business blog Archives - Nadine MullingsNadine Mullings

November

08 2016

How to Plan for Your Business Success

No matter what marketing strategy you decide to pursue for your business, in order to be successful, your effort CANNOT be random, being successful with marketing requires planning for your success!

November is a great time to get an early start on your Marketing Plan for the next year. Putting together a Simple Marketing Plan can ensure for a more successful year. Too many coaches, consultants and entrepreneurs practice Random Acts of Marketing (R.A.M.) with no real strategy or plan for their businesses.

I’m on a mission to help coaches, consultants, and entrepreneurs to be less random and more strategic. In this blog post, I will walk you through a simple strategy for success called The B.E.S.T. Marketing Plan™. The B.E.S.T. Marketing Plan follows four core marketing strategies for growing your business as a coach or consultant:

Continue Reading →

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

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

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