2.    Showcase Your Knowledge (or Your Product)
Let people know how wonderful your products and services truly are—in the form of your expertise. If you hold conversations with people, answer their questions or use your blog to provide a miniature version of the service they’d get as your customer…they’ll be interested. For example, if you have a restaurant, post a “how-to” for a simple summer salad (the ingredients of which would be obvious if they showed up for lunch). Let them know, however, that the dressing makes the salad and they can pick that up from you. Or remind them that your signature cold soup goes great with that salad. They’ll appreciate that you shared something simple, but will understand that for the real goods…they have to show up at your door.

3.    Sell, Sell, Sell!
I gave a mini-example of this in the last example. Remind people of your fantastic services. If you own an office supply store, have a sidebar that always shows what is on sale that week. We never suggest writing multiple posts that simply promote you or your product, but we do suggest that you find sneaky ways to inform your readers of your offerings.

What great blog ideas do you have? Let us know in the comments!

Image Credit: Maria Reyes-McDavis