4 Tips for Business Blogging

Is anyone listening to your business’s blog? Image: iStockPhoto

Last week blogs took a kicking. Turns out most readers don’t trust them.

On the back of the Forrester report, some business folks might be wondering whether a blog is worth it. Personally, having picked up two contracts in three days via my blog, I can’t recommend them enough. An interesting blog generates traffic to your site and gets people interested in your company and what you do.

How to write effective, trust-building copy
If you’re wondering how you can get a blog to work for you, here are four tips to write effective, trust-building copy that will help you get readers sticking around and generate customer loyalty.

1. Write Conversationally
The best blogs on the Net speak directly to their audience. They don’t drone on in corporate claptrap. Instead, they strike up a conversational tone that addresses the reader.

Write your blog with your target audience in mind. Don’t fall into the trap of filling your copy with a sea of jargon. And certainly don’t try and impress people with your vocabulary. The emphasis is on writing in a friendly, accessible way so people stick around and listen.

I find it’s always a good idea to read a blog post aloud before I hit publish. That way you ensure there’s personality in what you’re writing.

2. Share Stories
Readers want to know who you are and what you’re doing. In the the last couple of years the Net has become incredibly social. That’s partly why Twitter has become so popular. It gives followers an insight into people’s lives.

As a business blogger, if you give your reader insights into the work you do, you have the chance to show the human side of our business. One of the hardest things to get across in brochures and advertising copy is the personality of a business and the people that run it. Blogging can help you overcome that.

By sharing the challenges, innovations, problems and services you deal with, readers will get to know you better. This can be an important step in making them feel like they can approach you.

3. Update Frequently
There’s nothing worse than coming across a corporate business blog that has lain idle for a month. Even worse if it’s six months.

It’s essential to regularly update your blog, and keep readers coming back for more. If you don’t have a minimum posting schedule, you should to ensure you don’t fall behind.

If left to dwindle –even if you’re super busy with projects– a blog can work against your business as it may give the impression that you start things and leave them half-finished. Or that you never follow through. This is not something you want customers to associate with your company.

4. Don’t Avoid Difficult Issues
Silence is not an excuse. Not these days when consumers are adept at blogging, tweeting and stumbling their thoughts about a company.

With a blog you can always put your side of the story. And sometimes you will have to when individuals or groups work against you. A good example of this is the way that Basset Hound breeders in the UK didn’t respond sufficiently to the accusations raised by a BBC documentary earlier this year – Pedigree Dogs Exposed.

A blog doesn’t just generate traffic to your website or promote your skills and services. It can also tell your side of the story in times of crisis. Because Google tends to rank blogs that are updated regularly fairly highly, you can almost always guarantee that your position will be heard.

A company blog is an excellent tool for promotion, communication, and information. I hope the tips outlined here will encourage you to improve the way you utilise blogging in your company or small business.

Corporate Blogs - Failing with the copy

So Forrester says consumers don’t trust corporate blogs (Time to Rethink Your Corporate Blogging Ideas). Although it saddens me, it doesn’t surprise me. At all!

As Debbie Weil (author of the The Corporate Blogging Book) rightly notes, a lot of this is down to ”too many corporate blogs being written in corporate speak”.

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit recently and was complaining that too many web writers forget to be human yesterday.

Corporate blogs need to quit the cheese
As social media matures, corporates have got to ditch the cheese. Readers spot advertising fluff a mile away – even if it’s written in the form of a blog post.

If you’re a business blogger, you’ve got to speak to your audience as a human. You wouldn’t appreciate it if you stepped into a local store and the salesperson hit you with corporate speak.

You’re more inclined to buy or listen to what sales staff have to say if they speak to you as a person, rather than churning out corporate jargon.

Blogging changed the way we write on the Net. Twitter (and other microblogging services) are changing it even more.

We aren’t writing anymore. We’re speaking in text.

If business bloggers are going to start winning over audiences, they have to put the user at the forefront and start communicating in ways that people listen.

Time for a new corporate blogging voice
Plugging your sales pitch or corporate message into your website isn’t working. Nowadays you have to be more like the village shop keeper who cared about customers, forty or fifty years ago. Talk to people:

• be engaging
• establish trust
• don’t oversell
• be enthusiastic, not pushy
• and be polite and helpful.

Then, only then, will your blog cease to reverberate with the corporate claptrap customers are so wary of.

5 Steps to Boost Traffic to Your Business Website

Image: sputnik

1) Start a blog
Seriously. Write about things that interest your target group. Give away free help and information that makes your customers’ business or life easier.

2) Have a links page
Regularly promote the best sites within your branch or field. As you become a hub for essential information, people will return again and again

3) Publish instructions or user-guides
Make it easier for your customers to use your products or services.

4) Invite people to ask questions - even on a separate Q&A page
Customers likes to ask questions. Especially anonymously on the Net. Although answering takes time, it shows you’re interested in helping the people that make your business thrive. Everyone of them is important.

5) Promote Freebies and Giveaways
People like competitions, the chance to win, and information for free. If you’re company has the resources, give something away every week. Tips, tricks, prizes galore!

Blog Crisis Management: Basset Hound Breeders Slam Inaccurate Article

I’ve written previously about how basset hound breeders in the UK have come under attack since the BBC aired a contentious documentary, Pedigree Dogs Exposed, over two months ago.

This month sees Dogs Today Magazine in the UK publish a very one-sided article about Alison Jeffers and Jeremy Ward and their Albany Hounds.

Ms Jeffers claims that their hounds are closer to the original bassets bred for hunting. Slamming today’s show bassets, the article claims show bassets are winning awards “for tasks that they could not possibly perform” (i.e. hunt).

Given that basset hounds regularly win tracking competitions here in Sweden, I don’t really take this article seriously. Still, some of the basset folks in England are very upset.

I’ve already seen a stack of emails from basset breeders complaining about the inaccuracies of the article. Again, I would like to reiterate: this is why you need a blog.

A weblog enables you to put your response in the public domain. By writing a headline like: “Basset Hound Breeders Slam Dogs Today Article” you have a good chance of being found. Particularly as anyone who has read or heard about the article will most probably Google “Dogs Today Basset Hound”.

To find out more about how a blog can help you with crisis management check out these earlier posts:

• Blog Crisis Management - Use a blog to tell your story
• Blogging in a Crisis: Google Will Find You
• A Weblog is Essential for Crisis Management

Nurture Your Blog

As a Really Small Business you have every excuse NOT to tend to your blog. There’s people to talk to, jobs to do, invoices to send, bills to pay and that’s just for starters. But an ignored blog doesn’t just tell your site visitor you’re busy; it means you’re losing out on all that good stuff we mentioned before about customers, friends and job leads.

Strategy:

• Make time for one blog post every other day.
• Set aside an hour to ensure you write something worthwhile.
• Use descriptive headlines that target keywords like the services you provide or where you work.

Example post title:

5 Dog-walking Tips for Dundee Residents

Sure, you can include the rest of the world in the main body of your article, but by wrapping h1 tags around the headline will almost definitely help you reach anyone in Dundee looking for dog-walker. Amazingly enough, people tend to search for things they want: “Dog-walker Dundee”.

Other examples:

• Stockholm Copywriter’s 5 Top Tips
• Swedish-English Translation Guide

Follow this strategy for a couple of months and keep doing it. Keep an eye on which words people search for in Google and bring them to your site by using Google Analytics. Regularly tracking this data will teach you about how people find your website: it will also give you new ideas about what to focus on and how to use headlines to target readers.

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