James Cope

I was recently asked to put together a quick presentation on blogging tips for businesses, and thought it might be useful to share my Top 10 Tips for sucessful blogging here.

Why Blog?
To start with perhaps I should cover why should you bother! Well in my opinion Blogs are a great way to engage with visitors who are interested in your subject area, to build your brand, and hopefully convert them to customers at some point.

I started this blog as a way to keep businesses I meet up to date with latest developments. I often will meet business owners only once or twice, but throughout the year there is information that they could benefit from, previously I would have been unable to communicate those.

My top reasons for blogging therefore:

• Quality Content – Inbound Links & Search Engine Love
• Build Reputation – Share Knowledge & Expertise
• Convert Visitors – Garners Trust
• Engage Customers – Product / Service Feedback

That said arguably blogging is not for everyone, if you identify with these reasons more than the above, don’t start, consider outsourcing it:

• You’re Bored – Will you add real value
• It’s all Sell Sell Sell – Will turn people off, damage brand
• Website News is Old – No time?

Hopefully the potential benefits outweigh the extra effort, but if you are in doubt if blogging might work as a route to market get in touch and we can talk the issues through. For those that are here are my top tips…

Top 10 Blogging Tips
Here are my top 10 tips for a successful blog, there no doubt probably more but hopefully these will give you inspiration to get you started.

1. Get Inspired
There is no sense reinventing the wheel, so use assets to your advantage where you can. I don’t mean steal content here but look out for other articles or news, write your own take on the article and include a link back to the original, or write a review on something. (Helps to start a discussion.)

• Interesting articles from Newsletters & Other Blogs
• Constructive response – agree or disagree!
• Write a review
• Link to original, add additional links

2. Attend An Event
Preferably one of my Business Link Events! but attending and blogging your thoughts on it, commenting on the topic, adding your expertise. The same can be said for any seminars, workshops or meetings that are topic related to your area of business and can allow you to build your profile.

• Go to seminars, meetings, events
• Share ideas from the presentation
• Your own thoughts

3. Cheat
Well not literally cheating, but if you find other experts in your field or areas related to your subject why not sub out the work.  This certainly helps with time issues, helping you to blog regularly, and can also add additional expertise to widen the information given. Alternatively you could invite guest writers to feature on the blog demonstrating a community of experts.

• Get someone else to write it
• Outsource to Blog writers
• Guest posters

4. Write How To’s Or Lists
‘How to’ and or ‘How do I / you’ and lists are a couple of the most popular web searches, so capitalise on this and create a guide for your area of interest. Great material for showing off your expertise, adding value, and usually encouraging inbound links from other blogs and sites from experts in your industry.  Icing on the cake would be to create an accompanying video that you can post on your Youtube channel and embed into your post.

• One of the most popular searches
• How to blog or 10 top tips for blogging
• Great for generating good will
• Add video too

5. Pick A Fight
Why not become the Jeremy Clarkson of your industry? Well within reason, but being controversial, having an opinion, being passionate about your subject area, and challenging existing models gives visitors something to get excited about. One strategy might be to look at popular blogs that you disagree with on an issue and having your say. With any luck an inter blog fight will break out and visitors from this blog will visit yours to read more.

I’m not recommending you do this without thinking it through, but if you genuinely have a difference of opinion, try and exploit it professionally and constructively.

• Being controversial – Jeremy Clarkson
• Criticise popular blog
• Blogger responds (hopefully) = traffic to you!

6. Keep Them Wanting More
It’s good to create as much copy as possible, but remember what the purpose of the blog is – to gain customers! So try and think of how each post will contribute to that objective. Will it provide a link to your main site, can you offer a white paper download and collect the email address, can the post stimulate a want or need for your product or service.

You might consider releasing stages of a how to guide, so readers are looking forward to the next post. For example when I wrote the presentation on the topic, out of my Top Ten Blog Tips only 6 were included, for tips 7 – 10 attendees would have to visit here.

• Keep visitors looking forward to next post
• Drive traffic to your main site
• Capture email addresses for give aways
• Don’t give it all away on the blog

7. Cross Promote
Most optimisation professionals will agree that inbound links are a great way to achieve search engine positioning (or am I just being controversial). So why not set up a blog that you can develop as a focal point that has a different look and feel than your main site, is more engaging, is not sales-y and can be a vehicle for a community. You might consider building a strategic alliance with other non competing businesses who cater to the same target customer creating a shared blog that drives quality traffic to the alliances individual websites.

To illustrate this point here’s an example that I’ve used before, my ex colleague David Lakins now of Key Multimedia, uses this to the benefit of his clients. See the Mankymonkey surf blog ,now apart from a mention in the Page Title tag and the odd advert icon, it’s not obvious that this blog is anything other than a surfing blog. The strategy behind it are links from articles in the reviews section to the companies wetsuit shop, and other sections to its surfing kit site .Although at the moment there is not much evidence of many comments on the articles, to some extent that’s irrelevant, it works well to draw in and capture traffic and then drive it to the e-commerce sites.

• cross promote – link information to sale
• team up with non competing businesses

8. Use Visual Elements
I’ve spoken above about using video elements to brighten up posts, Youtube is the second biggest search engine in the UK next to Google, so use this to your advantage. Blog articles don’t have to be all text, look at using images where relevant. If there is something visual that the business has done, post the photos with comments, and perhaps host those on image sites such as flickr

• use video to add interest to posts
• images will brighten up boring text
• hosted images & video will provide inbound links

9. Evolve Consumers To Prosumers
A side effect of some blogs  has been to turn some customers into the businesses development team. Now businesses actively seek the interactivity, by encouraging feedback on products or services. Running articles on new developments in production you can get customer feedback quickly and can help shape the product before it reaches the launch stage. Famous example of this being Dell’s now brightly coloured laptops and laptops running Linux, all developments thanks to interaction through the companies blogs.

• seek customer involvement
• expand your product development team

10. Ask A Question
Have I forgotten anything? Are there any blog tips or tricks that I’ve missed that you find work well?

This tip features last as it really only works if you’ve got an active readership, but once you have it is a great technique for debating, encouraging opinions and giving you chance to demonstrate your knowledge. So if you would like to comment on this post feel free!

• Ask a question
• Post a problem
• Conduct a poll

Hopefully these tips will have given some inspiration to develop your own blogs, using tools like Wordpress or Blogger

If you are a South East based business please get in touch if you would like to discuss in more detail.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 9:13 pm and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.