So, you wanna be a blogger… what are you going to blog about?
If you’re a regular person, you can blog about anything you want — there’s no right or wrong to it. Blog for therapy, blog about the backs of cereal boxes, blog your terrible poetry; it doesn’t matter, as long as you’re happy with it.
However, if you’re blogging in support of your business, there is a right and wrong — at least, in regard to the question: Is this going to help my business?
If the answer is “no” — well, there are better things you can be doing with your time. So decide if you’re going to be a small business blogger — or simply a blogger who happens to have a small business.
Mind you, the goal doesn’t necessarily have to be “increase revenues XX%” (though it’s awesome if you can get to that level of detail and track to it). Seeing how your blogging improves your search engine results on keywords you care about is a pretty good goal. And some perfectly valid goals are a good deal softer. (Unless you’ve got the power of a market research department behind you. Sometimes, even then.)
For me, the guiding principle I use when it comes to goal-directed blogging — blogging where I’m explicitly trying to reach out to an audience — comes down to this (and I say this so often, forgive me if I repeat myself):
1. Be useful
2. Be interesting.
3. If at all possible, be both.
In other words, help improve the lives of the people who visit your site. And most of the time, this will not have anything to do with trying to sell them something.
To really figure out what will help people, you have to get out of your head, and into the heads of your visitors. And since this is really hard to do on your own (with clear eyes and no ego), this means you have to talk to your visitors, and listen to them.
Listening includes both the actual conversations you have — reading and responding to commenters, fellow bloggers and users — as well as things like watching your metrics to see what people respond to.
Another you’re probably going to want to do is to be a real person. I don’t just mean not hiding behind a fake name or persona. I mean recognizing that, as a small business blogger, you have a certain point of view and way of doing things, but that you’re also a real person.
To pick on a more maligned-profession, you can acknowledge that you’re a used-car salesperson, but if you can relate to people in a genuine way, that helps them even when you’re not trying to make a sale, people will treat you like a real person.
By being a real person, you’re trying to engage your visitors; give them a sense of investment into what you’re saying and doing; and make yourself look like the human you are, instead of a money vacuum trying to hoover out their pockets.
You can also indulge your visitors’ curiosity, by giving them a peek behind the curtain of your business. You don’t need to throw open your books and air out all your dirty laundry, but by showing them a little bit of what you do and how things work, you help show that you’re a real person.
If all this is frustratingly vague, it’s because what you’ll want to write about depends hugely on what business you’re in and what your audience needs. In followup entries, I’ll go a little further beyond restating the conventional wisdom of business blogging best practices (i.e., authenticity, transparency, responsiveness), and talk a little bit more about how you can say what you’ve got to say.
Am I just full of it? (Possibly.) Leave a comment and let me know.
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