Does your business blog make sense to readers?
The most frequent complaint I hear about blogging is “I don’t know what to write about.” This is because many business bloggers don’t have enough clarity about their blogging goals. Here’s how I help my clients solve this problem. (Image: freedigitalphotos.net)
Maintaining a business blog is time-consuming. However, if you have clear objectives in mind, the effort very well could be worth your while. As you establish your blog, define your goals to determine whether to keep it alive. Below are five common uses for feeding regular content into a business blog. (photo courtesy digitalart)
1. Raw Sales
For retailers and service providers, the most obvious reason to host a business blog is to peddle products or services. You want to show what you have to offer, and a blog is a great way to advertise deals to engaged customers who are clearly in the mood to buy and interested in your products (they are reading your blog, after all). If this is your intent, post product reviews, tell your readers about new products you’re expecting. Your blog works as an extension of your website, so provide more information than customers would receive from the product page. Let the reader feel as if he or she is getting the inside scoop.
2. Company and Industry News
Businesses of all types use their blogs to keep customers and clients in the know. If you’re hosting a company blog for communication purposes, include posts about company and industry news. These posts are especially useful for businesses catering to a tight niche. They also keep customers returning to informational business sites. These efforts help to establish a lasting relationship with customers who will return to a site if they know they can get up-to-date information. Read More→
Blogging for your business works like this:
But then your business grows, you get busy, and what happens to the blog? I’ve seen hundreds of business blogs written by smart professionals who haven’t been posted since last summer.
Here’s my own example. I think I enjoy blogging for other people more than I do for myself! The more work I’m getting ghost blogging for executive coaches, the more interesting my writing becomes, and the more fun I’m having. It’s all good, really, except for a few problems…
I am quite simply more excited about creating content that markets for other professionals than I am for myself and my own business blog. I have long since stopped worrying about being “normal,” so that doesn’t bother me in the slightest.
But here are some problems… All the while, my ranking on the Top 42 Content Marketing blogs is slipping. I went from #4 to #10 to #17…to #45. I may soon be off the list entirely. Yikes! (List now defunct, but you get the point!) Read More→
Guest post by Adam Kosloff.
You’re swamped.
You barely have time to scan the headlines of your favorite news feeds. Probably the only reason you clicked on this article was to check out whether it might provide instant value to you. Can this article save you time and/or money and/or hassle?
Hopefully, it can. And not because this article will tell you anything you don’t already know – rather, it will remind you of business principles that you already apply in your everyday professional work but which you forgot once you started marketing online.
Here’s the message, loud and clear: 99% of busy business professionals and attorneys should not – repeat, not – waste their precious productive hours writing their own blog posts and website content. If you are guilty of this practice, stop it. You will burn yourself out, and your business will suffer – even if you enjoy doing the writing.
Not convinced? Consider these four arguments.
I hear it all the time: smart professionals, who are great at what they do, don’t have enough time to blog, or even start a business blog. Recently someone shared with me how they had started blogging with great gusto – they put in a lot of time – but got stuck, and never went back. It reminded me of something I once heard…
About 20 years ago I was recovering from an illness and to avoid being bored, I took up needle work, you know, cross-stitching designs on canvas with yarn. One day as I was completing a big canvas, I was listening to a motivational speaker.
All of a sudden, I heard these words:
“Most people just start doing things without reading the instruction manual.”
Loud and clear. I looked down at my needle work and like a shock, it hit me. I’d been doing them all backwards.
Sure enough, a quick reference back to the user manual clearly showed that I was inserting the needle backwards, not producing the right effect. I put down my work and never went back to that hobby ever again.
My point is that I see many professionals who are pretty smart at what they do, but they start blogging without reading any instructions at all. Later, when they get stuck, they complain about not having “enough time” to blog. Read More→
If you’re writing for your business, how much of yourself should you include? Everyone agrees that blogs are a place to have a conversation. How personal should you be? How do you keep the YOU in Business Blogging and still make it work for business?
There’s an ongoing trend to be personal with business communications. Rohit Bhargava’s written a whole book about it, filled with examples of how companies are successfully using personalities to market their business products and services: Personality Not Included.
I get updates from a professional who writes about arguments with her husband. I can’t help myself, I’m drawn into reading the damn things. And sure, she’s promoting a program…And there’s only a loose tie between the story, the husband, and the program she’s promoting!
But she tells the story so well, you don’t care! I can’t stop myself from reading her blog and newsletters. Why? As a psychologist, I can tell you why:
We’re hard wired to connect with others, especially about family stories, and we all relate to each others’ predicaments.
So, the dilemma remains: how do you do this successfully without embarrassing yourself – or worse – incurring the wrath of a family member? Read More→
This is important: You want your blog posts to educate, entertain, engage, and enrich readers of your business blog. Aim for all four of these goals when blog writing, and you can’t go wrong.
What do you need to remember when writing a post that’s designed to educate? I wrote about that here: Educate Your Readers, about the four different learning styles of blog readers.
According to the 4MAT system on www.aboutlearning.com, when you’re educating people you need to appeal to four different kinds of learning styles:
How does this translate into blog writing for your business? Think in terms of the questions each type of learner would be asking as they read your blog post:
Remember the 4 E’s of Better Business Blogging? It’s my short hand memory checklist before publishing a blog post: Educate, Entertain, Engage & Enrich readers.
You write to educate, entertain, engage and enrich readers when you want to build readerships and get great results with your blogging.
When it comes to educating readers, it’s important to take a page out of teachers’ notebooks. Teachers know that not all people learn the same way.
Most of us teach in the style we’re most familiar with: our own learning styles. If you’re analytical, you’ll teach using data. Your blog readers will understand and learn well if they’re like you.
But not all readers are the same. Take, for example, an active experimenter. They want to know how to do something and need to try it out before they learn something.
I’m probably more of a conceptualizer: I’ve got to sit and think about something a while. It also helps when there are visuals so I can see how it works.
Everyone has a preferred learning style and we also have combinations. Then there’s the right brain and left brain to consider also. If you’re not a savvy psychologist or a teacher, you may be ignoring some of your readers if you’re only writing to those with your own learning style.
What’s a business blogger to do?
Here’s some help:
I’ve taken information off the www.aboutlearning.com site which explains the 4MAT system for understanding four different kinds of learning styles. I’ve tried to simplify it so you can apply it to business blog writing. Read More→
Today’s guest post is written by Christine Buffaloe, of Serenity Virtual Assistant Services, a great resource for social media know-how, for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Many people who think they don’t have time for social media use applications that automatically feed their blogs into Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Although this seems like a good idea, it may do you more harm than good.
Here are 5 reasons why you should NOT automatically feed your blog into these social media sites:
Now, if you are gung-ho about the auto-feed I found a couple of ways in which to do this, but only feed to one network. Read More→
This weekend I got a call from a person who wanted to buy a subscription to executive coach articles to use for his newsletter. What sealed the deal? The testimonials from other subscribers.
Recommendations, testimonials and client stories are a powerful persuasion tactic. It’s one of the key persuasion triggers that get people to take action. It’s called social proof.
Robert Cialdini wrote about six weapons of influence in his landmark book Influence. Social proof is one of the most powerful mechanisms for triggering buying decisions. Here’s why:
Customer ratings and reviews are one of the ways we decide and choose to buy products online. I use them all the time to click and buy: I glance at the number of gold stars other people have given a book on Amazon, or a pair of tennis shoes on Nike.
If there are two pairs of shoes I’ve selected for my size and price, I’ll go with the one that has 5 stars over 4. Think about it: I don’t know these people, they may have feet completely different to mine, they may not play tennis as often as I do.
Yet when I see a customer rave review and 5 stars, I’m all in.
We are heavily influenced by social persuasion, we can’t help it. Our brains respond to our strong need to belong and fit in, and it all happens in our unconscious minds.
Do these same persuasion tactics work for sites and businesses that aren’t selling physical products? Does social validation work for businesses selling services and experiences? Read More→
