Many businesses jump right on the business blog bandwagon without hesitation. There’s always plenty to say about products and services.
But unless you’ve been paying keen attention to content marketing trends, you may find it’s harder than you expect to consistently write compelling content for your business blog.
How exactly are you going to attract a large audience of enthusiastic readers? Strangely, not everyone on the Web is looking to read your blog!
How can you avoid having one of those boring blogs that slips into blog oblivion? How do you capture readers’ imaginations and get them to subscribe and leave comments?
It’s better to start smart than to quickly fizzle out after blog launch. Start by writing out clear objectives and goals that will help you stay focused and on track to find the best content for your blog posts.
5 questions
There are 14 questions to help guide you to writing successful business blog content, but to keep things simple, I focus on these five:
What problems do you and your company solve for your readers?
What have been the traditional solutions to these problems?
Why aren’t these working anymore?
What does your company offer that’s different/unique/special? (And what makes you the expert?)
What do you want readers to do now?
By answering these five basic questions in your blog posts, your content will provide valuable relevant information. You’ll demonstrate your expertise, show you understand your reader’s challenges, and build relationships with customers by generously offering solutions.
You can also ask these additional nine questions to help you better understand the purpose and goals of your blog:
What are your business objectives?
What is your blog’s objective?
Who are the members of your target audience?
What are all the benefits your products provide to customers?
What services do you provide?
Why are readers / prospects still stuck?
What’s new about this situation that contributes to more frustration?
What is possible?
What is different now?
Of course, there’s more to it than that. For your blog to be successful you should provide answers to these questions in a way that not only educates readers, but does so in an entertaining way, and engages their hearts and minds…
3 E’s
Here’s what I call the 3 E’s of content marketing with a business blog. You publish content that:
Educates
Entertains
Engages
Ideally, you’d also want to enrich their lives by saving readers time, energy or money too… but that may be a lot to accomplish at one time. There’s much you can do to educate readers, and a lot of different ways that are entertaining and engaging.
I suggest you start and end your blog posts with questions for readers. This helps to engage them right away, and also gives you an opportunity to ask them to participate, for example, by subscribing to the blog or leaving a comment.
So what questions or struggles do you have with business blogging? Share them in the comments below!
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