Content Mastery Guide

Editor and Ghostwriter

How Blogging Can Be Like a Day at the Spa

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© lenetsnikolai - Fotolia.com
© lenetsnikolai – Fotolia.com

To celebrate our summer birthdays (mine is August 11th if you want to send a card), last weekend my mother, sister and I spent the day together at a spa. We used to see a movie, but last year we upgraded and declared this as our new annual tradition.

If blogging still intimidates you, or feels like a beast demanding to be fed, use these short summer months as an opportunity to lighten your approach and even find some joy in the process.

Here are three ways that blogging can be like a day at the spa:

  1. The planning is one of the best parts.

A 2010 research study revealed that planning and anticipating a vacation can be just as enjoyable – if not more – than the trip itself. I know I had been looking forward to the day since last summer, and even though I wasn’t feeling my best, I still had a wonderful time that was cumulative through all those months of planning.

Planning your business blogging focuses both you and your blog posts, gives you motivation and confidence to keep up with your blogging, and allows you to consistently deliver the kind of helpful content that will attract people to your business.

  1. The options are endless.

There were so many tempting spa services to choose from, I think I was more relaxed after just reading their descriptions.

On your business blog, you may think you have to write a detailed, wordy article every week because that’s what some marketing gurus advise, but you don’t.

Luckily, there are many different styles of blog posts, and you can mix and match them to find a balance that’s easiest for you and provides an interesting variety for your readers.

  1. It’s even better with others.

I used to take regular spa days as vacations, and while I always felt relaxed and rejuvenated, sharing the experience with my loved ones definitely amplified my enjoyment.

Your business blog can be a team effort, taking some of the work off your shoulders and creating more value for your audience. Your blogging team may include:

  • Guest contributors – related experts in your industry, vendors, or customers with interesting stories
  • Regular bloggers – staff members, contractors, or other partners can have their own weekly or monthly column about their particular area of expertise
  • People who assist you with writing, editing, and publishing and promotion

I know that blogging may still feel more like a trip to the dentist than a trip to the spa, but I hope you’ll give some of these ideas a chance. After all, your customers are already online, waiting to discover your wisdom!

P.S. If you liked this post, you might enjoy the Blogging Tips newsletter, delivered weekly to your inbox! Sign up here.

6 Ways Blogging Helps Customers Choose Your Service

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© Sergey Nivens - Fotolia.com
© Sergey Nivens – Fotolia.com

How do you choose service providers for your business?

You may start with a Google search. You’ll likely ask friends, family and trusted colleagues for referrals. You may also scroll through your Rolodex of contacts and connections, including the things they’ve posted or shared on social media.

The ideal scenario is when the same name pops up in several of these places – definitely a sign to move forward. Next you’ll probably visit the company’s website to get a sense of who they are and what they offer.

Now what if a business owner is looking for your professional service, whether that’s coaching, consulting, marketing, design, website development, training accounting or bookkeeping? What will they find when they arrive at your website?

If there is a blog (and you’ve been posting consistently), they’ll find evidence of your expertise, experience and professionalism, and your genuine desire to help and connect.

Here are six ways that a blog helps customers choose your professional service:

  1. Boosts their confidence in you. When you write helpful blog posts that share information, tips and guidance about their most pressing concerns, your prospective customers see that you know your stuff. When you blog and post regularly on social media, they see that you’re a reliable and dedicated professional.
  2. Boosts their confidence in themselves. When people try out the tips and suggestions in your blog posts and achieve some success, they feel good! And you made them feel that way. When it’s time to recruit some professional assistance, they’ll feel good about choosing you as that expert.
  3. Helps them get to know you. There may be other people who do what you do, but no one who does it exactly the same way. You have a unique combination of experience and expertise. When you bring both into your writing, along with your one-of-a-kind personality, you will attract the people who are perfectly suited to you. And just as importantly, you will repel the people who aren’t a good fit.
  4. Helps you get to know them. As you grow your audience of readers – including current and prospective customers, referral sources, friends and fans – you can learn from their responses (and just as much from their lack of response). If people open, like, share, and respond to what you’ve posted, you’re on the right track and you can keep doing what you’re doing. If not, that’s an invitation to do some blog planning.
  5. Gives a sample of your services. By writing about your prospective customers’ problems and suggesting solutions, you’re demonstrating some of the ways you can help. Readers will see firsthand the wealth of knowledge that you bring to the table.
  6. Gives a sample of your service. When you treat readers as customers, you can show them that you’re quick to respond to feedback and questions, you care about the quality of your work, and that you’re consistent with your follow through.

In a crowded marketplace, blogging can show prospective customers exactly what you know, who you are, and how you care.

P.S. If you liked this post, you might enjoy the Blogging Tips newsletter, delivered weekly to your inbox! Sign up here.

5 Business Blogging Lessons From Tweetstock 2015

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© olly - Fotolia.com
© olly – Fotolia.com

I recently attended the 11th Tweetstock social media conference at the Hamilton Public Library (Hamilton, Ontario). It was my third time at this social media event and once again I found a like-minded group and many tweetable lessons about marketing and business success.

I pulled my takeaways into five core themes and gathered those tweets into a slideshow (enclosed below). For now, let’s look at how these concepts can help you as a business blogger:

  1. Know yourself

What are your strengths as a blogger? Love to talk about your ideas? Combine podcasts and video posts with written ones. Record your thoughts and use a dictation app or transcription service to turn them into written posts. Or use a ghostblogger.

What are your limitations as a blogger? Sam Fiorella talked about the importance of consistency in activating an audience for an initiative or a business. Determine how often you’ll be able to blog, and then stick to that.

(I know as well as anyone that none of us can be perfect with this. A blogging schedule can be the first thing to go when competing priorities arise.)

Give yourself room to grow. Even if you aspire to weekly blogging, start with every other week or even once a month. Still aim to write every day and finish one post a week. Then you’ll have a reserve of posts to draw from if inspiration wanes or your schedule heats up.

Speaking of blogging frequency, you can also take a page from Julie Cole of Mabel’s Labels:

Remember that people may have missed the links you shared last week – keep promoting your old posts!

  1. Know your audience

I think every Tweetstock speaker touched on this concept, and it’s also a common theme at the weekly #CMWorld chats put on by Content Marketing Institute.

Be clear from the start about your blog’s mission and who it serves. In most cases this will be the target market of your business – those to whom you want to sell your products and services.

Try this marketing exercise I learned many years ago, where you immerse yourself into your target market by interviewing a different person every day for a month about their needs, challenges, preferences and ideas.

  1. Don’t broadcast, help

This was another very popular point at Tweestock, and for good reason. People quickly learn to ignore a business that only sends out promotional information. In order for people to know and trust you, they must first feel that you understand and care about them.

Before posting anything, ask yourself how it will help the reader. Why would someone take the time to click through and read what you’ve written, and will they be glad they did?

  1. Connect emotionally, authentically

The more genuine you can be in your writing online, the quicker people will be drawn towards you or repelled away from you. Both reactions are exactly what you want, so you end up connected with the people who are most likely to follow you, promote you, recommend you, and buy from you.

When you read what you’ve written, does it sound like you? Are you the same person online as you are in person?

  1. Don’t just build a network, nurture it

A lot of people talk about numbers in social media, and there can feel like an endless quest to collect more and more. Yet in the end it doesn’t matter how many people see, read or share what you write. It’s whether they trust you enough to let you help them with your products and services.

When choosing blog post topics, look to your audience for ideas. Track whether people are opening, clicking on, and reading what you write. Repeat what’s working. Survey your readers about what they want to see on your blog.

Want to read more quotes from the Tweetstock conference? Browse this Storify slideshow for my highlights.

P.S. If you liked this post, you might enjoy the Blogging Tips newsletter, delivered weekly to your inbox! Sign up here.

Who is the Blogger Behind Your Blog?

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group-of-faces-textIn a guest post for Above the Law, LexBlog founder Kevin O’Keefe writes that for lawyers or other professionals, “blogging works because of your ability to establish an intimate relationship with the reader.”

He explains how that bond is formed: “You, by making yourself vulnerable and available to help people. The reader, by discovering someone with passion, experience, and care who can help them.”

Each party must open themselves up to this intimacy. Professionals, entrepreneurs, and solo business owners who blog become a combination of three types of bloggers:

  1. Passion bloggers who document their journey, share their experience with others, gain support and accountability, evangelize what they’re passionate about, and/or teach and help others.
  2. Thought leaders who identify and explore the most important research, news, trends and issues in their industry. O’Keefe is a perfect example, and he points out, “You discover new interests and grow as a professional through blogging.” As long as you’re enthusiastic about your work and your industry, he writes, “How can you not find things to blog about?”
  3. Subject matter experts who explain complex ideas and guide customers to either do a simple task themselves, or feel more confident about working with a service provider.

It may not always be comfortable to be transparent and authentic when you write. You open yourself up to judgment and there will definitely be some people who don’t like what you say and think.

Yet as a business blogger, the truer you are to your personality, the easier it will be for the right clients to find you.

Read Kevin’s post at Above the Law: Blogging Is About You, The Blogger, Not The Copy.

P.S. If you liked this post, you might enjoy the Blogging Tips newsletter, delivered weekly to your inbox! Sign up here.

How to Choose the Best Business Blog Categories

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© goir - Fotolia.com
© goir – Fotolia.com

Your business blog categories are a vital part of your content marketing strategy. When someone visits your website and finds your list of blog categories displayed in the sidebar, they get an instant snapshot of the range of your expertise, and how you can help your customers.

Your blog categories are a natural extension of your brand, revealing what’s important to you and what you stand for in your business. Blog category links also help guide your readers to the information that will help them the most.

Blog categories help you plan

Planning your blog categories before you write helps you organize your writing and stay on track, so you can achieve the consistency that will attract long-term readers and grow those relationships into sales.

By being strategic about your blog categories, you can more easily produce a balanced number of posts in each topic area. That way, visitors can see proof of your expertise no matter which category name they click.

This post will explain:

  • How to choose topics for your business blog categories
  • How to choose names for your business blog categories
  • How to maintain your business blog categories
  • How to clean up your business blog categories

How to choose topics for your business blog categories

When considering your categories, identify the most pressing problems of your prospective clients. In the Four-Step Business Blogging Plan, I encourage you to consider topics that are broad enough to give you some variety and options, but specific enough that they’ll be relevant to your perfect customers.

Ideally you want to find the intersection between your audience’s interests and your own. You or someone on your team needs to have the interest, knowledge and ideas to keep writing about each category.

When choosing blog categories, think about the body of work you want to build over time. Is there a book in your future? Your blog categories could very well be your book’s chapters. An online course? Your categories might be lessons or segments of that course. White papers and presentations can also be created one blog at a time.

Aim to have 5-7 blog categories that you find interesting and manageable to write about, which also address the concerns of your ideal customers.

How to choose names for your business blog categories

Avoid jargon or industry-specific terms when naming your categories. Remember that your business blog visitors may have varying levels of knowledge and experience with your subject matter.

Also consider doing keyword research, as Doug Kessler explains:

If you use the same language your ideal customers are using, you’re more likely to show up in search engine results when they type in those terms.

Categories and tags can both be helpful for organizing your content and displaying your knowledge base. What can get messy, though, is mixing them up. Be clear about the difference between categories and tags, and have a specific plan for how you will use each on your site.

Use categories for broader topic areas and themes, such as you’d find in a book’s Table of Contents. Think of tags, on the other hand, like the index at the back of the book. Here you can get much more specific with single words and sub-ideas.

You can also use tags to group together related posts, such as all posts in a series.

How to maintain your business blog categories

Once you’ve settled on a list of category names, commit to publishing in each category regularly. When you’re feeling creative, outline a few ideas all at once so you’ll never have to start from scratch.

Charlie Gilkey’s Blog Post Planner and Calendar are helpful for seeing your categories at a glance and making sure you’re achieving an ideal balance.

Your categories don’t have to be set in stone, but please think twice before you add a new category. Ask yourself:

  1. Do you already have a category that’s very similar to this one? For example, Business Tips versus Small Business Tips.
  2. Is this too specific to be a category, and would it be better as a tag?
  3. Will you have other posts to write about this topic in the future, and is it something you know is relevant for your readers? Watch that you’re not using a business blog as a diary to explore your own interests.
  4. Are you using the same capitalization style as your other categories? I recommend title case for categories (capitalizing all major words, along with the first and last word) and lower case for tags.

Above all, ensure every post is assigned a category. Describing a blog post as uncategorized makes your blog seem disorganized.

How to clean up your business blog categories

If you started blogging without a clear plan for topics and categories, you can always make a fresh start with a category clean up. First, take an honest look and answer these questions:

  • Do any of your categories make you cringe because the topics or language are outdated, or because you haven’t posted anything new about the subject in a long time?
  • Have you been adding more and more categories until they’ve become unwieldy, overwhelming, or even meaningless, both for you and your readers?
  • Do your category names accurately reflect the content on your blog? Will the words or phrases mean the same thing to your readers as they do to you?
  • Are your categories tags in disguise? Have you been using categories and tags to serve the same purpose?

Now decide which categories you want to keep, and which of those need more attention. Also decide if there are categories you want to retire, in which case you would re-assign those posts to other categories and remove the category name from your sidebar.

In some cases you may want to change the name of an existing category. Be sure to research how your permanent links will be affected. Is the category name part of the permalink? If so, will links to older posts still work? Consider also whether you’ve ever linked to your category archive page from other posts or pages on your blog.

Check with your website developer to avoid any problems with broken links. If you’re using the self-hosted version of WordPress, you can also try a plugin called Term Management Tools, recommended by WP Beginner.

If you’re about to start or re-start a business blog, download the free Four-Step Business Blogging Plan for help with goals, categories, topics, types of posts, time management, and creating an editorial calendar.