Blogging and social media

Whether you call it your blog, news, insights, whatever, regularly adding fresh content to your website is important for several reasons: it’s good for SEO; it’s good for promoting your products and services; it’s good for sharing your knowledge and experience; it can stimulate interaction with your audience; and it provides an anchor point for other marketing content, such as social media.

Balance helps business leaders put their expertise and experience into words and share them with their target audience, via their website, email, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social networks.

By outsourcing your blog writing to Balance, you can be sure of a consistently high standard of writing and a regular, sustained delivery, all of which is essential for building a faithful audience. No-one knows your business as well as you do, but we have the skills to write as if we are you, while you continue to focus on running your business.

How to get the most out of your blog

How to… 5 reasons why… The best 10… The truth about… These are some of the most popular blog themes. If you’re an authority on something (and let’s face it, you wouldn’t be in business if you weren’t), sharing your insights and opinions can be an excellent way of raising your company profile.

But successful business blogging isn’t a case of penning your thoughts on a whim and throwing them out there willy-nilly. To make it worthwhile (and it is a lot of work), you need to be very clear as to the purpose of your blog and the people you want to read it.

Start with your audience. Who are you aiming at? Most companies have a pretty clear idea of who they want to do business with. So define your audience, right down to their interests, tastes and the places they go for information.

Next, define your key messages. You should know what these are from your marketing plan; if you haven’t got a marketing plan, this would be a good time to write one. Your key messages might be the selling points of your products and services; eg, ‘our pencils stay sharp longer than any others’. If that’s the message you want your audience to take away, there’s little point writing a blog about the football results. Unless, that is, you write down the football results in pencil.

Make your blog connect your audience to your key messages in an engaging, informative, satisfying, stimulating way. If you can include a question that prompts readers to comment, so much the better. It’s all about engagement; once your audience are taking the trouble to contact you, it’s a short step to turning them into a customer.

Now you need to let your audience know you exist. You can raise awareness of your blog by engaging with already popular blogs or podcasts in the same field: comment on their posts with challenging, thought-provoking comments that give them a taste of your voice, meaning they’ll be likely to follow you. Alternatively, start networking with other bloggers in your field.

And post snippets on social media, linking back to your blog page.

With your blog properly targeted and achieving audience engagement, the final step is to lead your readers to the Holy Grail: your products or services. This is a fine art. Impartiality is a cornerstone of thought leadership, so gratuitous plugs will undermine the credibility of your articles. Better to lead your reader gently by the hand by first convincing them of their need with your reasoned argument and then telling them where to get the solution via a well-crafted call to action.

Of course, this all takes time and skill. If you feel you lack one or other, or both, you can still get all the benefits of a high quality blog by outsourcing to a specialist writing service. Like Balance.

See.