If you can’t answer that question immediately, you’d better spend some time refining your business vision so that you can extend it to your blog and your customers.
Photo by fotologic under CC License
