As most of my clients know, I am a great proponent of business blogs. They give a company an opportunity to show its ‘personaility’ and can give a strong boost to search engine visibility.
However too may neglect to think about what their target audience want to read or the questions they are trying to answer.
A recent article on econsultancy.com came up with five powerful questions. By answering these, you can benefit your readers and your business.
1. Why should I buy from you?
So obvious, its often forgotten. Think about the questions clients often ask in a face-to-face meeting and start answering those.
Use examples and case studies to give credibility to the answers.
These posts can really help search visibility as people are likely to be searching for answers to those same questions online.
2. How Much Do You Know?
Demonstrate your breadth of industry knowledge and expertise by discussing projects, issues, new developments and techniques, etc
And look outside the business as well as inside.
3. What Do You Think?
Blogs are an opportunity to bare the soul by expressing considered opinion of industry-related topics.
Reviewing and commenting on recent relevant news articles can be a good starting point for this type of blog post.
4. What’s To Come?
Make some predictions. It demonstrates you have a broad understanding of your marketplace and the future is always a great topic of conversation.
And you can then review your predictions in 12 months time in another blog post.
5. What Else Do You Do?
While it is important for corporate blogs to stay ‘on topic’, it can be interesting for the readers if occasional posts diverge.
They could be about parts of the company operating in different market sectors, it could be a personal story e.g. the next charity challenge.
In summary, think about the questions that are already in the heads of your target readers. Answering those will help to make your blog more interesting and popular, it will be a valuable asset for the business.