Published by Niall Devitt, Btb Business Training

As a relatively new business blogger, I am constantly seeking out advice as to how to improve our blog. One very simple way for me to do this is to surf the net looking at other business blogs, seeing what they do well and sometimes what they don’t. It goes without saying that ultimately a business blog needs to add value to a business or else it is simply not worth doing.

SEO

At a basic level it achieves this through helping with SEO, provided of course you are conscious that you are writing for the Internet.

Sales & Marketing

Leaving the SEO aspect aside, the primary objective of a business blog is as a sales & marketing tool for the business. Its an extension of your website (also a S&M tool) that guides and assists potential buyers so that they pick up the phone, send an e-mail or make an on-line purchase (a call to action)

Wise Up, ITS NOT ABOUT MORE ADS

Unfortunately, this is where the confusion starts for some business bloggers, they end up taking this principle way too literally. Taking for example, a sales & marketing training blog I happened to visit, the blog posts were merely a series of reworded ads for the business. Practically every post followed the lines of ” You have a problem” and “we can fix it” so “contact us ” OK, so there was a little bit of fluff thrown in around the sides but that was pretty much the extent of 150+ posts.

The Challenge

While you would think that a business of this nature would know better, it however clearly demonstrates the difficulty faced by all business bloggers in attempting to add value to the business in real terms (sales), through use of a business blog.

Understanding Value

So where do you start? Well let’s start with value, I would surmise that before a blog can start to add value to your business, it first needs to add value to your site visitors and blog readers. There are of course variations but generally, these visitors arrive at your blog in two distinct categories:

At the Front Door:

Potential Customers who are searching for your product

Potential customers who have been searching for your product arrive at your site with an already developed interest and need for your type of product. What they remain unsure about is your ability to deliver, your blog in this instance affords you an opportunity to start to give them reasons to trust you and your business. These visitors will usually arrive at your homepage (front door) and click through to your blog. The objective with this type of visitor is to get them to call or e-mail (call to action) after only one visit.

At the Back Door:

Potential Customers who happened upon your site when searching for something that was in some way related to your Product

Here, someone has stumbled across your site when searching for something related to your product. For instance, someone who is searching for “cold calling techniques” might end up at my blog. These visitors do not arrive with a developed interest in sales training and arrive at the site through the actual blog post (back-door). Your blog can now be used to start to develop their interest in your product. It is highly unlikely that this type of visitor will choose to contact you after one visit, so the initial objective then should be to get them to continue to revisit; to become a reader of your blog.

Business Blogging Strategy

In part 2, I will be looking at how your prospects can spot fear and dishonestly in your writing, why blog posts that give for free are the most effective, why you shouldn’t try to be all things to all people and why it’s important to invest your personality in your writing.

Tags: blogging for business, business blogging, business blogs

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 1:19 pm and is filed under web marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.