Successful business blogging, part 2: think of your audience
/In this 5-part series, we’ll cover the philosophical and practical steps for successful business blogging, whether you’re a counsellor, marketing agency or scrap metal yard.
In part 1, I suggested choosing a useful-or-funny guiding principle for your blog. Now it’s time to decide what that means for your blog by considering your audience and their needs.
The human condition: selfishness
What do people care about most? Themselves and their problems. Even if your audience is seminary saints, they still care most about their own problems (how can I save souls, etc.) and you can be useful by addressing these real concerns on your blog.
That means you have to get to know your audience—clients and prospects—to understand what they care about and what they want to read about or see videos on. Like maybe grammarians would enjoy reading an indignant argument about why English should conform to Latin standards on not ending sentences with prepositions while copywriters would like the opposite argument. See how knowing your audience lets you guess whether your topic will flop or pop?
But are you still a little shy about putting your value out there? How about adjusting your point of view? In an article on 3 essential systems for business success, Ramit Sethi, your soon-to-be surrogate Asian father, suggests this: “Reframe your fear. If your material is good and you know it can help people, it’s your OBLIGATION to share it with the world.”
[Sidebar: all glory to Ramit!]
5 ways to come up with ideas for your business blog
Okay, know your audience and talk about what they want or need to know. But how? Good question!
Brainstorm
Personally, I enjoy any opportunity to bust out pens and oversize paper or to take over an even more oversized whiteboard. Because it’s fun. So get your brainstorm supplies and a colleague or two and start pumping out your thoughts on “things we think our clients and prospects care about.” In brainstorming, people like to say there are no stupid ideas but that’s the wrong way to encourage creativity. Lots of ideas are stupid so frame your brainstorm session by telling yourself or your team to, ‘throw out any idea, no matter how off-the-wall because now’s the time to go crazy, not to evaluate.’
After a good brainstorm, you’ll have 3 months of useful blog topics, plus the dread of having to produce them.
Collaborate with your sales and customer service folks
If your business is big enough to have teams, it’s big enough to have silos—the dreaded symbolic grain containers that keep one team from talking to another. Marketing, don’t let that happen to you. Instead, walk on over and talk to the folks who actually talk to your customers and prospects. Ask about what comes up, what issues they see and deal with, what they know clients are concerned about.
Boom! Two more months of blog topics for the list.
Talk to the sales team again
Prepare for some razzing. “Oh, it’s Marketing, crawling back to talk to us again…need our help?” Ever notice how great sales people like to laugh? Well, thank goodness. Now that you’re all buoyed up, ask the sales professionals what their top sales objections are by product or service and how they usually address them.
That’s gotta be another 20 ideas added to your blog brainstorm list.
Know your keywords
Using the right keywords throughout your blogs helps your site get found. Free options include Google Keyword Planner and Keyword Tool so test them out. Look up questions associated with your keywords and start answering them in your blog.
These questions are probably already on your blog idea list from your collegial investigations.
Look for social media comments and questions
Your clients and prospects may be telling you what they want to know on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn so mine those comments for questions or issues you can cover in your business blog.
If you do these 5 things, your list of blog ideas will be long. Perhaps overwhelming. But ignore that for now, because it’s time to celebrate coming up with some zillion ideas for your audience-friendly blog.
Stay tuned for part 3 in this business blogging series where we talk about how to turn your master list of blog ideas into a logical and simple plan that won’t crush you.
I'm Andrea Bassett, an executive ghostwriter and content marketing writer in Toronto and I’ve spent the last decade serving executives.
I write thought leadership content marketing for executives and/or their content marketing teams. My specializations are corporate wellness, benefits, employee assistance programs, leadership & coaching, encryption & cybersecurity and strength training for seniors.
To talk about a content marketing project, call me at 647-502-3187 or send a note to andrea@redsailwriters.com.
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