As a business owner, coach or consultant, blogging can play a key role in your marketing strategy. As mentioned in my prior post, How to Use Blogging to Build the Know, Like and Trust Factor For Your Business, blogging allows you to build those key factors that can allow you to have an advantage in the marketplace.
In order for your blog to be successful, you need to follow the 5 C’s of Blogging:
- Content
The first and most important part of your blog is your content. You should decide on the main topic for your blog (i.e. business, gardening, etc.) and then decide up to three sub-categories for your topic (i.e. business- marketing, leadership, productivity; gardening- fruits, vegetable, flowers; etc.).Once the topic and sub-categories have been decided, then the next thing is deciding whether you are going to come up with original content or content that you curate.In order to show your expertise in your particular area, having original content is very important. That is how you showcase what you know and show your knowledge in your area. However, coming up with original content consistently can be a difficult task, so sometimes it helps to curate other people’s content. Use what they have posted about your area or expertise and write a response or a differing opinion to the original article, or just reposting what they have written also works too. As long as the content is relevant and will resonate with your audience then using other people’s content is fine. The biggest thing when it comes to curating content is giving credit to the original source of content, your goal is not and nor should it ever be to take their content as your own, so always give credit where credit is due. This is especially important when it comes to copyright infringement, you do not want to plagiarize, so be sure to site where your content is coming from.
- Community
Your blog posts should be targeting a specific community. Your goal in blogging is not just to add value by informing your readers, but to also create followers who become your community. Having a community of people who are like-minded and enjoy your content can do wonders for your business. When you create a community, you create loyal followers who can become loyal customers, so knowing that you are creating a community for your blog is also helpful.
- Conversations
You want your blog posts to create conversations. The great thing about blogs compared to regular online articles is the fact that blogs allow people to converse about the particular topic that you have posted. You want to create conversations around your topic, so it is not a one-way street, but a two-way conversation with the writer of the blog and the audience. The ability to have a conversation, adds another level of connection with you and your audience, so make sure that your blog posts create a level of conversation around your industry or topic.
- Consistency
I believe there is a Blog grave yard, so many people have good intentions to start a blog, but couldn’t or didn’t keep up with blogging consistently, so their blog died! When you make the decision to start a blog for your business, you have to be consistent with posting on the blog. You have to decide what makes sense for your business. If you are able to blog weekly that’s great, if you can only blog bi-weekly that’s fine too, the least amount of commitment would be blogging once a month. Of course there are benefits to blogging more frequently especially when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and people finding your content online, but you want to take on a frequency that will be able to fit into your business. Blogging on a daily basis is not viable for the average business so you have to figure out what frequency works best for your business.
- Convert
As a small business owner, one of your blogging goals should be to convert your followers to customers. By sharing your content with your readers people start to view you as knowledgable or an expert in your field. Once they have that level of trust in your knowledge and your blog talks about solutions, if they are in the market for what your company offers, they will naturally see you as a solution and become a customer, which ultimately is what you want. Having strong call-to-actions (i.e. click here, sign-up now, learn more, etc.) on your blog helps with converting people to your website pages, or sales pages for your product or service.
Are you currently blogging for your business? If so, what other C’s do you think are an important part of blogging?
In the last blog post, I shared the 3 key things you should build in your business, which included building your audience, network, and database. This week the focus is on how to engage your audience, network, and database. Watch the video below, or read the post to learn 3 key ways to engage your audience.
