By Robert Middleton - Action Plan Marketing

This week, all the approaches to marketing my business online came together into one "Unified Theory of Online Marketing" – A way to create true marketing synergy. 

These days more and more of you want to market your professional services online. After all, if you could sit at your desk in front of your computer and attract all the clients you wanted by never stepping outside your door, wouldn't that be the perfect marketing solution?

This is essentially what I've done for close to 15 years. 

Virtually all my business has come from online marketing activities. And my primary tool for that has been the More Clients eZine that you're reading right now. 

My website attracts visitors, the visitors sign up for the eZine, my e-list grows, and in addition to providing valuable marketing information for free, I've promoted various products, programs and services with great success. 

The question is, can you follow this model and be successful? 

The resounding answer to that is: "No you can't!"

Why? Because things have changed dramatically in the past few years that makes this model less and less sustainable. 

The most dramatic changes I've seen is that it's getting harder and harder to grow one's e-list. Because there are more eZines than ever, it's harder to get subscribers. And because there's more and more competition in search engines, specifically Google, it's harder to drive traffic to your website. 

As a result, many people have switched directions and moved toward blogging and social media. But these two marketing vehicles alone will not produced the kind of results a regular email newsletter does. After all, if your blog is on your website and it's hard to get web traffic, you'll get very few blog readers. 

What is needed is a complete integration of blogs, social media, and eZines. And then there's one catalytic ingredient that I'll mention at the end of this article. 

Simply put, this is how it works:

1. Put your online content, primarily on your blog, front and center on your website. You blog becomes your home page. By having continually updated relevant content, your website will start to rank higher on Google, hence more visitors and more return visitors attracted by your content. 

2. Link your blog to social media. At the bottom of every blog post you should have links for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (at minimum) and the very first thing you should do after posting your blog is to click on those social medial links and announce your new blog post to your own social networks. And then when visitors come to your blog, many of them will spread the news by also sharing it with their social networks. 

3. Make your blog the primary channel for getting new subscribers to your eZine. A simple way to do this is to place your sign-up form directly below the blog, always with a free report as a bonus for signing up. 

All of these methods added together equal online marketing synergy. More people are attracted to your content and sharing it with others as your list builds, increasing your reach to your prospective clients. 

The mistake most people make is failing to integrate these three powerful marketing tools - blogging, social media and eZines. This week, I've taken the leap and put my blog up as the first thing on the home page on my website. The other steps are already in action. 

But I know what you're thinking:

"It's easy for you, Robert, after all you've been publishing your eZine for 15 years, already have a huge list of subscribers and don't have any resistance to writing. What about me? I'm lucky if I can write an article a week, let alone a month!" 

Well, that's where the catalytic ingredient comes in that creates even more marketing synergy:

Guest Bloggers. 

Guess what? You don't need to write all of your content. In fact you could only write a small proportion of your blog posts. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of people in your industry who would be willing to contribute to your blog. 

The guest blogger strategy is a triple win:

- Your readers win because they get more valuable, free content that can help them in their businesses. This makes you look good, raises your credibility and turns visitors into prospects. 

- Your guest bloggers win because they get the exposure they wouldn't get otherwise and will also get traffic to their websites as a result. 

- And, of course, you win because you get a lot of valuable content for your website at no cost. You get more visitors to your website and you build your e-list enabling you to communicate with more people, some of whom will become buyers of your services. 

The inevitable next step for me is to invite my readers to be guest bloggers for the Action Blog. My goal, by the early part of March, is to blog daily, with one post from me and four posts from guest bloggers. The More Clients eZine will continue weekly, but will also include links to the week's blog posts. 

Who knows, you could be one of my guest bloggers!

If you have original content about anything related to attracting more clients as an Independent Professional, I'm interested. All you need to do is go to this page and fill out the application: 

http://actionplan.com/write-blog

Cheers, Robert Middleton

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