Clients often ask me what they should write about in their blogs.
It’s easier to answer this question by turning it around to say what they shouldn’t write about. I’ve also included some general points about what you should do in the list below.
- Don’t write sales pitches. A blog should be informative not a platform for sales pitches. So stay away from blog posts that try to pitch your products. The purpose of your blog is to attract interest and, whilst you might be interested in the latest variant of your xyz widget, most of you blog readers won’t. The only exception is if you’ve just brought out something so different, or even revolutionary, that it will immediately attract interest.
- Don’t include personal news/gossip about you and/or your staff. In general your readers are not going to be interested whether Julie from accounts just ran a marathon in aid of the redundant lamplighters’ charity. Or the fact that you’ve just hired a new part-time bookkeeper. A blog, and I’m talking about business blogs, should be about business related topics. Keep the personal stuff for Facebook.
- Don’t post recycled news items. Some people think that they can fill up their blogs with recycled content from other sites so that their blog becomes a kind of new aggregator. Don’t bother. Why should I go to your blog when I can go straight to the source, and online news readers such as InoReader can aggregate far better than you every will. You should, however, post about news items if you’ve got something to add such as a new angle or criticism. Use your blog to state your point of view.
- Do keep posts short. People tend to read blogs “on the fly”, and often on mobile devices, in the odd spare moments. I know, when I’m reading blogs, that I will often skip over to the next when I come across a long post.
- Do focus posts on single topics. This makes it easier to read and remember your points particularly when, as I said above, people tend to read blogs in a hurry.
- Do state your point of view.Your blog posts will be far more interesting if you say what you think about a topic rather than just writing a list of facts. Don’t worry that some people will disagree with you. Some probably will and you may upset a few people but your post will be all the more interesting for it.
Use your blog to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise in your field of business so that potential customers will come to you because they believe you’re an authority in that field and will be ready to do business with you.
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