Phil Kelsey

Now that I have tackled why you should blog for your business, I want to address the “how?”. Lack of ideas on what to write about is a challenge that businesses may face.

Last year at the Lincolnshire Marketing Expo, I did a joint presentation about the effectiveness of combining your online and offline marketing methods. I talked about blogging as a means of building credibility, trust and recognition, then suggested to write at least one informative article a week. One response from the audience was “Who has time to do one a week?”

I strongly believe that if you know what you’re going to talk about, then you can write 500 words in 35 minutes, which is only 1.25% of a 40hr week.

Here are five of the techniques I use to gather ideas. Just one of them will keep you busy, but all of them will give you a great action plan for you or your team.

Take note of other blogs

What topics are other blogs in your industry talking about? Which ones are getting the most comments and social engagement? This will highlight the trends and hot topics. Also, read the comments. You’re looking for additional questions to see what else people want to read or learn about.

Recent client questions

Write down the common questions you get asked during consultations, telephone enquiries or from current clients. Can you create a simple step by step guide or explanation that can be printed and used away from your website?

Your opinion of recent affairs

Has something quite complicated happened within your industry that you want to put across in simple words for your customers? Or has a new technology or product just been launched that you want to review?

Use the table of content in eBooks

Look for the best-selling eBook around a specific topic and use the table of contents for ideas. Don’t copy any of the eBook content (that’s lazy!), you’re simply looking for things to write about to put your opinion across. You could even buy and review the book!

Look in forums and discussion groups

Places like the UK Business Forum or LinkedIn discussion groups are a great way to get ideas of the latest questions people are asking or wanting help with.

Hopefully, the above has given you enough to get going and be consistent with. Please make sure you do not copy anyone’s content — not even a sentence. Make everything you write your own, and inject your own personality and wit into it. Search engines don’t like duplicate content and it will hurt your overall search performance.

Marketing experts will advise you that blogging for your business will help you humanise your brand and engage with customers. SEO consultants like me recommend it too.

Before I start, I want to say this: there are businesses out there that have never had to invest in search engine marketing because their website naturally brings traffic as a result of consistently publishing new blog posts about topics that interest them and their market.

With that in mind, here are five strong reasons that businesses can relate to and hopefully encourage your company to start blogging for itself more often.

1. Naturally attract more search traffic, by accident

A general rule of thumb is the more pages with quality content you have, the more natural search visits you will receive. A reason for this is because each article will be unique and naturally include phrases that your prospects may type in when they need some information. If the phrase they use only correctly appears on your article, then the search engines should recommend your page in a strong position.

2. Strategically attract more search traffic

The above point covers those who just hop on and start writing. However if you use keyword research techniques then you can strategically place phrases that actually have traffic but very little matched results. To check this, find some keywords using the Google keyword tool and then type your target phrase into the Google search box and wrap the phrase within inverted commas, like so; “how to remortgage to release equity”. You can see that Google has highlighted when the exact phrase is mentioned and if you use their page preview button you can glance at the quality of the content/page.

Look at this example, it’s a very poor page and only briefly mentions the phrase. Imagine what you could do with 500 words around this topic with some cool info graphics embedded.

3. It allows you to demonstrates your expertise

I think this speaks for itself.  Imagine all the people who visit your website before they decide to give you a call. If as well as a quality service page, they see a range of articles around like-minded topics that is a mixture of how to articles, your opinion on recent industry news, or just more detail about what you do – that prospect will have a stronger opinion of your business which may result in more conversions (like phone calls).

4. It triggers social engagement and starts a community

Write your blog posts in a way that urges a response from the reader. Whether it’s a comment saying “this is the most informative and easy to follow piece I’ve read on this topic” or “I’m not quite sure I agree with something you said, I feel that … “ both are giving you and opportunity to reach out and interact with like-minded people. You may even get more social shares out of it, or even be asked to start guest writing for other blogs – what a result that would be for your brand!

5. Provides a home base for all your marketing

With an effective blog, you always have a space to bring people back to no matter what marketing methods you’re using. Whether it’s a link within a press release to an infographic or a video presentation, or simply a list of recent topics for your newsletters – there will always be an online door for someone to walk through.

How to get started:

The most recognised blog platform is WordPress. It’s quick to set up and there are thousands of free themes that can quickly be modified to suit your needs and corporate brand. Remember, the whole point of my articles is to help you become more self-sufficient with your online marketing so I strongly recommend reading this article from WebHostingBuzz about how to set up a WordPress blog in 5 Minutes.