Businesses are now publishers. They are expected to blog and get on social media. Businesses should participate, share, and contribute to online communities, they tell you. As a business owner, you are expected to be everywhere, do more than what seems humanly impossible, and do it for as long as your business lasts. If your business fails and you start another one, you start all over again on all these activities.
If you were a serial entrepreneur, I’d love to hear how you manage all this work, really (sorry, I’m digressing).
How do you possible keep up with all these hats that go within the task of wearing one heavy hat called marketing? How can you ensure that your efforts for blogging are seamless, trouble-free, and work like a clock? Here are some tips:
Realize the Purpose of Blogging
Should you blog for your business because it makes you money? Chase this goal and you’ll end up developing wrong systems and chasing ghosts (that’s how chasing money really feels like).
Maybe you should blog because it makes you feel important? You aren’t as important as you think (just ask your competition or all those customers who just switched loyalty).
By blogging for business, you’ll open the gates for customers to engage in open debates and conversations about your inputs related to your brand, products, and relevant news in your industry. You will establish thought leadership and gain exposure. You’ll lead your customers into an honest, open, and unbiased flow of content (thanks to your blog) so that they can make better decisions.
The purpose of blogging for your business is to empower your customer. But then, I’ll leave you to decide your own purpose. Maybe you’d like to empower and humor customers too? Maybe you just want to show your customers all those secret ways they can use your product? Go ahead. But make sure you still have a purpose.
Blogging Goes with Social Media: Plan for it
If you had a travel company and you kept blogging about pristine beaches your customers should visit before they die, or breathtaking spots from where sunrise is best viewed, without giving a thought to actually promoting your blog, it will face the same fate as those secret hideaways that nobody actually goes to. Blogging for your travel company is surely fun – but don’t ignore social media. More conversations happen on social networks about travel, or just about anything else, than they do on all companies’ blogs put together.
The same applies to tools, products and services, whether they’re web based or not. Social media is not the only factor that influences the perception of your business. User generated content, such as questions, answers and arguments on online communities, makes a big difference. For example, hoteliers and airlines are directly influenced by the rants and raves on TripAdvisor.com. For web hosts and webmasters, the difference between truth and banner marketing is laid bare at WhoIsHostingThis.com. You get the drift…
What social networks, Q & A sites, groups, communities, or forums determine the fate of your business, or even industry?
Work in Spurts because Blogging Can’t Wait for Creative Inspiration
Here’s the thing about blogging and how it’s different from writing a novel: there’s no sabbatical in between your decision to write and the actual publishing. There are no “writer breaks.” There’s no allowance for writers block. You can’t blog with a bag of excuses. You can’t wait for creative inspiration to happen to you in your shower, one fine day. Blogging won’t wait for sparks of inspiration you might get at the beach while the sun bathes your skin and water kisses your feet.
Since blogging can’t wait for creative outbursts, you can’t rely on it thrice a week, every week of the month, every month, throughout the year. What you then need is the ability to work backwards and work more when creativity hits you with a passion.
Let’s say you were at your creative best during the weekend after a wild party night – that’s when you write up all five posts that you’ll schedule (in advance) to go live for every day of the following week.
Work in spurts because creativity comes in spurts.
Read, Take Notes, and Refer Back to Them
Taking notes might or might not have been an effective way to study in school, college, and university. It is, however, mandatory today. It so happens that there’s way too much information on the web. You’ll need to spot trends, collect information, and use these as references for your blogging (it makes your blog posts more credible).
How do you possibly keep track of the endless stream of information then? You take notes. Pick your choice of note-taking such as like Evernote and grab everything you read about, find, or want to base your next curated post on. That’s the only sane way you can get ideas for your blog posts (apart from relying on your own creativity, which won’t happen every day).
You are what you read, and what you take note of. Your blogging – and hence the whole shebang of content marketing and business success – depends on that.
Passion Makes it Go Smooth and Seamless
If blogging is a job, you’ll do a pathetic job at it. If blogging is just for business, you’ll see that the returns aren’t satisfactory. Blogging is all about passion, expressed in words on digital print. It’s all about writing from your heart. Blogging is all about making justified opinions, intelligent conclusions, and insightful contribution so as to benefit your readers (who conveniently happen to be your customers).
Almost anyone can write; not everyone can write passionately. If you cannot write, find someone who can write on your behalf. The writing should cut through. It should flow. It should evoke emotions. It should make your readers laugh, cry, or even piss them off.
No one cares about your business as much as you do. Your blogging – in a way – shows that.
Passion, by the way, is contagious. You do want the word to spread about your business, don’t you? Try passionate blogging.
How effective, seamless, and trouble-free is your blogging? How is it going for you? Let us know what stops you in your tracks? What explains the stops, starts and spurts with your blogging efforts?
What’s killing you?
