Blog to add Real Value for Your Business (Part 2)
Published by Niall Devitt, Btb Business Training
In part one, we talked about how some business bloggers create posts that resemble a series of reworded ads. This is, in my opinion a misguided S&M approach, which will rarely add anything to the company’s bottom line.
For a business blog to end up adding real value for that business, it has to first add value for potential customers/readers. Then and only then, will these potential customers be motivated enough to contact the business and give you an opportunity to turn them into actual customers. So how can you achieve this?
Don’t give a little, Give a lot.
When posting, give of your expertise and knowledge and give it to your readers for free. Write posts that discuss and offer insight to their problems. Give advice, give solutions, give links to other resources, give, give, give. Attempt to make your blog a treasure trove of knowledge and a can’t do without resource for your target market and prospects. Using your blog to give for free is a guaranteed way to demonstrate your professional expertiseand immediately start to give prospects confidence to trust that you can deliver.
Risky Strategy?
Some would have you believe that giving for free is a bad idea because you risk giving readers so much insight, that they no longer need your expertise and/or product. Put yourself in the shoes of your prospects, you will quickly realise, that this is nonsense.
A site/blog visitor who has searched for your product will initially read through your blog to qualify your level of expertise, so the more you can demonstrate, the bigger the chance of the prospect contacting you.
A site/blog visitor who has stumbled across your blog while searching for a related keyword may not arrive with a developed interest in your product, If your blog is able to capture their attention, offer something of value, therefore icreaseing the likelyhood of return visits and ultimately sales for your business.
In either case, if your blogs fails to convince your readers, the net result will be potential customers not contacting you and business lost.
Keep your Customers in mind
Your target audience (prospects) should ditate the launguage that is used in your blog. Some business blogs make the mistake of trying to be all things to all people. If your customers happen to be computer programmers, stick to writing for computer programmers. If the rest of us don’t get it, that’s irrelevant because we won’t be making the decision to buy your product.
If on the other hand, you are a programmer, but your prospects are small business owners, well then the onus is on you to write in launguage that small business owners understand.
Let your Personality outta the bag when writing
Mindful to sound and come across all professional, some business bloogers refrain from allowing their personality to appear in their writing. in effect, all this does is to make your blog lifeless and superficial.
In other words, if you enjoy a joke, have a joke so long as its in good taste, it will add colour and life to your posts. In the past, I have met bloggers who in person seemed very different people, to the person I had imagined them to be after reading their blogs.
Prospects will use your blog to get know you, the person, so it is important that you allow yourself to come across in your writing.
Prospects can spot Dishonesty
Assuming that they should know better, why would the S&M blog discussed in part one, decide to create posts that were merely a series of ads for the business. As discussed, fear of giving too much away is potentially one factor, however another much more sinister factor might be that they don’t actually process the expertise and know-how that they are advertising through their blog.
If they had chosen to write in any detail about their solutions, it might become apparent they don’t really know what they are talking about. The comments feature would allow potential buyers of their product to ask questions. They might get found out?
Prospects nowadays invariably have a sophisticated and honed buying process, which leaves our so called S&M experts, though actually really saying nothing of interest in their blog, potentially might be saying everything and inadvertently waving a big red flag to readers/prospects.
Finally, here are Seven Mistakes To Avoid When Building Your Business Blog from Ireland’s branding guru Krishna De.
Tags: blogging for business, business blogging, business blogs, website promotion