Writing a blog: A business like approach

Your business website is useful, probably essential, in today’s world.  It can provide potential clients and existing customers with contact details, descriptions of your products or services, maybe an online shop, support notes, specifications, technical notes and white papers.

Now the real problem is how do you attract visitors to your site?  And not just any old visitor – you need the type of visitor who is going to be interested in your product, wants to co-operate with your business, wants to supply your business or actually has cash and wants to buy from you.

You can, and should promote your business website through your business literature:  your business cards, advertising leaflets, letterheads and even invoices.  You should also put a link to your business site at the bottom of every email your business sends out.

If you’ve covered all of the above then you’re working well.  However, you still need to drive traffic to the website and then from the site to the business.  There are four ways to do this:

• through public relations, probably through the print and trade press
• through advertising, Google Adwords, being a useful way to start
• and the third way through blogging
• social media, such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter

Originally a blog was an online diary that displayed entries, called posts, in a reverse chronological order, so that the last post written is displayed on the home page.  Today a post can combine text, images and other media, such as video.  The post can also contain links to other web pages both within the site and externally to any web page on the net.

Other common features of a present day blog are that usually visitors can make comments on an individual post, useful to start conversations with customers or as a way to provide support.  A second feature are that there are numerous add-ins, plugins, and screen layouts, themes, available to upgrade or modify the look of the blogging package.

WordPress, the leading, free blogging package has over a thousand plugins, most free of charge, and thousands of themes, again many are free, or reasonably low cost.

Like all business promotional materials you have to write in a style that suits your audience.  Most businesses will write in a sensible, easy to read to style.

Some businesses will have to break the rules.  My son, Tom, during his student days used to rent out a night club one night a week aimed at attracting students and young professionals.  His ironic style worked well. A local newspaper labelling him, ‘Mr Bad Taste’, and demanded the club be closed down, which really boosted the number of clubbers attending.

Most people using the internet are web savvy.  They don’t respond well to heavy selling.  In the words of my friend Dave you should:

create on a web site a happy atmosphere around a product, and then when the visitor is ready to buy, then give them a clear path to purchase.

Things to write on a business blog could be:

• technical details of the product
• happy, smiling customers using the product
• support questions answered
• benefits of using the product
• unusual uses of the products
• news of special deals or upgrades

by product I mean either a physical product or service.

Two things that you should be aiming to do with your blog is:

• to build a community around the website.  This can be through the blog’s comments section or a forum.  The latter is really useful for a support service.
• to build up subscribers to the business’ newsletter.  Sent out regularly, usually monthly, or ever other month, a newsletter keeps your customers, and potential customers, up to date on the business’ developments.

Narrow the niche: I live in a fantastic neighbourhood to the west of London. A few years ago I was working with a local programming and web design business.

Their website, which was well designed, was targeting the whole internet.  They advertised the same skills as thousands and thousands of competing businesses.  Their website was thousands of places down in the search engine searches. So they got very little traffic to their site.

So over many coffees and a pleasant, sunny afternoon’s drink at the nearby White Swan Pub, on the bank of the Thames we developed a strategy.

We decided to re-focus the business.  They were quite experienced in working with databases and had had a couple of contracts with the local council, but most of their work was giving support to local businesses for both computing and web design.

It was decided to try and work with medium sized businesses.  Instead of offering just the usual web design service it was decided to focus on e-commerce and more complex, interactive systems.

They set up a simple blog and email newsletter supporting the more complex systems and provided a lot of case studies of businesses in and around west London.  Once set up they promoted the newsletter through the business press, local press and sending a press release to local business organisations.

Soon they were asked to give talks to business networking groups, which resulted in their getting both big contracts and quite a few simpler web design projects.  The newsletter and website provided a great way to keep in touch with their customers and  brought in a number of new clients.

About two years ago they were offered a big contract, as a sub-contractor, as part of a large health service contract.  This was so lucrative that they decided to focus solely on this project and closed the business. Two of the team are now living as contractors in Australia and another in the US.  The remaining two are now full time, highly paid contractors.

• Try and find a narrow niche for your writing – for example a specific location or demonstrating your business’ specialist skills or your product’s unique selling point.
• Use your blog/newsletter as  part of your conventional marketing – you have a good reason to send a press release to the business and trade press, business organisations and local press.  Update the blog every few months to keep the publicity coming.
• You need a newsletter – to remind people about your business.

It requires fresh content on a regular basis. In general a business can update say every two or three weeks, but a blog that’s not been updated in six months looks very dated and will not impress potential customers.

Someone needs to handle the queries and emails.  One of the easiest ways to really hack off a potential customer is not to respond to their comments or emails.  Sadly too many businesses still neglect the email.

My wife responded to a car promotion.  She knew which car she wanted and this deal was very good.  The garage’s automated website promised us that they would phone us up within 24 hours to arrange a test drive. They didn’t and in fact never did.  They had no selling to do as we would have bought at the offer price.  They lost the sale to another garage offering exactly the same deal.

Blogs do need someone to keep an eye on them. Blog software needs updating.  Blogs occasionally get technical problems.  Someone needs to keep an eye on the hosting contract and making sure that the domain is renewed.

There also needs to be someone to help sort out the technical problems with content writing.  The format might go strange.  Images need reducing in size.

Are you planning to use a blog in your business?  How are you promoting your business online?