 Clients and prospects alike often come to us and ask us how to build their business by blogging.
That’s the topic of this, well, blog. But we’ll also offer some prerequisites and caveats first. Let’s dive in. How to build business by blogging: The media mix Business does not thrive by blogs alone. They are part of what’s called the media mix. This includes your website, paid advertising, social media, P.R. (public relations), trade shows, podcasts, and so on. None of these will do the trick on its own; the challenge is to balance them appropriately, both for your audience and for your budget. In that regard, it’s a little like an investment portfolio: You don’t want to put everything you’ve got into, say, one stock. You want to spread out your risk so it’s aligned with your comfort level and goals. Same thing for your media mix. We’d mentioned podcasts, for example, and they’re great. But they’re pretty far down the list in terms of bang-for-the-buck, for most of our clients. Blogs, on the other hand, are usually pretty high up the list. One of the great things about blogs is that they’re inexpensive. If you write them yourself, they’re free. That said, blogs are what we call a “soft” medium. You must set your expectations properly. Don’t think you’ll write a single blog, and then your phone will ring with some new prospect who’s dying to give you money. The business of blogging Properly executed, blogs work in a couple ways, simultaneously:
That’s quite an impressive array. But note the caveat we used as our opener: “Properly executed…”. That’s where far too many would-be bloggers fall short, waste their money, or both. Remember: Your goal here is single-minded. You want to build business. This is not about ego, or politics, or getting “likes,” or talking about your vacation or your kids. Leave that to your personal social-media life. With that goal in mind, there are some things you can do to improve your odds of success: Think backward to move forward. You want your blog to be searchable. Let’s say you offer expertise in Service A. What, then, would your ideal prospects be searching on? It might be a phrase such as “Best ways to get Service A.” Bingo: That’s your blog-post title. For this very blog that you’re reading right now, we want to attract readers who want to build their business by blogging. That’s why we titled it thus. That’s because we know that a certain proportion of readers of this article actually don’t want to do it themselves, and would much rather seek out an expert who can help. Ta-dah: Those readers (and you know who you are!) are already on our site. Don’t waste your money on “production blogs.” “Production blogs” is a term that we invented, so we’ll need to define it for you here. It’s the kind of blogs you can get from ultra-low-priced “writers” that are overflowing with hyperlinks and regurgitate lots of existing information (hopefully not plagiarizing it in the process). They’re bogged down with blatant SEO terms throughout the text that render them virtually unreadable. Speaking of “unreadable,” they’re usually poorly written in the first place, rife with grammatical, usage, and spelling errors. You might be able to get one of these written for just a few dollars. But whatever you spend would be a waste of money. That’s because they’ll ding your brand (now you’re forever associated with this subpar content), while making you blend in, rather than stand out, from the crowd. Don’t go there. Do invest in “thought-leadership blogs.” “Thought-leadership blogs” is yet another term which we invented, so we’ll define it for you… although you can probably figure it out by its title. This is the antithesis of the cookie-cutter approach used for production blogs. This is the kind of compelling storytelling that only you can tell, leveraging your expertise and experience. This is where you can afford to be generous: Reveal important tips and tricks. Share war stories and lessons-learned. Your audience will eat it up, and respect you all the more for what you’ve shared. That’s how you begin to build business with blogs. Don’t think that you need to be Shakespeare to pull this off. The important thing is the information: Those exact war stories and lessons-learned we mentioned above. Get those down, even if they’re just as bullet points or if you want to hash them out on the phone with a professional writing resource (like us). We do this kind of work for lots of clients all the time, and the results are powerful: Between their great input, and our ability to transform that input into interesting stories, the end product is compelling and cost-effective. One more thing Production blogs, fortunately, are on the wane. They arose in prominence because there was a time, not long ago, when they could actually fool the search spiders. But not anymore. Amped up with artificial intelligence, today’s search bots are far more discriminating than their recent forebears. They’re continually being tweaked, too—for example, pillar-page content is getting quite hot these days (and we have a blog in the queue to help you with that topic)—but the common thread is that they’re trying to be more human-like. They want to find, and serve up, usable information. So if you load your blogs with just that, you’re ahead of the game. Need help with that blogging strategy (for example, you’ll want to create an editorial calendar, and we have an entire article about that, too) and execution? Contact us and let’s help you get the word out.
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