Since its inception, blogging has been transformed from a place where overly opinionated teenagers go to vent, into a medium where businesses are able to engage with their customers and keep them informed. It’s not enough, however, to say,”We have a blog”. If you’re going to blog, you might as well do it right.
1. Leverage Your Resources
What’s the strongest resource that a company has? Its employees, of course! Finding out individual strengths and utilizing them in such a way that helps in furthering a business as well as nurturing the employees’ skill is no new concept. In the case of blogging, keep those who enjoy writing, who are knowledgeable about the general subject matter, and are familiar with blogging as designated company bloggers. Create a blogging team, that way each member can feed off each other’s ideas, and keep each post creative and away from monotony.
2. Blog As a Person, Not a Company
Humanize your blogs! Many people make the mistake of treating social media mediums as a separate category than what they term as “real life contact” such as meeting in person, talking on the phone etc. Social media is “real time contact” and it is imperative for businesses that it is treated with as much care as the rest. You are still engaging with a customer so write each post as if it is a one on one conversation with you and another person.Bloggers shouldn’t be afraid to write in their own tone of voice and superiors shouldn’t discourage it. A diverse tone goes a much longer way than a generic one.
3. Don’t Advertise, Just Talk
This almost goes hand in hand with the previous point. Advertising and PR is crucial to a company’s success, but there is a time and place for it. Despite popular opinion, your blog is not the place for it. Customers want to hear from you, your thoughts, opinions, and your expertise, not your selling skills. In fact, that is probably what they came to your blog to get away from. Talk about what your company specializes, put it in a different perspective by providing a helpful use for it in their daily lives. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes, and think about what they’d like to hear, that you know you can engage in constructive banter about, and write what comes to you naturally.
4. Be an Open Book
We’ve mentioned this before in a previous blog that “Tweets” should not be protected when marketing a business. The same applies here; let your readers share your blog! This is something that you would think is a given, but surprisingly many businesses forget to enable such a simple tool. This is free marketing all on it’s own. Furthermore, make sure you are promoting your blog. Synchronizing all your social media outlets not only maintains a level of synergy but your customers will thank you for the consistency. Announcing a new blog post on Twitter, Facebook, etc. goes a long way.
5. Three Words: Track, Track, and Track
Google Analytics is an easy-to-use interface and is a great start for those who are currently not using web analytic tools. It’s important to keep track of which posts generate the most traffic, and everything of that nature. You’d want to know which product sells the best in the market, how is this any different?
