More frequent updates can shorten the sales cycle

You won’t necessarily need to publish every day, or even every week, depending on how frequently other parts of your site are updated. However, when you do have an occasion to make a short blog post, it provides another reason to remind prospects to return to your site.

This can help shorten the sales cycle, particularly if you are using a multiple feed or blog strategy.

With the combined power of blogging and RSS, you can construct multiple outlets for information that are each hyper-targeted to several segments of your market. Instead of attempting to force your static web site to capture home buyers and home sellers for your area, as well as provide the statistical information on your locale, you can build several focus areas, some of them automated, and promote them side by side.

For example, if your local area is Frederick, Maryland, you could dedicate one blog and its accompanying feed to recent Frederick listings, and then have a separate feed that automatically provides updates on area schools, crime rates, cost of living and other statistical information home buyers consider when making purchasing decisions. Separate blogs and feeds on the same site could focus on the needs of home sellers in the area

The possibilities are truly as endless as the number of markets you wish to capture.

It is often said that it may take up to seven times for a prospect who comes across a marketing message to buy. Therefore, the faster the opportunity arises for you to contact your potential client, the closer they may be to a buying decision. If you are able to provide them with the information they need to make that decision with updates from your site, the likelihood that they may ultimately make that purchase decision through you increases.

Updates to blogs and RSS feeds can give you the power to make this transition happen at a faster pace, as the production cycle of the content takes only the time you would need to publish that information.

Rather than contacting your web content management department, forwarding content, and waiting for the page to be published, then picked up by search engines, with a blog, you simply log into your administration area, type and publish.

These pages can also get picked up by search engines faster through the power of syndication - and those already following your feed receive your update instantly.

There are more ways that you can use RSS to draw more qualified prospects to your business that we will go over in two upcoming posts, followed shortly with a short report you can download to learn more about how to exploit the power of blogging for your business.