The Internet can be such a faceless place with every website starting to look and sound the same…. how do you make your business website stand out from the crowd?

With a blog, of course!

KansasCity.com posted a great article today on how businesses are using blogs to give a personal touch to their websites. A Kansas City real estate agent uses her blog to get more clients who are interested in moving to the area, and a local bistro uses their blog, the Business Bistro, to quickly and easily introduce specials to their clients.

Several of the advantages to blogging are listed in the article and are worth repeating:

• You can keep your site updated in as little as 15-20 minutes per week.
• You need to update at least once a week with really good content that fits your audience.
• Responding to criticism through your blog comments is a great way to show responsiveness to your market.

I’d also add that you want to inject just enough of your personality that your visitors get to know you-without knowing too much!

So why do you blog? Have you seen it change your business?

Need help with your sales? Is lackluster customer service hurting your bottom line? Just want to be more productive? DrewStevensConsulting.com, one of our newest YourBlogTeam clients, can help.

Drew is a talented speaker and writer, author of six books, including Split Second Selling, Spilt Second Customer Service and Little Book of Hope.

If you are looking to improve your sales effectiveness, be sure to check out his free Sell Well Kit.

What’s exciting about working with Drew is his ability to generate so much content in a short amount of time. We moved his posts from his old blog and imported them into his new one, he has tons of free ebooks, and over 100 articles on the Internet so it’s really easy to get traffic going to his site.

He’s already on the first page of Google, and we’re shooting for the number 1 spot, mainly through articles submitted online. Then once we get the visitors to the site who are interested in his main topics (sales effectiveness, customer service, time management and productivity), the goal is for them to sign up for his Free Sales Training materials and join his newsletter so we can continue to contact them.

How hard is it to make a sale on your website? First, you have to find the prospect. Then, you have to get them to visit your site and go to the order page. Then you your words have to convince them to buy. Maybe you are selling a $14.95 ebook or a $29.95 course. They buy, you make money, woo-hoo!

Then what happens?

You start the whole process all over again!

But what if there were another way?

What if you could continue to get revenue from that one prospect, over and over and over?

There is a way!

One of the absolute best business models on the Internet is a Membership Model. You have the initial sale, a prospect becomes a “Member”, you provide regular information (monthly or weekly), and you keep getting paid month after month.

Imagine having 500 members paying you $20 per month. That’s $10,000 in revenue… every month!

This is my absolute favorite business model so I’ve been scouring the Internet to find all the best resources, hints, secrets and tools for creating memberships.

I’ve found some really fantastic resources, and I’m excited to tell you that one of them is opening for a limited time to new members.

Membernaire explains how to setup your own membership site in 48 hours or less. I’ve been a member since it first opened last year…and I’ve got an entire notebook of material already.

What I love about Membernaire is how easy the whole process is. Some of the other membership training courses get really complicated by setting up special websites with complex software…. but Membernaire explains exactly how to set this up just using email instead of have a subscriber website.

The author, Jimmy Brown, has created multiple membership sites so he shares all his success secrets (and the problems to avoid)! He is a very talented writer, and every lesson teaches me something. In our most recent lesson, he explains how his wife (who can’t do technology) outsourced everything to set up her member site.

The lessons come every week (so you get four or five a month), and it only costs $27.

If you think you might be interested, go to Membernaire and read about all the different lessons, what a “Fixed Term Membership Site” is, and why it’s so much better than a regular membership site.

The Your Blog Team rating is 5 stars!

Any questions, let me know!