Category Archives: Blogging

Anatomy of a Blog Post – How to Get More Readers and More Business

As business blogging becomes more popular how do you make your posts stand out from the crowd? And how do you create the sort of loyal following that will make your blogging efforts worthwhile? As with most things in content marketing there are no hard and fast rules – but there are a few points on the anatomy of a blog post that you can follow to help you enjoy greater success.

Searching for interesting content

Good titles are hard to write

Do you find it easy to write titles for your blog posts?. If you do, you’re not trying hard enough. Think about what you are trying to achieve: a succinct few words of copy that tell people ‘this is relevant to you, here’s why you need to read it, you’re going to be entertained, informed and stimulated.’ The more you know about your audience and the things that will grab their attention, the easier this becomes – but it never becomes easy.

Think how many links you see posted in LinkedIn, Twitter etc that you decide to ignore; too dull, too salesy? With so much content to choose from you need a good feeling that clicking through is going to be worthwhile. ‘Why would somebody click on this?’ is the question to ask. If you can’t find a good answer, you haven’t found your title.

A couple of years ago the advice might have been to start with ‘How to…’ or use the ’6 Reasons your Blog Sucks’ approach. But now everyone does it. ‘Eight ways to…’ etc has become an easy way our for lazy copywriters, so this approach, on it’s own, won’t make your content stand out. It’s still better than ‘Here’s My Latest Blog Post’, however.

Make it Easy on the Eye

Short paragraphs and plenty of sub-headings. That’s it really. Make sub-headings a bit intriguing if you can, and think about the words that will catch the eye of your target reader and make them stick with your content.

Always Use Pictures

People like a bit of visual stimulation. Pictures make your content more approachable and less intimidating than just having words. Try to go for something a bit off-beat. People are curious – a slightly unresolved connection between the main image and the title can encourage people to read on. Pictures can also provide a visual reinforcement of the point you want to make. Your articles should stimulate people’s minds – images are are great way to add to the experience.

Blog articles are tending to get longer as readers are looking for more depth. Your posts may need 2 or even 3 images if they are running to 800+ words, which is becoming increasingly normal.

If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog I recommend the Compfight plug-in which has a huge searchable repository of free photos. It also pulls in the credit to the image owner automatically. Never lift images from the net without being sure it’s OK to use them.

Why Are You Blogging?

What do you want to achieve and what do you want people to do as a result of reading your content? Objectives for a piece could include getting more subscribers, linking to a particular service or special offer, or might be just maintaining awareness of your brand. Always know what this is.

Have Something to Say

We talked about the importance of the head when we looked at titles. The heart matters too! Where are your passions and beliefs? We are not short of information so you need to provide an interesting and unique viewpoint. Be prepared to be controversial and to be disagreed with – it’s better than being ignored! I produced an article recently on giving your blog a personality if you want to read a bit more about this.

Don’t worry if not everyone agrees with you

Think About the Search Engines

You want as many relevant people as possible to find your content. You need to understand who these people are and the sorts of things they are going to search for. Your blogging strategy must be part of your SEO strategy and your search objectives and keywords should be helping you direct your blogging. Again, if you’re using WordPress, use an SEO plug-in so that you optimise every post. This one from Yoast is really powerful and simple to use: SEO plug- in.

And the Circulation?

As blood flows through the body there needs to be a coherent thought process flowing through your articles. People like a story. A good blog article will often have an issue or a question that gets progressively resolved in an enlightening way. Do you use analogies, anecdotes and topical issues to illustrate the points you want to make and provide a narrative structure?

If you do it well, blogging is an incredibly powerful way to drive targeted traffic to your website, build trust and reduce the effort you have to put into traditional selling. Hopefully you’ll have a few ideas from this article about how to improve your blog articles and achieve better results. Sign up for my regular newsletters or follow me using the social sharing buttons below to make sure you get future updates.

Richard Hussey, Copywriter and Content Marketing Specialist, South West

Email me on richard@rshcopywriting.co.uk or call 01823 674167

Mike Licht via Compfight Gabor Dvornik via Compfight Daniela Vladimirova via Compfight

Uses for an Old Blog Post – Get More Value from Business Blogging

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Writing a good blog post takes time and effort. Identifying a relevant message, framing it in a way that resonates with your audience, making it interesting and entertaining – this all needs work. What a shame then if you only ever use that post once. Here’s a few thoughts on how you can get more value from this hard work.

Nick Wheeler via Compfight

I’m assuming that you are already making full use of social media tools to distribute your content, and that you’ve identified the networks that the people you want to engage with are using. This is not an article about how you link your business blogging activity to social media, I want to focus on different ways that you can use the stock of content that you’ve built up.

Business blogging – don’t be a one-hit wonder

The simplest thing you can do is go back through your posts, find ones that are still relevant and repost them on your social media networks. You should be continuously growing your network of connections, online and through networking. You may also have found some new discussion groups on LinkedIn or Google+. If your post is a few months old there should be plenty of people new to your network who may have missed the content first time around – why deprive them of the experience?

Think before you re-post

Being in business should be a learning experience. We learn more about what our customers need and we continue to think of new ways to apply our expertise or products. New ways of doing things, new technology – all of these affect how we think about what we do. But our core purpose and the value we bring to our customers rarely changes at a fundamental level. Your older blog posts should continue to carry a strong and relevant message about the value you offer – but may need updating with a fresh insight. But you don’t have to start from scratch for every post. If you have good existing content go and ‘mine and refine.’

Email Marketing

Not all of your connections will be glued to social media networks 24/7. So it’s possible that they may miss your posts linking to your content. Include summaries of your blog articles in email marketing with links to the full content. If people have opted in to your email list it’s because they are interested in what you have to say.

Queries and follow-up

Sometimes your blog post can answer a question posed on social media forums. If your content is relevant, answer the question and provide a link. A word of caution though: make sure it IS relevant and it doesn’t look like you’re being opportunist or doing a bit of cheap link-building. Also, use blog posts to follow up conversations with people you meet at networking events. If you have built your content around things that matter to your target customers there should be plenty of opportunities to use it as part of your follow up.

Turn it into something else

People like to receive information in different ways. Think about whether your article can be turned into a presentation and posted on Slideshare. If you can find some engaging visuals, your blog post might form the basis of a video script. If you have a series of related, good quality articles you might have the basis of a valuable e-book, You can use the e-book as a way of getting more online contacts and email sign-ups to replenish your sales pipeline.

That’s just a few suggestions for getting more value from your business blogging. As always, these will only work if your content is well produced and based on the things your customers care about.

Richard Hussey

I’m a copywriter based in the South West. Call me on 01823 674167 or use the contact tab to find out how written content can boost your b2b marketing.

Want New Customers? Be Interested

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With any marketing (and content marketing in particular) keep one thought at the front of your mind: your audience has complete freedom over whether or not to engage with your content. If there’s no reason for them to read what you produce, and no benefit to them, they have plenty of other things to be doing.

Content marketing – how good are you at listening?

Kit via Compfight

So, how to be interesting? Step one – be interested.

People who talk a lot often think themselves very interesting – they have lots of useful insights they want to share with the world; and everybody else is, of course, hanging on their every word. Or so they think.

Genuinely interesting people spend as much time listening as they do talking. They take the trouble to understand who they are talking to, frame information according to their perspective and pitch it at the right level. If you want a non-marketing example think Professor Brian Cox.

If ‘content is king’ in online marketing, then being interesting is the power behind the throne. The purpose of content marketing is to publish useful content to build a following, get opt-ins to your email list and expand your influence and trust. Producing content that does all of this means working harder than ever to understand your customers: their interests, challenges and ambitions.

Using Social Media

Social media tools offer a great opportunity to deepen your understanding of your target customers. I read a lot of discussion threads related to online marketing. Sometimes this is to benefit from the insights of experts but often it is to see how non-specialists react to the content and the discussion. If I understand the aspects of content marketing that seem unclear or challenging then I have a much better chance of publishing things that people will want to read and will find valuable.

The same applies with networking. Interacting with other businesses helps you see the world through their eyes. It helps you configure your content and your offer in the way that adds maximum value. But this only works if you treat networking as an opportunity to learn rather than just to sell.

Is Your Business a Good Listener?

Now you might be thinking that businesses are always listening to their customers: ‘That’s how we make sure we are delivering what people need’. All I’ll say to that is hand dryers.

Not listening – possibly two examples in one picture.

D’oh Boy (Mark Holloway) via Compfight

For many years, if the makers of hand dryers had been interested in users’ experiences and views they would have found out that they were usually too slow, not effective and in many cases just didn’t do the job they were supposed to do. And then Dyson came along, invented something that worked and, magically, the companies who used to make crap hand dryers are now also able to make dryers that actually dry your hands. So maybe as businesses we are not as good at being interested as we like to think.

So, If you’re stuck for a subject for your next blog article or infographic, don’t ask around the office for inspiration, pick up the phone and talk to a customer, or go to a networking meeting.

How about you? Have you got any tips for finding inspiration for marketing content that you’d like to share?

Richard Hussey

I help smaller businesses achieve growth through engaging written content.

Find out more: content marketing services

Content Marketing – Finding the High Value Sweet Spot

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Effective content marketing needs a focus. With the right focus and sense of direction, finding suitable topics for blog articles, infograpics, videos, slideshares and so on should never be a challenge. The formula is relatively simple to understand. In fact here’s the simplest of diagrams to illustrate:

But, while the concept is simple, making it work still needs research, mental effort and planning.

The green circle above represents your side of the content marketing equation and the blue side represents the people you want to engage. You could call the bit in the middle ‘Value’. Put simply, what you have to offer only has value when it overlaps with what a potential customer needs. That’s the area where you need to focus your content.

Looking first at the ‘you’ side of the diagram, the products and services aspect is, in theory, the easiest bit to understand. It’s also the most common bit to misunderstand. Your services can be a context for your content, but shouldn’t be the subject.

Here’s an example to illustrate. One of my clients provides web-based software applications for a range of businesses. We never publish articles that just talk about how great their software is. We always focus on an issue or challenge that businesses face, these, of course, happen to be the sort of issues that their software is really good at overcoming. The primary objective is to get businesses to think a bit more deeply about how the processes and systems they use are affecting their business performance.

Knowledge and Experience

There’s a similar argument with both knowledge and experience. Your content is an opportunity to reinforce (subtly) that you have relevant knowledge and experience to address the things in the ‘customer’ circle above.

Of all the words in the green circle ‘beliefs’ is probably the most interesting. As a business, what do you care about? What makes you do what you do in the way you do it?

These last 3 elements: knowledge, experience and beliefs, are what will give your blog and other content a distinctive and engaging personality. This will make you stand out from all the other content that just passes on information without getting people to stop and think. Have a look here if you want to know more about business blogging with personality.

Content Marketing – Customer Needs

Apologies for not starting this article by focusing on the customer (won’t happen again, I promise), but I thought it was helpful to look at your side of the equation first on this occasion. Naturally, the starting point for your content strategy has to be the customers you want to win.

For all of us in business, the two most precious commodities are cash and time. Successful business people don’t part with either readily, and without getting something back. If you want people to spend some of their valuable time reading your content you have to be helping them with at least one of the words in the blue circle: objectives, needs, issues and challenges.

Your content strategy needs to be based on a thorough understanding of your target customers, what they want to achieve, what they are struggling with, and how what you do helps overcome those issues. You need to spend time researching, discussing and documenting this before you start producing content. Often, it’s helpful to include somebody external in this process to get a more objective view.

This analysis of customer needs and how your offer addresses them also pays off with the identification of relevant keywords for internet searches. Somebody looking for a particular solution ends up finding your excellently produced and highly relevant content through Google – think about that.

How Many Circles?

In reality most businesses will have a number of different types of customer they are targeting: different sectors, different sizes and so on. A more accurate diagram would have several customer circles and different areas where your services, knowledge and experience overlap. So you need to segment your targets in a meaningful way and carry out this analysis for each group.

This may seem a bit more effort than what you are currently doing but I can promise you it’s worth it. The prize on offer is the capability to publish content that people will actually want, value and engage with.

Richard Hussey, RSH Copywriting

I run a copywriting and content marketing business in South West England. Find out more about how I can help you win more customers: Content Marketing Services, Devon

Websites, Content and Social Media – the B2B Online Marketing Jigsaw

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There are many parts to your B2B online marketing jigsaw. And like any other jigsaw, if you look at one piece in isolation it can be hard to make sense of it. To know where it fits you need to have the bigger picture.

Online marketing – wondering where the pieces fit?

Horia Varlan via Compfight

This seems to be one of the commonest difficulties people have with online and content marketing; people will pick up a single piece, like blogging or Twitter, for example, and try to work out what they need to do with it, without understanding how it fits with their overall approach. So, let’s tip out your B2B online marketing jigsaw box and see what pieces we have.

Actually, before we tip out the pieces, we’d better have a good look at the lid. This is the picture we’re trying to construct. The purpose of marketing is to understand your market, to work out ways of providing what that market wants, and to promote your solutions. Too many companies focus their marketing, particularly their online marketing, almost exclusively on the third of these elements. The big picture of your B2B online marketing should take all of these into consideration.

Piece 1 – Your Website

For most businesses a website will be a central feature of their online marketing. There are plenty of options for getting this set up and the one you choose will depend on a number of factors:

Budget
Your IT skills
Your design skills

If you are setting up your business and need some ideas on how to get a website set up, have a look HERE.

However you set it up, your website will probably be the foundation of your online marketing. It is the one place where somebody can find all of your products and services, your business philosophy, your key marketing messages, testimonials and your contact details. Serious business customers will make a judgement about you based on how your website looks and what it says. The main priorities are to have content which connects with your audience and helps them find what they need.

There’s usually no problem with convincing a business that they need a website. It seems to be a standard feature of the business set up check-list. The biggest danger with the check-list state of mind is that a website can become mainly informational – without businesses thinking through the precise role that they want it to play in generating more sales.

Piece 2 – Your Blog

While the need for a website seems obvious, blogging in B2B online marketing can be more of a puzzle. Through blogging you are trying to demonstrate that you have something interesting to say about the things your customers care about. Through your blogging strategy you are seeking to build awareness of your capabilities and build trust in your organisation. With each post you are progressively building your profile as people who have the experience, understanding and skills to deliver the solutions your target customers are looking for.

B2B purchase decisions are rarely ‘spur of the moment’. Businesses take time to weigh up potential suppliers before deciding where to spend their money. Through skilful blogging, which isn’t trying to sell, you will be building relationships with potential customers well in advance of the purchase decision. You even have an opportunity to influence the customer’s decision about what it is they need. On the other hand, you could always just hope that your sales brochure turns up on their desk at exactly the right moment.

The secret is to write something that they will want to read – which means writing it from their perspective rather than yours.

Piece 3 – SEO and B2B Online Marketing

Understand your target market and understand the things they type into Google. Once you understand this you can include the most relevant keywords in your content to ensure it gets found by the people you want to find it. Another powerful reason for blogging is that you can create content optimised for a wider range of more specific searches than you could with just a brochure website. The purpose of B2B online marketing is to use the internet to reach a wider range of potential customers than you could through traditional marketing. Incorporating the most effective keywords into your content is essential – do you know what yours are?

Your web developer should help you with the SEO on your site and a copywriter certainly will when they produce the content. If you use WordPress for your blog and/or your website, install a good all-in-one SEO plug-in.

A Whole Load of Pieces Called Social Media

The nature of your business and the people you are trying to reach will determine the social media tools you use. LinkedIn is often the easiest to grasp in B2B as it seems a natural extension of face-to-face networking. I also recommend Twitter, which can be harder to grasp but very powerful when you get it right.

Whatever tools you use: Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, Google+, etc etc, just remember the focus is on engagement, not on selling. Social media tools can help a wider range of people find your content. You can also use carefully curated content from other experts to demonstrate that you understand the needs of your audience. Social networks are also a great place to deepen your understanding of what the market needs.

And a Load of Other Pieces Called Content

I focused on blogging above but there are many content alternatives: video, slideshares, infographics, photos. The same rules apply though: it’s about building awareness, engagement and winning trust; it’s not about pumping out sales messages. You can also use specific pieces of content (eg white papers, e-books) to collect contact details that you can use in targeted email marketing: better to send your emails to people who have shown an interest rather than a list you bought somewhere.

So, if you’re struggling to understand how to get results from a particular aspect of content marketing, try looking at it in the context of the bigger picture: how you understand what your customers want and how you make them aware that you are the people they can trust to deliver the solution.

Richard Hussey

I’m a copywriter and content marketing specialist based in South West England. Call me on 01823 674167 to see how I can help you win more business. Click on the ‘Follow’ tab to have future posts delivered straight to your inbox.

See more: content marketing South West

Does Your Business Blog Have an Identity Crisis?

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The best business blogs are not necessarily the most grammatically perfect and may not even be the ones with the most finely-honed copywriting. The critical factor is having a distinct identity and a personality. As more businesses take up blogging, how will yours stand out from the crowd – with the distinct identity you need to build a loyal readership? By identity I don’t mean how your blog looks, but what it has to say.

Originality is the key to effective business blogging

Nick Wheeler via Compfight

The proliferation of business blogs means that we’re not short of information sources. For pretty well any business topic, whether it’s marketing, finance, IT, HR or PR, you’ll find plenty of words of explanation on any number of blog sites. Yes, people want to be informed, but getting people to engage fully and regularly with your blog needs more than just informational content.

Business Blogs Need Personality

So what makes a successful blog site? One that people will subscribe to and one where they’ll make the effort to click on a link that pops up in Twitter or LinkedIn feeds? The ‘personality’ of your blog is critical.

The personality of your blog is partly to do with the writing style: friendly, easy to read content always wins over self-important and preachy stuff. This isn’t always easy for people to do but there are plenty of copywriters who can turn your thoughts into readable copy if that’s not your thing. Most importantly, it’s what you have to say and how that resonates with your audience.

A major reason for business blogs failing to generate a return on the time and effort that goes into creating them, is that businesses don’t work out their key messages: the fundamental views and values that underpin their blogging strategy. Once you understand these it’s much easier to identify the topics that you need to blog about and what you want those blog articles to say. Without these fundamentals you’re likely to end up just posting more information into a crowded space in the hope of establishing some kind of on-line presence.

Insight and Originality

Factual and informative articles are fine but they don’t engage. What your audience is looking for is your personal take on the subject. Rather than just describe something, think about the implications for your customers; pose some additional, relevant questions that they might not have thought about. Aim to help your audience develop their understanding. Be thought-provoking and even controversial if the situation calls for it. Above all, add your personal insight to every topic.

I have a feeling that one reason so many blogs fail to establish an identity is that the authors aren’t clear about who they are writing for. Business blogs should always be planned and written with a defined audience in mind. If you understand who you are writing for you can work out the following:

the subjects they’re really going to be interested in
how those subjects relate to their lives or businesses

The key is understanding not just whether they will be interested but why they will be interested.

Good blogging is about interpretation and analysis rather than just passing on information. You don’t want your blog to be like the boring bloke down the pub who knows lots of things but has nothing interesting or original to say about any of them.

Business Blogs: Give Them a Reason to Return

People have a reason to come back to your blog if you’ve helped them think a bit more deeply about something. Develop their thinking and level of understanding and they’ll decide that it’s worth paying a return visit. But if you just give them the same information they could get on a dozen other sites, they might try one of those next time.

RIchard Hussey is the founder of RSH Copywriting, Devon. Copywriting, web content and content marketing for SMEs in the South West. Call me on 01823 674167.

See more: copywriter Devon

Blogging for Business Part 4 – Putting the HASSLE into Blogging

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If you’ve followed the first 3 parts of this series you will have set up your blogging site with all the tools for sharing, SEO and analysing your traffic. You’ll also have a list of great ideas for blog topics. Now you need to start writing. But what are the secrets to creating something that people will look forward to reading?

So, you’ve set up your blog – what now?

Martin Gommel via Compfight

If you think blogging is a hassle, let’s work with that thought. All copywriters love acronyms so here goes with HASSLE.

H – Headlines

It is impossible to overstate the importance of a headline in any piece of marketing copy. When you post your article to social media sites or email it to your customers and prospects, the headline will determine whether they click on the rest of the article. Aim for something that makes it clear that they should be interested, but also something slightly intriguing. Posing questions can work well, as long as it’s not something that people can answer with a simple yes or no.

‘List’ headings are a common ploy: ’5 reasons why you should be blogging’, ’10 mistakes that new bloggers make’, and so on. These work, but try not to overdo it as they are becoming very commonplace.

Often, I write headlines last. Sometimes they come in flash of inspiration and sometimes I sweat over them. Give them the effort and attention they deserve or your content may never get noticed.

You should also use your analytics data to see whether there are particular styles of headline that your readers prefer.

A – Angle or Approach

Every time you write a blog you will have a point that you want to get across. However, just stating that point does nothing to engage an audience or get them to think about how it might apply to them. You need an ‘angle’.

An example: I was writing a blog post recently on how to deliver better PowerPoint presentations. I could have just listed a whole load of do’s and don’ts and made the whole thing very preachy. Instead I started it by talking about using PowerPoint as a cure for insomnia. What I wanted was for people to be intrigued and to start thinking more about their own presentation style, wondering whether they are sending people to sleep rather than getting them to hang on every word.

Try to come at subjects from a slightly different angle. One that draws people in and makes them think about things in a different way.

S – Style

Something strange happens to people when you put a pen in their hand or sit them in front of a keyboard. They seem to be transported back to the classroom and start writing in a formal school essay style. A ‘natural’ writing style, perversely, doesn’t come naturally.

Here are my tips for sounding more natural:

Forget about grammar. People want blogs that are informal and easy to read. If anyone is sitting there marking your work out of 10 for grammar, they are probably people you don’t want to be around anyway.
When you’ve written something, ask yourself whether you would phrase it that way if you were speaking the words. If not, change them to what you would actually say.
Try dictating rather than writing.
If all that fails hire a copywriter to edit your words.

S – Story

Stories are important and are closely related to the point about angles and approaches above. For example, find topical issues as a way of introducing and illustrating the points you want to make. Stories about customers you have helped will naturally give similar customers something they can relate to. People like to read a story rather than a sermon.

L-Links

It’s always a good idea to plan the links that you want to put in a blog article. You might want to direct attention to other things you have written to achieve deeper engagement, or you might want to direct people to specific pages on your website. Links give you the opportunity to direct people to other places once you’ve grabbed their attention with your article. Links also mean that you can use carefully chosen anchor text to help your SEO.

L could also have been for length. Think about your poor readers and don’t expect them to read a 2000 word blog, unless it truly is fascinating and indispensable. Once I get past 700 words I start to wonder whether I should be splitting the content into two posts.

E – Engagement

This is the point of it all. Blogging is all about engaging an audience so always ask yourself the question: Would this engage me and make me want to find out more?

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series of articles and they’ve inspired you to give blogging a try. It might seem daunting at first but it really does get easier and more natural over time. I publish regular articles on blogging and content writing so sign up to my newsletter on my home page to stay in touch.

Richard Hussey

I am the founder of RSH Copywriting and support businesses in the South West to use written content to win new business.

Blogging for Business Part 1

Blogging for Business Part 2

Blogging for Business Part 3

Blogging for Business Part 3 – Planning Your Content

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When I’m talking to people about starting a business blog one of the most common barriers people put up is ‘I don’t know what I can write about – my business isn’t interesting enough to generate regular new content.’ I’ve yet to find a business where this was true and for which blogging couldn’t be done effectively.

Effective blogging is about finding engaging messages

Procsilas Moscas via Compfight

There’s a group of people out there who will be interested in what you do, they’re called customers. If they weren’t interested in what you do they wouldn’t be your customers. And there are other people who have similar interests to your customers but are not yet doing business with you. The first step towards a blogging plan is to look at your blog from these people’s perspective, rather than from an internal viewpoint.

It’s easy to become focused on this internal perspective. We naturally devote a lot of energy into thinking about how to do things better and day to day problem solving. You can lose sight of the things that you already know that other people would find useful and on the beneficial effects of what you do on other people’s lives or businesses.

So here are a few steps you can go through to help develop your blogging plan.

1. Identify your blogging targets

It’s unlikely that your target audience will be homogeneous. In most cases you can break your customers down by size or business sector, for example. It’s important to do this as the issues and challenges they face will differ. The more you can refine the picture of what your customers ‘look like’, the more you will be able to target content specifically at each sub group.

Think carefully too about the bits of your business that you really want to grow. You only have so much time to create and publish content, so make sure you focus on products or services that have a profitable future and on the people who are likely to have enough money to buy them.

2. Think about their issues and challenges

For each group of customers you identify, make a list of issues and challenges that they face. What’s going to be keeping them awake at night? Then write down alongside each of these points the ways in which what you do helps overcome those issues and challenges.

3. Themes and key messages

Having identified your audience, what matters to them, and how you can help, you are well on the way to a content plan. By this stage loads of potential blog topics are usually popping into your mind. But before you start writing it’s also worth thinking about some overarching messages; these may be specific to each group of customers. Think of it as an overall impression you want to convey through your content. Here are some examples:

We can make their life simpler

We can help them be more efficient

We can help them get more business

You should also consider the specific values that you have in your business. Is your marketing based on the customer service you offer, price, specialist knowledge, skills, or is your approach to business in some way unique? It’s worth documenting these values as a reminder that you want to reinforce them with each new piece of content.

4. Who and when

Having been through the above processes you should have a list of blog articles that you intend to publish. At this stage it will probably just be a list of topics, themes and messages for each customer group. Now comes the slightly dull but absolutely crucial bit. You need to plan when each article will be published and who is going to produce it. As a minimum you want to be clear about what you will be putting out over the next 3-6 months.

The plan doesn’t need to be elaborate (in fact it’s often a case of the simpler the better), but it needs to be a plan. Blogging should be an important element of your marketing mix and you need some structure to avoid it being overwhelmed by more urgent issues.

The plan should also include time to review the effectiveness of the blogging strategy. I’ll say more about how you can use analytics to improve the results you get from blogging in a later article.

5. Spread the word

The other feature in your plan should be to identify the networks you will use to disseminate your articles. If it’s LinkedIn, think about the specific discussion groups that would be most relevant. You also want to consider whether the blogs and social media posting will be from the company or from an individual. Above all, be clear about who will be posting the articles and where they will go.

6. And finally, be flexible

Effective blogging is often about being topical. So don’t be afraid to deviate from your publishing plan if urgent and relevant issues come up in the news. Beware of coming across as opportunistic, however. There were some ghastly examples on Twitter of people trying to hijack the news of the recent hurricane in America as a marketing opportunity.

Hopefully you’ve now got a clearer idea of how you can come up with suitable things to blog about. Next time I’ll be discussing some tips for making your articles more engaging and effective.

Richard Hussey

If you missed the first 2 parts of this series, here they are. They’ll help you decide on your blogging platform and give you some tips to help get your blogging site up and running.

Part 1 - Getting started

Part 2, SEO Sharing and Statistics

I’m the founder of RSH Copywriting which is based near the Devon, Somerset border. I help businesses across a wide range of sectors including IT, training and healthcare to use written content to win more business.

Blogging for Business – SEO, Sharing and Statistics

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Welcome to part 2 of a series of articles on the basics of effective blogging for business. Last time I discussed setting up a blogging site using WordPress. Now we’re going to look at how you equip your blog with the tools to help get your content noticed and shared.

Using the right plug-ins means people can see you, hear about you and talk about you.

Simen Svale Skogsrud via Compfight

You’ll remember that we discussed whether it’s best to have a site hosted at wordpress.com or to download the framework from wordpress.org and host your own site. If you’re still thinking about how to set up a site you might want to refer back before reading on: Blogging for Business Part 1.

Hosting your own blog allows you much more freedom to control what it does by installing plug-ins. Inevitably I’m going to be talking more about self-hosted sites as there is so much less flexibility and less to say about .com sites. But I’ll also point out things you can do if you’re using wordpress.com to host your blog.

WordPress Plug-ins

Installing a plug-in is simple. Down the left margin of the dashboard you’ll find the word Plugins (I wish they’d hyphenate it). Roll the mouse cursor over this and you will see options including ‘Installed Plugins’, ‘Add New’, and ‘Editor’. You don’t need to worry too much about ‘Editor’.

To install a plug-in, click on ‘Add New’. You can then use the search functionality to find what you want. For example, type SEO into the search box and you will get a list of the SEO plug-ins with star ratings, brief information and a link to reviews. I would also recommend doing a bit of research on Google to see what people think of the various options before you decide. When you’ve picked the one you want, click install and it’s done. In most cases It really is that simple. Sometimes a bit of extra configuration is required but this is usually straightforward.

Get Yourself Noticed

The point of blogging is to use content to get noticed by a wider range of people. There are two main ways to do this: search and sharing.

Optimising your blog for search engines is critical and there are several excellent Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) plug-ins to choose from. The one I use is the WordPress SEO by Yoast. This provides a simple way to improve the optimisation of all the posts and pages on your blog. Once you’ve decided on your key word or phrase you get an analysis of how effectively you have used it, with suggestions for how optimisation can be improved. You can write an SEO title and description that will appear in the Google search results page and see the preview of this ‘snippet’ appear as you type.

A simple traffic light indicator shows whether your SEO is ‘green for go’.

Sharing

The next critical thing is making it easy for people to share your content. Again there are several excellent plug-ins that you can find by typing ‘social media’ or something similar into the ‘Add New’ plugins search window. In one way or another these will all add buttons to your posts and pages so that people can use a single click to send your post to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, or whatever you decide is most appropriate.

I use the Shareaholic plug-in, but there are plenty of alternatives. It might be worth experimenting to see how the sharing buttons look on your screen before making a final choice. Make sure that you have this in place before you start blogging as there’s no point publishing content that it’s difficult for people to share.

For wordpress.com sites you can find a ‘sharing’ option from the Settings menu (again, down the left margin of the dashboard). Here you’ll find an option to add sharing buttons for the most common social media tools. You can also set up links to post automatically to your social media accounts.

Blogging – Keeping track

Tracking the traffic to your site is vital. You want to be able to see how many people visited your site as a result of each post you put out. This way you can evaluate the topics, headlines and the times of posting that are most effective.

Google analytics will also tell you where visitors come from so you can see which social media tools are most effective. You’ll also know how many are new visitors, how many returning, how long they spend on your site and any other pages they visited. This is all marketing gold.

Track, evaluate and learn. I use the Google Analytics for WordPress tool but it’s largely a matter of choice. You will also need to visit the Google Analytics site to get a tracking code for your blog in order to set this up. It’s a bit of effort but well worth it.

For wordpress.com sites you are restricted to using the standard WordPress analytics tool. This will give you basic information on the number of hits your site is getting.

Other Plug-ins

Once you see how easy it is to install plug-ins you’ll find loads of other things you can do. I won’t try to cover everything here but here’s just a few to think about:

Security. I would install a security package to protect your site from malicious software attacks. Again, there are several options. Once you’ve installed one your site will be safe from hackers.

Spam. Your Comments box can quickly get overrun by spammers. The Akismet plug-in will sort that out immediately. You’ll need to visit the Akismet site to register and get a key to activate the plug-in. It’s quite simple and very effective.

Pictures. Images give your posts impact. Compfire allows you to browse Flikr and download Creative Commons licensed photos together with the appropriate credit for the creator. This is one of my favourite plug-ins.

Hopefully that’s given you plenty to think about for now. Next time we’ll look at the really important business of developing a content plan.

Richard Hussey is the founder of RSH Copywriting which supports businesses in Devon, Somerset and across the South West to market themselves more effectively using written content. See our main website.

The Skill Every Blogger Neeeds

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What makes a good blog post? Beautifully crafted words? An irresistible headline? Humour? While all of these matter, the fundamental quality of any good blog post is that it has to appeal to a defined audience. People have complete freedom to ignore the words that you’ve spent hours hunched over your keyboard drafting and honing – so you’d better be writing about something they care about.

So what’s my top skill for effective blogging? LISTENING.

Blogging be inquisitive and pay attention

Listening is the key to great blogging

Beverly & Pack via Compfight

Every conversation is an opportunity to learn

A champion blogger doesn’t see networking events as opportunities to promote their business and collect orders. They will see an opportunity to interact with business people and learn more about the issues and concerns they have. Nothing new in this, it’s what good marketers have always done – understand your market and adapt your offer to meet the need. These conversations are also a rich mine of potential blog topics.

A champion blogger approaches social media in the same way. Twitter and LinkedIn are not just convenient free tools for pushing out our sales messages, they are golden opportunities to interact with a wider audience and see how the world looks through their eyes.

Make connections

Focus on building your understanding of the things that are bothering people and the challenges their businesses face. You’ll then start making the connection to the ways that you can help them and the issues that will get their attention. Understand those connections and you’re well on the way to an effective blogging strategy.

I promise you that if you start looking at blogging and networking in this way you’ll never be stuck for something to blog about.

Thinking about starting a blog and not sure where to start? I’m publishing a series of articles covering the basics of setting up a blog and using content to grow your business. The first article is HERE

Good titles are hard to write

Make it Easy on the Eye

Always Use Pictures

Why Are You Blogging?

Have Something to Say

Think About the Search Engines

And the Circulation?

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Business blogging – don’t be a one-hit wonder

Think before you re-post

Email Marketing

Queries and follow-up

Turn it into something else

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So, how to be interesting? Step one – be interested.

Using Social Media

Is Your Business a Good Listener?

Knowledge and Experience

Content Marketing – Customer Needs

How Many Circles?

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Piece 1 – Your Website

Piece 2 – Your Blog

Piece 3 – SEO and B2B Online Marketing

A Whole Load of Pieces Called Social Media

And a Load of Other Pieces Called Content

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Business Blogs Need Personality

Insight and Originality

Business Blogs: Give Them a Reason to Return

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H – Headlines

A – Angle or Approach

S – Style

S – Story

L-Links

E – Engagement

1. Identify your blogging targets

2. Think about their issues and challenges

3. Themes and key messages

4. Who and when

5. Spread the word

6. And finally, be flexible

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WordPress Plug-ins

Get Yourself Noticed

Sharing

Blogging – Keeping track

Other Plug-ins

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Every conversation is an opportunity to learn

Make connections

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