There’s an old saying, “If one person tells you that you have a tail, then you can usually ignore it. If two people tell you that you have a tail, then you might begin to wonder a little bit. And if three people tell you that you have a tail, you should go find a mirror right away and check.”
I have a tail. It’s Thursday morning as I write this, and so far this week, three different prospects asked why their company should have a blog.
That’s interesting, because a year ago, many of these same companies would have asked “What’s a blog?” Now it’s, “Why should we have one?”
Blogging is the key to engaging your prospects
Blogging is an excellent business tool. It engages and educates your audience, it drives website traffic, generates new business leads, keeps customers informed, it’s very easy to do, multiple people in your company can do it, and blogging is basically free!
However, these results from blogging will only come if you are committed. Too many times I find a website with good design and engaging content, only to find that they stopped adding content to their blog six months ago!
Your blog serves to educate and nurture your readers, thereby building trust for your company or for your products and services. Blogging works well for $1M software products, or a pizzeria. The key is consistency. I recommend to all my clients that they blog every Tuesday and Thursday. This is frequent enough to increase your ranking in Google and the other search engines.
Why these two days? Simply because it’s easy to remember. I used to say “Blog twice a week”, and then later in the conversation, I’d get asked “How often do we have to do this to be successful?” So now I say, “Blog on Tuesday and Thursday — EVERY week.”
Continually and consistently adding blog posts means you are continually adding pages to your website. Each page can be seen as another reason why someone would come to your site, and why the search engines would increase the authority of your site.
What do I blog about?
Remember, the idea is to engage and educate your web visitors. Blog about a new company announcement. Blog about a new product release. Create a short video explaining how to select among your various families of products. Write a how-to article. Share a list of things to avoid. Relate your content to a current event. For more ideas, see Hubspot’s “100 Inbound Marketing Content Ideas”.
Here’s a simple way to start blogging. Pull together some of your salespeople and come up with a list of 23 questions that they get asked all the time. Then divide up these questions among the salespeople or your staff, and asked each person to write about 400 words in an answer to each of their questions. They can do this in Word.
Pulling together those 23 question/answers, you now have your Tuesday content for almost 6 months! In fact, most blogging software allows you to create a post and publish it in the future. So have someone spell check the 23 answers you received (please!), and enter them into your blogging software, scheduling them to be published once a week on Tuesday for the next six months. See, this isn’t so bad!
Now use your Thursdays to blog about something else. 🙂 And remember, you can write it any time before Thursday… even weeks ahead. Just make sure you have every Thursday covered.
Get started blogging now!
Is there more to blogging? Of course. We should talk about how to select the title of your block, SEO, headlines, photos, using video, etc. But all that can come later. Start blogging now! You can always update an old post, or address the same topic again from a different angle.
Want to know effective your blog is compared to your competitors? Simply fill out the form for a free, no-obligation, 30-day test drive and we’ll show you!
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