blog Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Nadine MullingsNadine Mullings

February

23 2016

How often should you blog to get more business? (Part 4)

Blogging for business can be an effective long-term marketing strategy. When used correctly, it can bring consistent leads, prospects, and clients to your business. Over the last couple of blog posts, I explored the why, what, and how of blogging for business.

First we looked at why you should blog for business with the blog post ,5 Awesome Reasons Why Coaches Should Have a Blog (Part 1), then we looked at what exactly a blog is and what type of content you can place on your blog with the post, 4 Types of Awesome Blog Content That Can Grow Your Business (Part 2), then we looked at how to use your blog to grow your business with the blog post, 4 Smart Ways to Use Your Blog to Grow Your Business (Part 3), in the last post in this series, we will look at when you should blog, specifically how often should you blog for business?

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Posted by Nadine Mullings | Comments Off | in Blog, Business, Business Development, Marketing, Marketing for Coaches, Marketing for Consultants

February

16 2016

4 Smart Ways to Use Your Blog to Grow Your Business (Part 3)

In this series on the how, what, when and why of blogging for business, we have covered the why and the what of blogging, so this post is actually going to go into the how of blogging, specifically How to Use Your Blog to Grow Your Coaching Business.

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Posted by Nadine Mullings | Comments Off | in Blog, Business, Business Development, Marketing, Marketing for Coaches, Marketing for Consultants, Uncategorized

February

09 2016

4 Types of Awesome Blog Content That Can Grow Your Business (Part 2)

In my last post, 5 Awesome Reasons Why Coaches Should Have a Blog, I talked about why you should use blogging as a core marketing strategy. If you missed the post, be sure to go check it out.

In this blog post, the second post of the series of the what, how, why, and when of using blogging as a marketing strategy to grow your coaching business, we take a look at what blogging is exactly.

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Posted by Nadine Mullings | Comments Off | in Blog, Business, Marketing, Marketing for Coaches, Marketing for Consultants

January

26 2016

5 Awesome Reasons Why Coaches Should Have a Blog (Part 1)

As a coach or consultant, you probably already know about the importance of being recognized as a knowledgeable expert in your field. One of the main reasons is that people like to do business with people they feel are knowledgeable and can help them solve their problems.

Did you know blogging can play a major role in building your authority and expert status online? A blog can be your home base for your knowledge and expertise, the place where people can pull up a chair and learn about what you have to share.

If you’re not using blogging as a core marketing activity then it may be something you might want to consider, or if you are using blogging, but not getting any results from your blogging effort then you might want to read on.

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Posted by Nadine Mullings | Comments Off | in Blog, Business, Marketing for Coaches, Marketing for Consultants

September

22 2015

How Often Should You Post on Your Business Blog

One of the questions I get when its comes to blogging for business is how often should I post on my business blog?

[Tweet “How often should I post on my business blog? #MarketingEssentials #Blogging”]

Some people would say it’s important to blog every day, or it’s important to blog at least three times a week. This may be a good strategy for a professional blogger, but your business is not blogging, you should be blogging for business as a part of your marketing mix, so you should take a different approach to how often you blog.

I feel the answer to that question differs for each business. If blogging is part of your marketing mix, you have to decide how much time you or someone on your team can dedicate to consistently posting on the business blog.

Depending on the decision that you come up with for your business, this will determine how often you should blog. However, as a rule of thumb, I would say you should try to put new content on your blog at the very least twice a month.

New content on your blog is important for various reasons:

It keeps your blog from getting stale– Nobody wants to visit a blog and the last post was from 3 months ago, so to make sure that your content stays fresh it would be important to post at least every two weeks.
You rank higher in the search engines when you have newer content. Search engines like to provide browsers with more recent information, so the more updated your blog is, and the newer the content on your blog, the more likely you are to rank higher in the search engines.
Promoting your new content helps to bring consistent traffic to your website. Having a business blog and promoting your blog posts is a great way to get traffic to your website. The more you post the more traffic you will get.
When done correctly, your new content can also help to create new leads for your company, so the more content you put out, the more leads you can expect to get for your company.

However, it’s not just important to have new content on your business blog, but it’s just as important if not more important, to promote the older content you have on your blog, so in addition to creating new content for your blog, you should also have a plan to promote the older content that you have on your blog.

[Tweet “In addition to creating new content for your blog, you should also plan to promote the older content on your blog. #MarketingEssentials #Blogging”]

For example, if you decide to post on your business blog at least twice a month, then after just one year of posting at least twice a month, you will have at least 24 pieces of content that you can repurpose and share on your social media networks, your email list, etc.

So no matter how often you post on your business blog, it is important to have fresh content (at least twice a month), and it’s important to promote both your new and old content in order to get more traffic and get more leads for your business.

Do you have a business blog? If so, how often do you post on your business blog?

Posted by Nadine Mullings | Comments Off | in Blog, Business, Business Development, Marketing, Marketing for Coaches, Marketing for Consultants, Uncategorized

September

15 2015

How to Stay Consistent With Your Business Blog

One of the hardest things about blogging is staying consistent. Many coaches, consultants, and independent business owners, start blogs but don’t stay consistent with their blogging effort. A great way to stay on task and remain consistent with blogging is by creating an editorial calendar. When you plan out what you will be blogging about in advance, and when you schedule your blogging activity, it becomes part of your routine.

In this post we will explore some editorial calendar options for your blog:

A wall calendar. Although it may seem old-fashioned, a paper calendar is a good way to stay organized and on task without having to use any technology and it works as well as technology. You can use a 12-month calendar to map out your entire year of blogging activity. For each month select the topic you will focus on for the month, then schedule out when you want to publish your posts. This advance planning will really help you to stay on task with your blog. I use an At A Glance Wall Calendar to keep me organized, and since it is posted on the wall, I am always aware of when my blog posts are due, and what I need to be working on.
Your device calendar– Almost all the devices (iPad, Smart Phone, etc.) have a calendar option within the device that you can use as an editorial calendar. The great thing about the calendar on your device is that your device is typically always with you, so even if you’re not in the office and don’t have access to your wall calendar, you can always know what you’re working on and what needs to be done by checking the calendar on your device. I use my iPad calendar to stay on track with when items need to be produced and published on my blog.
An online calendar– Another great option for an editorial calendar is an online calendar. The great thing about an online calendar is if you have a team or someone who helps you with your blog, having an online calendar makes it easier for everyone to stay on the same page and know what needs to be worked on. Many people like to use a Google Calendar for their online calendar and if you use Gmail you can check your calendar and your email right in one place, making it very convenient to stay on task. The Google Calendar allows you to color code different types of activity, so you can color code the dates a draft is due, then put a different color for the day that a blog post is published, etc.
An online editorial calendar– An editorial calendar is designed specifically for the task at hand, keeping your blog organized. There are tons of online editorial calendar software, but I choose to use Coschedule. If you use WordPress for your blog, Coschedule integrates directly with WordPress, so you can plan and post right in one place. You can also directly post to social media from Coschedule, so you can plan, post, and promote your blog from one tool.

These are just a few options of how to stay consistent with your blog by creating an editorial calendar. Are you using an editorial calendar for your blog? If so, what calendar tool do you find the most useful?

Posted by Nadine Mullings | Comments Off | in Blog, Business, Marketing, Marketing for Coaches, Marketing for Consultants, Small Business

September

08 2015

7 Essential Elements for a Highly Successful Business Blog

There are 1001 ways that you can market your business, but if you are a coach or consultant, blogging should be an essential part of your marketing mix. However, it’s not that easy to run a successful business blog. The blogsphere is very crowded with lots of blogs covering the same topic that you will be covering, so how do you stand out and create a successful business blog?

Here are 7 Essential Elements for a Highly Successful Business Blog:

[Tweet “7 Essential Elements for a Highly Successful Business Blog. #MarketingEssentials #Blogging”]

Show your personality– A blog, even a business blog, should have a personality that reflects the style and tone of the business. If you have a fun business, that should be reflected on your blog. If you have a serious business, then that should be reflected on your blog. What makes a blog stand out is how the personality of the business shines on the blog, so make sure that your blog is reflecting the true personality of your business.
Know your target audience– The most successful business blogs resonate with their target audience because they know their audiences needs, wants, struggles, and creates blog posts around those issues. In order for your business blog to be successful be sure that you are addressing the needs, wants, and struggles of your specific target audience.
Create amazing content– With so much information available on the Internet, it is important that the content you create and share with your audience resonates with them. It is important to create content that will inspire, motivate, inform, and/or educate. People love to learn, and when they know that your content can teach them what they need to know, you will create a successful business blog.
Have a strong call to action– Providing amazing content that resonates with your target audience is important, but in order for you to get business, you also have to have a strong call to action. You want to not only inform your audience, but encourage them to take the next step with you. The next step could be joining your email list. Having a strong lead magnet to encourage individuals to join your email list at the end of your blog post would be important, or if you are selling a program, product, or event, having a link to the sales page to encourage sales would be important. Whatever your call to action, it is important that you have one at the end of each blog post.
Promote your blog– In order to get traffic to your blog, you have to promote it! It’s not one of those things where once you write it they will come. Nope! Just like anything else you have to promote, promote, promote. That should include promoting the post to your email list and on social media. You have to get the word out about your blog post in order for people to read it and engage with it.
Be consistent- In order to have a successful business blog, you have to blog consistently. Whatever that looks like for your business. Whether it is monthly, bi-weekly, weekly, be consistent in how often you blog. Being consistent shows that your company is professional and reliable.
Remarket your blog– Promoting your blog should not be limited to when you first publish a new blog post, but you should remarket your blog posts. Select some of your most popular blog posts and promote it again on email and social media. This one exercise of remarketing your blog post can increase your traffic by leaps and bounds.

Are you blogging for business? If so, what essential elements do you feel makes a business blog successful, leave your comments below.

Posted by Nadine Mullings | Comments Off | in Blog, Business, Business Development, Marketing for Coaches, Marketing for Consultants, Small Business

May

26 2015

8 Mistakes to Avoid when Blogging for Business

As an independent business owner, coach, or consultant, you already know the importance of creating a platform, and being known as an authority or expert in your field. When people view you as an expert in your field, you start to attract more clients, instead of having to find clients, clients are finding you.

One of the best ways to become known in your field is to consistently create or curate awesome content, and the best platform to do that is on your own blog.

However, starting, maintaining, and keeping up with a business blog can be difficult. In this blog post I cover the 8 mistakes to avoid when blogging for business:

Mistake #1- Not creating a blogging plan

I know I say this all the time, but no matter what type of marketing activity you choose to participate in, you must create a plan for that activity, so if you decide you are going to start a business blog, you have to have a plan for your blog. The plan should include answers to the following questions:

Who is your target audience?
What topics do you want to cover?
How often will you blog?
What will your calls to action be?
What are your blog goals?

Mistake #2- Not having a specific audience in mind

If your blog is for everyone, then it really is for no one. You have to be specific in who you are talking to, and who you are trying to reach with your blog posts, that is why selecting your target audience is the first thing in your blog plan.

Mistake #3- Not choosing specific topics

Random blogs aren’t successful unless maybe you’re a celebrity blogger, but even celebrity bloggers keep their blog topics around what they are known for or what they enjoy.

When creating a business blog, select up to five main topics that you want to be known for. All of the topics should fall under or supplement your business. For example, I blog about Marketing. There are 1001 ways you can market your business, but I mainly focus on my four key topics, blogging, social media, texting, and email marketing. If I blog about something outside of these topics, it always falls under my main topic of marketing.

Mistake #4- Not being consistent with how often you publish your blog

This is something that a lot of independent business owners, coaches, and consultants struggle with. They decide to start a blog, and at first they are pretty consistent with blogging, but as the weeks and months go on, and things get busy, their blogging becomes inconsistent. The weekly blogging turns into monthly blogging, the monthly blogging, turns into every other month.

When you decide on how often you are going to blog (daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc.), you must stick to that schedule. Figure out what works best for your business and stick with it. Blogging daily is a difficult task for the average coach or consultant, weekly is a little more realistic, but can still be hard to keep up with, bi-weekly is a good schedule for starting out or if you feel that’s the most amount of time that you can dedicate to blogging for your business. Once a month is the least amount of time that you should commit to blogging for your business.

Mistake #5- Not having strong call to actions

I have been guilty of mistake #5 for the first few years of blogging. One of the goals of your blog should be to have your readers not only view you as an expert in your field, but to also have them take some type of action. Having strong call to actions with each blog post helps you to achieve your goal. If your goal is to build your email list, then you should have strong call to actions within your blog post and/or on your page about joining your email list. If your goal is to promote an upcoming event, then you should have strong call to actions throughout your blog post about the event (the event should also relate to the blog post topic). If your goal is to promote a product or service that relates to the blog post, then you should have strong call to actions throughout you post about the product or service.

Mistake #6- Not having goals for your blog

Having a blog is great for many reasons as already mentioned, but not having a goal for your blog is a big mistake. Is the goal of your blog to create brand awareness, if so, how do you measure brand awareness? Do you measure brand awareness by the amount of views on your blog posts? Is your blog to showcase you as an authority or an expert? If so, how do you measure becoming known as an authority or expert? Establishing and setting goals will help you to achieve the results you are aiming for with your blog.

Mistake #7- Having someone else write your blog who doesn’t understand your company voice, story, or goals

We are all busy, so it is okay to have someone write or contribute to your business blog, but if that person doesn’t understand the tone or voice of your brand, this could be a huge mistake. You want the feel of your blog to stay consistent, so if someone is writing or contributing to your blog, they have to understand the tone of your blog, the voice of your brand, and the goals of your blog. Otherwise they could do more harm than help in your business.

Mistake #8- Not promoting your blog posts

Just because you write it, doesn’t mean they will read it! You have to promote your blog posts on your other platforms. If you have an email list, you should promote your blog posts to your email list. If you are on social media, you should promote your blog posts on social media. You need to promote your post several times to get the exposure you need, and for people to actually read your posts, so be sure to promote, promote, promote!

Are you blogging for business? Have you made any of the mistakes listed above? Be sure to comment below and share your blog with us, by listing it in the comments below.

If you need help with coming up with a Blogging Plan, we can help! Be sure to contact us for a FREE Blogging Success Strategy Session

Posted by Nadine Mullings | 2 Comments | in Blog, Business, Business Development, Marketing, Marketing for Coaches, Marketing for Consultants, Uncategorized

May

12 2015

The Secret to a Successful Business Blog

I have seen it over, and over, and over again. Independent business owners, coaches, or consultants who decide to start a business blog because they have heard that it is important to have a blog for your business. They usually have all intention to keep up with the blog, but after a few weeks or months, the blog ends up in the blog grave yard. Why does this happen so often? Because most people start blogging without a plan.

It’s true that there are many benefits of blogging, I wrote a blog post about how blogging can help you gain the know, like, and trust factor, which is so important when growing your business, but other factors include helping to identify you as an authority or expert in your field, or making it easier for people to find you and your business due to the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) benefits that occur from blogging.

However, without a real blogging plan, you can easily be doomed to head to the blog grave yard. Here are 5 things for you to consider when starting a business blog: [Tweet “Without a real blogging plan, you can easily be doomed to head to the blog grave yard. #Blogging #MarketingEssentials”]

Why do you want to start a business blog? Basically, what is the goal of your blog, this could vary from:
1. Building your expertise in your field
2. Becoming known as a thought leader in your field
3. Becoming known as an authority in your field
4. Providing valuable information to your current customers/clients
5. Attracting new customers/clients
6. Building your SEO so you can be found in online searches
Who is your target audience? Who are you trying to reach with your blog posts? You can answer this question by deciding the following:
1. Are you talking to your peers in your industry?
2. Are you talking to your current customers/clients?
3. Are you talking to potential customers/clients?
What do you want to talk about? Pick a particular topic or several topics that will be relevant to your business and your target audience, and decide to consistently blog about that topic or topics. When you have a business blog, you want to stay on topic and not venture off on to topics that do not relate to your business or can’t tie back to your business in some way. You also want to make sure that the information that you are sharing is relevant and will resonate with your target audience. What do they want to hear about? What are their struggles or concerns?
How often do you want to publish your blog posts? Decide how often you are going to publish your blog posts and stick with it. The biggest problem I see when it comes to business blogs, is a company will decide to blog, but then they don’t stay consistent in publishing to the blog, because they get busy and the blog is secondary. If you decide to select a day and time to publish your blog posts then stick with it. If you decide the frequency to publish (daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc.), then stick with it.
How will you measure success? Now this is a touchy subject, because you could be blogging for months, even years and have no way to really measure the success of your blog. Some people measure success by traffic, how many people have visited the blog posts. Some people measure by shares, how many people have shared the post on social media. Others measure by blog comments, how many people actually comment on a blog post. Others measure based how many individuals have taken action based on the blog post (i.e. visited a sales page, visited a landing page, signed up for their email list, etc.). Depending on what your goal is from #1, that will determine how you need to decide what you will use to measure the success of your business blog.

Do you have a business blog? Do you feel like your business blog is successful? Share your comments and/or links to your blog below.

If you have a business blog and you would like to take it to the next level, or you are thinking about starting a business blog, we can help, contact us to schedule a free blogging success strategy session.

Posted by Nadine Mullings | 2 Comments | in Blog, Business, Business Development, Marketing for Coaches, Marketing for Consultants

January

27 2015

The Truth About Blogging for Business

There are many advantages to starting a business blog. In fact, I talked about one of the major benefits of a business blog in my blog post, How to Use Blogging to Build the Know, Like, and Trust Factor for Your Business, but what most people don’t necessarily talk about is the “truth” about blogging. So in this blog post I will uncover some of the truths about blogging for your business:

Blogging for business has become very popular in the last five years or so, which has created a crowded blogging world and with so many things grabbing people’s attention, it takes time to get results from your business blog (it can even take years), so if you think blogging for your business will bring you a ton of clients quickly, think again.
Creating content for your blog takes time. You have to think about the content you want to post, then you have to create the content, and then you have to promote the content, this can take a lot of your time and effort. For example, on average it can take up to two hours to create the blog post, it may take an additional 10-20 minutes to promote the posts on your various social networks, so one blog post can take almost three hours, so depending on how many blog posts you produce per month, this can be very time consuming
A large percentage of business owners, coaches and consultants manage all aspects of their blog themselves. According to coSchedule, 58% of business bloggers are solo bloggers. That means they are the content manager, the copywriter, the graphic designer, the promoter, and everything else for the blog, which can become overwhelming because of the different elements of running a business blog as well as keeping up with running a business!
Many blog posts go largely unnoticed. You put all the time and effort into creating content for your blog, and then nobody reads it. That is why promoting your blog post is an important part of blogging for your business. You can promote your blog posts to your email list, on social media, etc.
A large percentage of business blogs die after a few months because many business owners, coaches and consultants can’t find the time to keep up with the blog. In fact, according to a recent survey by coschedule, 22% of respondents said their biggest challenge when it comes to blogging is finding time, which makes it easy to see why so many business blogs end up in the blog grave yard.
Most people will not comment on your blog. One of the great things about blogs is the ability to create conversations, because people are able to comment on your blog posts, but the statistics show that the majority of people who may read your blog, will not comment on your blog post, which can make it hard to gauge if you are engaging your audience.

So, if you decide to start a business blog, keep these truths in mind and check out my blog post The 5 C’s of a Successful Business Blog.

Do you have a business blog? Are you thinking about starting a business blog this year?

Posted by Nadine Mullings | Comments Off | in Blog, Business, Marketing, Marketing for Coaches, Marketing for Consultants, Small Business, Uncategorized