There’s a lot to think about when blogging. One of the most difficult things to think of when starting or writing your blog is what to write about. The top business blogging mistake stems from not knowing what to write about on your business blog.
Because blogging takes a lot of your time, making this mistake costs you a lot of money. Not only will it cost you money in time, it’ll cost you money because your blog won’t help your business grow. Your blog won’t have the necessary content to be found by potential customers.
Your blog becomes a time sink the more you make this one blogging mistake. So, let’s get into the mistake and how you can change your blogs direction and avoid making the mistake in the future.
The Mistake
The top blogging mistake you can make for your business is blogging for yourself and your business. When you have a personal blog this is the best approach but for a business your approach needs to be different.
Your current customers don’t care about your business problems or what your business has been doing and potential customer especially don’t care. Unless a business-centered post helps your customers accomplish their goals, they don’t care. Customer and potential customers care about their problems and what will help them resolve their problem.
The blogging mistake your business can't afford to make: writing for yourself not your customer. Share on XI see a lot of startups and small businesses who are making the mistake of writing for themselves. A good blog is customer-centric, never business-centric.
A business blog is a great place to generate leads, build authority for your business, and build relationships with customers. By writing for your business only you’re not going to benefit from any of these things. Knowing your audience is an important first step that you can take to correct the big mistake that’s killing your blog.
Know Your Audience
Two reasons most business blogs tend to go the way of business centered posts is:
- It’s easy to write for yourself only.
- No knowledge or thought is required to find out who your audience is.
The one to be most concerned with is knowing your audience. Once you’ve taken care of knowing your audience then it’s easier to write for them and not yourself.
Knowing your audience is an essential part to mastering your business blog. You don’t have to get too detailed when learning about your audience. While buyer persona’s help you learn more, there are simpler approaches you can take immediately.
The remedy will help you learn about your audience and write targeted posts that help bring customers and leads to your business.
The Remedy
You’re an expert at your business and you know almost everything about it. That or you know exactly who to go to in order to help you. Take a step back from what you know to understand where your customers are coming from.
Customers and leads don’t know anything about your business. They are starting from nothing and need your help to reach their goals.
Put yourself in the customers shoes to figure out what their business pain is, the pain that you are in a position to solve. Now take that pain and do research on how the customer might search to solve their problem.
Problem Solving Tools
I use tools such as the Google Keyword Planner and Keyword Tool. Keyword Tool gives you ideas on what to use as keywords based off another keyword. Google Keyword Planner gives you an idea of whether a keyword for search is ever used, how much it’s used, and how high the level of competition for it is (or competition for Adwords at least, but it gives you a general idea).
Another awesome tool is the Google search results themselves. Simply search for the keywords you’re thinking about using and scroll to the bottom of the page. You’ll find an awesome list of related search terms to help give you an idea of what terms people are using for your search.
There are a lot of good ideas for what people are searching for on this list. Equipped with these results and the tools I mentioned above, you’ll be able to find a lot of great ideas to write about that will directly help answer your customers questions.
By answering the questions your customers are asking you’ll be doing them a service. Not only that, you’ll stand out as an expert and someone who can be trusted.
Each blog post that is posted on your business blog should do one of these things for customers and leads:
- Answer a question.
- Entertain them.
- Make visitors think.
- Provide a benefit to visitors.
That’s it. Don’t write a post about your business or yourself. Your business blog is all about who you want to bring in as your customer. If you know who your audience is, who you’re trying to reach, then your blog can be a tool to bring leads to you which you can then foster into customers.
Make your blog successful by: answering a question, entertaining, or making someone think. Share on XYou now know the biggest blogging mistake and how you can approach solving it, now it’s time to turn your blog into a lead powerhouse.
Turn Your Blog Around
If you have a business blog and you haven’t noticed it bringing interested people to your business after a few months, you might be doing it wrong. Very few people are interested in a blog about a company with news about the company.
Turning your blog into a lead magnet takes a shift of thinking from business-centered into one of customer-centered. With a successful blog and a content marketing strategy, your business blog can be an amazing tool for growing your business online.