If you’ve blogged for any length of time, you’ve no doubt come up against the dreaded blank page blues. Unfortunately, it’s not a self-curing condition. No, the first time you give in to it generally becomes the last time you demonstrated any commitment to business blogging at all.
First you wonder what to say. Then you wonder if anyone cares. Finally you wonder if anything you say will make any difference to anyone anyway. After all, the Internet is FULL of blogs! And my inbox is FULL of email newsletters that never get read! What’s the point?
Depressed yet? Don’t be. The Internet is not your audience. Thankfully, you’re not your audience either. Let’s change our perspective a tiny bit and look at your blog with fresh eyes.
First off, what can business blogging accomplish?
- Help your existing customers solve a problem.
- Help potential customers solve a problem, thereby positioning yourself as a trusted resource.
- Educate existing customers about new products and services.
- Introduce potential buyers in your local area to your products and services.
- Endorse and recommend products that you have experience with through affiliate links, potentially creating a new income stream.
- Endorse and recommend other people and businesses to your customer base because they provide a service your audience could benefit from.
- Direct readers to relevant pages within your site by linking to them, which improves your website’s SEO while serving your reader.
- What would you add to this list?
What would you like your blog to accomplish?
This question is worthy of some thought. As I said in a previous post about content marketing, think beyond what you want out of the exchange. Yes, your blog should and will drive leads to your business, but how will your blog serve your audience? This becomes your goal.
Now make it a SMART goal – specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and within a time frame.
Need an example? Here’s one of my goals for this Inside Line Blog:
“My blog helps me to network with other professionals on topics also useful to my customers: SEO, website architecture, manufacturing marketing and service business marketing for b2b and b2c, sustainability. Blog posts emphasize working together, highlighting the accomplishments of others as they relate to happy customers. They answer the question of how we work. I personally blog once per month at a minimum, and also re-blog and feature other professionals with useful messages to my network. My blog posts weekly beginning this week.”
Who is Your Audience?
You might call this an avatar or persona. Figure out who your ideal reader is and write to that one reader. Here’s another example. Maybe I’m being too transparent, but this is the reader I want to attract:
“Our ideal reader is a marketing director of a manufacturing company or a service business owner. This person is seeking ideas, strategies and tactics for better ways to present products or services to the marketplace. By better, I mean easier, cost efficiently, broader reaching. He / she is interested in marketing, self-development, business growth, travel, reading, social media, and is between the ages of 40-60.”
Go through these exercises yourself the next time you’re staring at a blank page, wondering what to write about and if anybody cares. You’re likely to notice that you DO have something to say after all.
If you’ve found this post useful, would you do me a huge favor and complete a short, four question reader survey? Thank you!
