How to Write Brilliant Business Blogs, Volume I

Suzan St. Maur

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781631577444
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Meetings & Presentations
• Index: Business

Here are the basic business blogging skills you need to learn before you can write excellent business blogs for your company, your employer, or other activity. In this volume, we look at the basic issues for business blogging including business writing skills, blogging strategy, types of business blogs, how to promote your business blog posts, writing style and grammar for business, how to use images, and many more—as well as a brief look at search engine optimization for business blogs.

CHAPTER 1

Where to Start

If you are just starting out with a business blog from zero and are wondering what to write for the first few posts, here are some tips that I found useful when I started my website, How To Write Better, and also a couple of other blog sites I have initiated in the past.

Let us assume that you already know what your blog site should be all about. What do you need as a basis before you can start attracting readers?

What Is a Sensible Basis for a New Business Blog Launch from Zero?

Realistically, before you can start promoting your blog site so it gets known, you need to have a reasonable number of articles or posts in place, so that visitors to your new site can have a choice of things to read about.

Despite your blog site being new, inviting guests to view merely one or two articles inevitably will lead to disappointment on their part, which is the last impression you want to leave them with.

How Should Your Posts Start Out—from Scratch?

Obviously, you need to write an introductory piece that announces the new blog, and who you are and what your business is. But, this does not need to be the first post everyone sees. Why not? Because of the old features versus benefits, “what’s in it for me” story.

You may not agree with this, and you could well be right, but my feeling is that your first few posts should be real throat-grabbers that address what your (of course!) carefully researched audience is dying to know about.

The introductory information about your new blog can be intertwined in these early posts, and also, of course, should be written up as an “About” page. But, to bring the “all about me/us” story right up front is not going to get you as many readers, much as it may seem unfair.

What Else Do You Use to “Fill Up” a Brand New Blog?

Readers of a new business blog will know quite well that you have not been collecting “readers’ questions” because you’ have only just started up. But, what you can well have been listening to is customers’ questions, and these can form very effective bases for early blog posts.

Try to pick questions that occur most frequently, and (dare I say it) if you have not got enough in hand, you could always make up one or two typical questions. But, whatever you do, make them real, based on real customers’ issues. There is nothing worse than a phony sounding Q&A article.

Most of your readers—existing and potential customers—will appreciate highly relevant “how to” articles. Obviously, the nature of these varies enormously according to your type of business, but invariably there will be some way you can pick up on readers’ concerns and give them some easy-to-follow guidelines on processes or other issues. These articles also have the benefit of letting you write them in bulk, in advance, so that you can load them and schedule them over a period of time.

Industry news and updates are also obvious targets for a new blog site, but obviously, they are time-dependent, and so you cannot upload them in bulk. They make good ongoing articles, though.

Once again, depending on the nature of your business—product and service reviews can help pad out a new blog’s content and provide your readers with a new look at that information.

So, How Much Is Enough to Start Out with?

My own view is that you need a bare minimum of 10 articles, if not more. The more, the merrier, really.

And, though it is tempting to share your wonderful new business blog with the world at large before you have a significant number of articles or posts settled comfortably in the background, I would resist. The more you can offer new readers and customers, the more they will like what they read and be sure to come back to your blog for more.

Sorting Out Your Blogging Strategy

I wish I had a dollar, pound, euro, rupee, or whatever currency you like for every time I see an article or blog post that goes into vast technical detail on how you should develop your blogging strategy.

Okay, if you are Coca-Cola or General Motors, this probably is something that you need to take seriously. But, then if you are Coca-Cola or General Motors, your choices of staff toilet tissue are likely to require lengthy policy documents that need to be peer-reviewed and ratified by anything up to the board level.

Your Blogging Strategy Does Not Need to Be Complex

It is a good idea, though, because it helps to stop you from running out of steam. First of all, you need to take a good, long, hard look at your readers, clients, customers, or prospects (as always) and think about the sort of information they will find useful. Yes, that one again. But, I cannot emphasize the importance of this too much: it is essential.

Now, before you start worrying about individual blog topics you could write to inform and entertain them, think first in terms of blog post types that you could use—then flesh those out into individual posts.

So, for Instance

How-to blog posts … always popular, although a wee bit overdone at times. However, they are probably not overdone in your niche, so think in terms of all the functions and processes your audience might need to go through and run up a list of posts based on each one of those. And, do not try to cram too much information into each one. Remember that although people argue until they are blue in the face over how long a blog post should be, the answer is—okay—as long as it needs to be. But, folks do not really want to read more than a few hundred words at a time. Space out your how-to posts into digestible chunks.

Lists … another almost-cliché in the blogosphere, but they still work. Numbers attract. Some of the woo-woo gurus even tell you what numbers readers will find attractive … 7, 10, but never 13 … and so on. Whatever numbers you can muster, numbering your key points is attractive to blog traffic.

Tips … following on from lists and numbers, XX top tips on how to do whatever will get attention. These usually are easy to extract from your own written information, or from your brain when you are working through a process or other activity within your business. If and when you run out of your own tips and ideas, research your topic and share others’ tips that you admire and feel are worth sharing with your own readers. Your recommending them will not cause you to lose credibility: on the contrary. Your readers will admire your insightfulness and generosity in sharing.

Feature articles … posts based on your own observations, ideas, and thoughts relevant to your business, and more importantly, those of your target audience. Given that events in your business—and those of your customers—are likely to be changing as rapidly as everything else, there should not be a problem for you to find enough material. If you should find yourself short of ideas, look beyond your own immediate business and examine related issues that can affect your business and those of your readers.

Historical material … why and how your business and the businesses of your target audience have come into being in the first place. These are more entertaining than they are informative in terms of contemporary information, but are, nonetheless, interesting and attractive. Having been born and grown up in the 20th century, I still feel a bit offended when people talk about my childhood days as if they had occurred in one of the Ming Dynasties.

No matter how young you are, never forget that some of your readers or customers may have been born before Prince’s prophetic 1999. And, use historical information to underline your own in-depth knowledge of your business. When you start thinking about it, there are very few areas of business that do not have a history. Use them.

Next, Work Out the Frequency of Your Blogging

It is all very well to listen to the “gurus” who say you should blog three times per week, every day, or whatever. However, what is important here is what works for you.

Okay, a lot depends on your industry, your own business, and the relationship you have with your readers. (Notice I do not say how much time you have to spare … that is not the right way to look at things if you want your blog to enhance your turnover and profits.)

Given a choice, I would say that regularity is more important than spontaneity. Your blog is your means of establishing worthwhile communication with your readers, customers, or prospects, and they will come to appreciate a regular post from you whether—within reason— it is every day, once a month, or once a week.

If my back is up against the wall? I will say go for once a week posts. That is a “do-able” amount for most business people, and it is also a useful interval for communicating with your audience.

Editorial Calendars

Editorial calendars do pretty much what the name suggests: they provide you with somewhere to set out your blogging (and other social media) plans for the upcoming weeks, months, and whole year.

Geekier readers might find their eyes lighting up when I say that there are vast numbers of digital editorial calendar devices you can download and install, which will plan everything from a blog post once a week to an entire military invasion of the moon. Just Google “editorial calendar” and watch what comes up.

Nongeeks can relax, however. Most DIY blog facilities (such as Word-Press) offer basic calendars to store drafts and schedule posts ahead of publication time, allowing you to move things around and plan ahead while leaving yourself some flexibility to add in new things at the last minute. (And if you are really technophobic, you can even use a paper-based calendar or print diary.)

So, relax. Read this book, then work out what you are going to write about. I am so sorry to trivialize the advice you might be given by other blogging experts, but it is that simple.

Your “Blogging Policy”

Unless you are running a mega-humungous corporation, your blogging policy needs only to consist of (a) what you feel your audience will benefit from in terms of your contributions and (b) what you learn from your audience, on that they want to read about.

Yes, you could do well to structure a “blogging policy” that encompasses all these issues, especially if you have other people in your organization, who will be contributing to your business blog, and incorporate all that into your “editorial calendar.”

As long as everyone in your organization understands the aforementioned, your blogging strategy will work superbly.

Putting the Blog Post Ideas into Practice

Let us look at an example of how your blogging can be developed into a useful resource for your customers, and a very solid platform from which to grow that into sales: Imagine you have a commercial transport company.

You have a fleet of vans and trucks which transport your customers’ goods over medium to long distances around the country.

To begin with, you are likely to blog about the quality of your service, what to watch out for if customers consider using your competitors, how your service compares with those of others, what alternatives are there for transportation of goods and why they are inferior (of course!), and so on.

Those are all fine and dandy, but they are very strong on inward focus. Yes, your customers will be interested to read those posts because they have a need to use such transport services.

What About Your Customers’ Other Needs?

For example, how should they prepare their goods for transportation, so that they are as well protected as possible? Do they know how important it is for them to give you a detailed inventory of the goods being transported, so that your people will know how best to handle them en route? Do you know someone who is an expert packer whom you can interview for a blog post, sharing his or her expertise to help your customers pack properly?

Moving on, what advice do your customers give to their customers who receive the goods transported by you? Could you help your customers improve their own service by issuing better instructions for unpacking goods, inward handling, and so on?

And, then, what about stock control just-in-time (JIT), and other production strategies that relate to goods outward and transportation? What tips could you get from external experts to advise your customers on how to improve these elements of their business?

Make Your Blog Your Customers’ Favorite Point of Reference

The whole point about this previous example is to give you an idea of how to dig deeper into what you can blog about that will really resonate with your customers. You could apply this approach to almost any type of business, big or small.

If you have a hairdressing business, do not just blog about topics relating to your actual customer himself or herself. She or he has a family. What advice can you give him or her about his or her children’s hair? Head lice? Baby’s first haircut? Hair care for the elderly? Nutrition for healthy hair? Choosing the right style to suit people’s faces and shapes, whatever age they are? Why a hairstyle can look great on a friend but will not work for you?

If you have a software company, do not—ever—get carried away with all the features of your product: focus on what it does for your customers. But, do not merely write about how it helps them. Think about what products or services they are offering to their own customers, and emphasize how your product helps them deliv...