If you use content to promote your services or digital products, you may also want to sell on a blog. It's important that you get a return on your investment.

You know that if you spend all of your time relentlessly selling, you will be alienating a lot of your prospective audience.

The tricky problem for content marketers is that various readers are at different awareness levels, depending on how long they’ve been reading and how much exposure you’ve provided to your offer.

Depending on which stage your prospect is in, the way you approach your offer will be different.

Pause before you directly sell on a blog

In 1966, Eugene Schwartz wrote a book about this issue.

Schwartz divided prospect awareness into five different phases.

  1. The Most Aware: Your prospect knows your product, and only needs to know “the deal.”
  2. Product-Aware: Your prospect knows what you sell, but isn’t sure it’s right for him.
  3. Solution-Aware: Your prospect knows the result he wants, but not that your product provides it.
  4. Problem-Aware: Your prospect senses he has a problem, but doesn’t know there’s a solution.
  5. Completely Unaware: No knowledge of anything except, perhaps, his own identity or opinion.

Digital marketing's "new" challenges, such as how to sell on a blog, have been thought of before.

Schwartz and David Ogilvy had to approach their work in the same way.

Digital Commerce Partners works to deliver targeted organic traffic for growing digital businesses.

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The five stages of reader awareness

The five stages of awareness can help you craft content that works for you.

We don't directly sell to every audience member who is engaged with our content

A variety of strategies are used to make a case for the offer when the time is right.

1. The Most Aware

Long-time readers are the most aware.

You need to make sure that those direct messages don't hurt your chances with those at different levels.

Strategies

Take these readers off road for periodic offer-specific messages, such as a high- value sales funnel.

Occasionally you can do announcement posts in between regular content, or add a P.S. to an article.

2. The Product-Aware

Even though you have educated them about it, they are still not sure if what you offer is right for them.

They don't want to be bombarded with information at an earlier stage of the conversion process.

Strategies

You probably need to take an approach that more fully addresses prospect questions and objections if your content hasn't made your case for you. The basic email autoresponder is great for this.

It's important to deliver real content with independent value that also demonstrates a benefit of your offer in order to learn how to sell on a blog.

3. The Solution-Aware

The person has a need but doesn't know you have a solution to it.

Content marketing is going to help a lot. This person is the perfect person to provide a white paper, free report, multi-post tutorials, or other high value content.

Strategies

You should use an email list to let the reader know about everything you have to offer.

The two hold their interest and build a relationship.

4. The Problem-Aware

They know they have a problem, but they don't know you.

They haven't been persuaded to subscribe to your website and start a relationship with you. They could have arrived via a search engine.

They don't know or trust you.

Strong content with independent value is important to everyone in your audience, but it's these people who need to see the value up front to subscribe.

Strategies

If you want to learn how to create the right content strategy to sell on a blog, we have an ebook just for you.

5. The Completely Unaware

This is the kind of social media traffic that comes from a professional network.

They aren't looking for anything about you or your offer, they're just responding to a piece of content

This is the reason I don't like clickbaiting.

You could get some links and shares. It is better to have a perfect audience than just anyone showing up.

Strategies

Content that is designed to attract attention should be created when you are learning how to sell on a website. It needs to be related to your goals.

Advertising is a tough one to win online, and traffic just for the sake of traffic is a waste of time.

Value first when selling on a blog

The content that attracts audiences in the first place has to offer value no matter which stage you find your prospect in.

It's a mistake to pitch relentlessly from your content platform.

There is no reason to be shy about the fact that you are promoting your business by creating content.

If your posts don't offer independent value, you'll lose your audience's trust and you won't have much of an audience at all.

Do you want to know more about the topic? You can get our free ebook below.