Up-selling is a concept I have been thinking a lot about lately. The book The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber explains how the idea of franchises combined with upselling have helped businesses become successful – but how do I transform this into my own business?
I want you to visualise a pizza base, which is an excellent medium for adding things onto. Not just tomato sauce and cheese, which adds value anyway in creating a Margerita, but all the extra toppings which make the pizza individual and appropriate for its consumer. You can add many different toppings to enhance the product, and its the combination of these when added together creates the final effect.
What if your blog was just a Margerita, serviceable on its own, but a bit boring? OK, it tastes nice, and it seems to do well, but do you think extra features would help?
Consider mushrooms as a link to other websites, peppers as a link to your newsletter signup page, chillis in the form of your picture, olives as RSS feed options, anchovies linking to your categories and tags, pepperoni as your social networking links, pineapple for your recent visitors and tuna to show past comments.
As long as all these ingredients are your favourites, it doesn’t matter if you put them all on at once! Although they all have an individual purpose, explore combining these tastes to see what effect they have. Test and measure the responses. Rearrange the positioning to highlight specific items. Work with your widgets!
But don’t forget the tomato and cheese, which should relate to the blog posts, as these are the mainstay of your pizza. Good quality and value should always be on the menu.
How does this relate to upselling? ‘How to beautify your blog’ offers a series of packages that can be added to the main staple, the blog itself. Investigate this concept and give me feedback – does this sort of thing appeal to you? More ingredients cooking away are advice on exiting posts and how to write them effectively, plus all the other marketing elements of blogs I am researching into. Should be the making of the most fantastic pizzas (sorry, blogs) ever!
How to spruce up a free blog
Thursday, April 16th, 2009Hi Alice
I’d welcome any feedback you could offer on my shop blog: http://kittyandpolly.wordpress.com/
Thanks, Paula
–oo00oo–
Hi Paula
What a fantastic blog! I love the pictures and the posts are really readable, well done!
I particularly like the links to specific pages on your website and that you’ve created some extra pages. You could have put your pages widget a bit higher on the side bar, but as you have links across the top this probably doesn’t matter.
What else can you do? I don’t want to spoil the overall effect, but you could move the comments widget below the recent posts widget – don’t hide your feedback, encourage it!
You could promote your newsletter on your side bar. As this is a free Wordpress blog you aren’t allowed sign-up forms, but you could get around this by using a text widget with an image of your newsletter linked to a specific webpage with the newsletter sign-up form on it. This has worked for me! Place the text widget high up on the side bar to encourage action.
And why not move your blog icon further up your website to encourage more visitors from that end?
Finally sign up to feedburner.com or feedblitz.com to get your blog’s RSS URL, and place the code for a RSS button and new post subscription link in a text widget. This is to encourage more readers to follow your latest activities. And remember to place the widget at the very top of your side bar where it is really noticeable.
Other than that I think your blog is truly great!
Alice
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