Blogging Now: The Benefits of Blogging for your Business – Part 1

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Blogging for your business is still a popular form of online marketing. Blogging for your business gives your ideal clients and prospects a taste of who you are and your value system.   It builds credibility, sets you up as a thought leader, and contributes to the trust factor.  Blogs are now a focus of social media marketing, relationship building, SEO, and sales funnel. Micro-blogging via Twitter is the current big thing. Blogging is a great way to showcase your expertise and resonate with your ideal audience.  Consistent blogging will get your website indexed more often by the search engines, as well as introduce you to a mass market who are looking for your products and service.  You’re giving them a taste of who you are before they buy from you.

Massimo Paolini, Spectrum Group told me to think about writing for two audiences: One for my audience and the other for search engines.  Both go hand in hand.  You don’t want to write so technical for the search engines that you lose your reader, you want to write often and train the search engines to visit your website often.  I wrote 3 blogs in one week, then another week went by and I hadn’t blogged because I was wrapped up in client work.  This hurts me, so I’m better off by posting 1-2 blogs per week to keep up the momentum.  Massimo indicated that I start off slow, to write a blog post once a week (and to write enough blogs in advance and post date the publication).  He’s right.  I tell my clients to select one day a week and to shut down distractions for a few hours, conduct online keyword searches to use for headlines, categories or keywords, and to find articles they can hyperlink to that either compliment or contrast their post.  I am taking my own advice.   Here are a few ways I collect topics and information for writing relevant and informative blogs:

• I spend 2 hours per day reading, I started writing keywords and forward blogs to my in-box so I can write a compare and contrast or a complimentary post then hyperlink to it.
• I visit Quora and use the questions as fodder for blog posts, then I re=post the answer to Quora with a link back to my website (pretty clever-wink wink)
• Write down words that come to mind (topic, theme, the what, why, how, who, what,when)
• Craft a mind-map of keywords and the direction and flow I want the blog to go to
• Write 300 word posts and create part 1 and part 2 posts if I’m over 350 words, (keep my blogs are short, succinct and easy to read and follow)
• Use  Alltop.com to seek out content that I can link to that compliment or act as a contrast to my  blog post

Are you blogging?  If not, why?  My suggestion is to stop worrying about what people think, set up your WordPress blog website, add social and shareable plug-in’s and start sharing your input, insight, thoughts and opinions; don’t forget to comment other people’s blog and endorse them on Twitter and social sites. What goes around comes around.