Blog about your passion. For some of you, your passion will be something in your business. However, if you have a passion for something else related to your business (such as direct mail advertising or Google AdWords), then you could write about this and still promote your business. Whatever you write about, you have to keep your business brand and message consistent. Your business blog should not be your personal blog, or your travel blog. Stick to business on your business blog. Your blog should carry forward the brand from your website and other marketing materials. At one point, we used a blog template that didn’t look like our website and we ended up changing the design so that it looks seamless when compared to our site.
Stay on brand!
If you don’t already have a website for your business, consider setting up a blog. Blog technology allows you to set up a page that looks exactly like a website, operates like a website, can integrate plug-ins for e-commerce and collect names and addresses in the database. It’s a wonderful, inexpensive way to develop a website quickly. See QuickPress for an example of a quick, easy blog platform. If I were to launch a new business today, I would start with a blog. I’m not saying, “Build it and they will come.” They won’t come. You need to be where they are. You want to go where the eyeballs are. Visit other blogs, make comments and see who’s communicating there and using those social tools.
Blog posts should offer valuable content for your audience.
Posts should engage the audience so that they tweet about the post and link to it. Give users the option to comment, too. One of my posts received 79 comments, which increased traffic to the post and engaged the community. Make sure you also respond to comments too; let your followers know that you are listening. You can also use polls and contests and ask questions to engage the community. Give your audience a voice. We’ve actually used polls on our blog to help create new products and services by asking women what they care about, what bugs them and what would help them in their businesses.
You should track the traffic to your blog.
Google Analytics works well with most blogging platforms. When we sit down on Wednesday mornings for our staff meeting, the ABN team looks at the number of visitors to our blog, the number of comments, the number of new subscriptions and which posts are most popular. If you make a habit of blogging at least a couple of times a week and reviewing the traffic data, you’ll begin to realise which types of posts draw the most traffic.
If you’re not a great writer…
Consider recording YouTube videos and posting them on your blog. You can also record and post podcasts. But when you post videos, photos and podcasts, be sure to include at least a paragraph that contains keywords for search engine optimisation. And then there are times when it may be better to avoid blogging. Don’t blog if you don’t have anything to say. If your posts are not engaging and useful, then you will probably lose followers. Remember: “No One Cares What You Had for Lunch!” This is also the name of an online resource with suggested blog topics. Other helpful resources for blogging include Blogging for Dummies, problogger.net and anything by Seth Godin.
