What’s the point of a blog?

 

If you’re not an enthusiastic blogger you can be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about.  You hear people rambling on about ‘Content is King’ and how important it is to be writing good content, but why?

The simple answer is ‘visibility’, but there’s much more to it than that.

An article can:

• Be a huge reputation builder for you and it gives you good quality content to share in social media, on your website and by email.
• Establish you as an authority in your industry and attract the media, giving you opportunities to be the ‘go-to expert’ for print, digital and broadcast media.
• Maintain your visibility without having to come up with fresh content every time you go online.
• Show off your expertise, demonstrate your knowledge and educate potential clients.

This last point is particularly important.  If someone is looking for the kind of help you offer, there will almost always be competition.  They’ll have a friend who knows someone, or a networking contact who does that, one of their clients might give them a recommendation.  But all these are contacts that are based on someone else’s opinion.

If you’ve been writing great content that shares your knowledge and shows people the depth of expertise you can offer, they don’t need someone else to recommend you (although it won’t do any harm if you have great testimonials too).  They can form their own opinion based on what they’ve read and can see you know.

Blogs are there to inform and educate, not to sell your services, but to demonstrate them.

Don’t reinvent the wheel

If you’re beginning to see the point, finding things to write about might be a bit of a challenge.  But I bet you talk to people about your services all the time.  You talk to potential clients, you talk to your networking connections, you answer questions people ask.  That’s all potential blog material.

You can write:

• How to’ articles explaining something that your clients find useful
• Tips to help people in your target market to make life easier
• An outline of common mistakes people make, and how to avoid them
• Your opinion on a topical item - explaining your rationale
• The answer to a frequently asked question
• What’s the latest new development in your industry - and why it’s important for your readers.

And that’s just for starters.

When you’ve written your blog don’t forget to share the link on social media - not just on the day you post it, but next week, next month and, if it’s not topical, next year too.

Get it out to your newsletter list - they almost certainly won’t have spotted it on your website and have already ‘told’ you (they signed up) they’re interested in what you do.

Don’t forget that fresh content on your website keeps the search engines interested too, so they visit your website more often.

Get on that keyboard and get yourself noticed!

5 steps to make a strategy work

When we meet new clients the first question is ‘what are your goals?’  This is not just for their social media, blogs, website or whatever they need help with, but the overall business goals.  

Why is this important?  Simply, because if we understand what their business aims to achieve, we can give better advice about what activities will help them to get there.

Having goals isn’t the first step - it’s what comes before the first step - let’s call it Step 0.

Here are the five steps to success:

1. Who are your target clients?

Not just a generic group, but a detailed profile of the people who would be an absolutely perfect client for you.  Get into the detail (this might help), this will help you to get really focused.

2. Why you?

Before you start trying to influence people, it’s important to know why they would choose you.  This is where you need to find out why your clients like you/what you do for them?  Don’t guess, ask.  It’s not about what you do - it’s about what they get.

3. Where do you find them?

When you understand who you’re trying to reach, you now need to work out where they hang out - both online and offline.  This will allow you to focus on the right people in the right places, rather than just hoping the right people will see - and get - your message.

4. Review your options

Now it’s time to look at the tools you have available.  If you’re trying to put a marketing campaign together, you’ll need to review:

• The social media that will best engage your target clients; whether LinkedIn will have a better reach than Facebook, for instance.  
• Which publications your target customer reads and how you might get published in those.
• What type of information they will respond to best, to inform what you blog about, put out on social media and include in newsletters or email campaigns.

Now you can create your strategy of what you’ll do, where you’ll do it and how it will be followed up.

5. Means, manpower and measurement

This is ‘who does what, when and how - and how do we know if it’s working?’  With a clear strategy, this is where tactics come into play.

None of these are set in stone, circumstances change, goals evolve and people have new ideas.  All these need reviewing regularly to ensure that your strategy remains valid to achieve your goals.

Is a book a step too far?

They say everyone has a book in them, but, if writing isn’t your primary skill, it can feel like an impossible mountain to climb.  However, you don’t have to write 50,000 words to become an author.

There are many ways to deliver your content, besides actually sitting down to plan and write a book.  My advice is to start with the baby steps.

Baby step 1:  Plan to succeed

You don’t have to have a massive creative mind to write good content.  Much of it is about planning, whether you’re writing a blog, a speech, a proposal or an academic dissertation.  A good structure to get you started comes in 5 parts:

1. Introduction: what is this about?
2. Key point 1: your first point with associated explanation.
3. Key point 2: your next point with any supporting facts/data
4. Key point 3: your third point with information that helps people to understand
5. Conclusion: the ‘so what’ of your item, why it’s important to the reader, how they can use the information, the benefits of applying it, etc.

As you get into writing regularly you’ll find you can create different structures, but this is a good place to start.  It makes writing your blog or article easy for the reader to digest - and easier for you to write as you have a framework to work with.

Baby step 2:  Get the blogging habit

Writing is a discipline and a habit.  If you find it tough to tackle writing a big project, start with a small one.  A blog doesn’t have to be a thousand words, it can be just 300 words as long as it makes a point or explains a useful process.

Baby step 3: Create a lead magnet

A lead magnet is a document that potential customers will find interesting, so it needs to have real value.  Whereas a blog may be your opinion, a lead magnet needs to have a solid ‘how to’ in it, to educate people and help them do something they don’t already know how to do.

Typically a lead magnet can be anything from a single page to around 20 pages, but there are no rules that say it has to be a particular length.  Plan your lead magnet as a longer article and ensure it delivers something you’re an expert in.  It might be 5 tips or 7 steps or 3 things to avoid, that will help you to get your structure in place.

Baby step 4: Write an ebook

If you’ve used planning strategies, written a regular blog post and created a lead magnet you’re ready for the next step - writing an ebook.  

The good thing about an ebook is that it doesn’t have to be any particular length.  You go about this in exactly the same way as your blog and your lead magnet, it’s just longer.  

The big tip is to review all your current blogs as you have almost certainly already got material you can recycle into a book.  I once wrote a blog every day for a month and then recycled them into a book - editing, reordering and adding action points every day.   

Baby step 5: The final one!

Now you’ve created an ebook - and you know you can do it.  Writing that full-length book is no longer a big step, it’s just another step along the way.

Of course, if you really find writing difficult you can get help with all of these activities - that’s what we do for our clients.

 

10 ways to make your lead magnet work

Lead magnets don’t work!  While the name implies that potential clients are magically attracted to you via your lead magnet, there’s no magic involved!

If you haven’t heard of a ‘lead magnet’, it’s something of value that you give away in exchange for the recipient’s contact details.  That puts them into your marketing funnel.  Typically, this is a pdf download that delivers information of value to your ideal client audience.

When loads of people use these to grow their lists - why don’t they work?

One of my clients asked me if I would guarantee that the lead magnet we’re working on would deliver results.  I had to say ‘no’.  I can help clients to create attractive documents with bags of value for their audience - but I can’t guarantee that their list will grow as I have no control over how they promote it.

If you rely on the odd person noticing it on your website and downloading it, you’re probably going to get one or two people added to your list a month.  However, if you invest a little in promoting it on Facebook ads or even Google ads, you could end up with hundreds of new sign ups every week.

If you don’t want to spend money on growing your list here are some other ways to get more sign-ups:

• Email all your existing clients with the link to sign up.
• Email everyone else you know with the link to sign up (you’ll need to do these individually if you want to stay compliant with data protection).  Don’t write off friends and family, even if they’re not in business they know people who are.
• Send new connections on your social media the link to your sign-up page and invite them to take advantage of your freebie.
• Put the link to the download in your social media profiles.
• Put the link into your email signature.
• Print the link on the back of your business card.
• Get a digital business card and have the form so people can sign up directly from the digital document.
• Tell people about it in your networking 60 seconds presentations.
• Get the document title and link signwritten on your company vehicle.
• Get leaflets or postcards made with the image of the document and the link to sign up made and do a drop round all the local businesses near you.

You just need a bit of creativity - and your list will grow.