Does your business need a blog?

We all know that having an internet presence is an important part of your marketing strategy. For many businesses this includes having a blog. But for some, they wonder – is a blog really going to help me reach my customers? Is it worth the effort?

The short answer to that is YES. The longer answer follows; 

Times have changed and as a company, you can now reach more people on the internet (using a smaller marketing budget) than ever before. One way to do this is with a blog BUT (and that “but” is in capital letters for a reason) you have to make sure that each and every blog post gives value to your customer.

Sometimes the value is in a hint or a trick that will save them time. It may be advice about using your or a competitor’s service – a sort of “be careful of” post. And sometimes, it might mean that you provide your clients with entertainment in the form of a joke or photo.

A blog is NOT about how you spent your day or what *you* think about anything (unless those musings add value.) Readers don’t want to hear about boring things. They want to have a reason to go to your site.

And much like the baseball field in the movie “Field of Dreams”, if you build a value-packed and entertaining blog, your customers will come – again and again.

So what does an effective blog look like?

• A good blog has a schedule. It’s published 2, 3 or even 5 times a week, you decide the schedule and then you stick to it.
• People are for the most part visual, make sure that your blog has graphics, pictures, and that each of your posts has a visual that fits with the writing.
• Let’s talk about time, no one has enough of it. An effective blog post is short – between 400 -600 words, if you go any longer than that, you run the risk of losing your audience.

A blog post, unlike traditional journalism, should have a voice. People want to know that a real person is writing the information, so feel free to add some of your own voice (style) to the posts. People read differently on the internet, they tend to scan vertically instead of reading horizontally, as they would in a book. Take advantage of this by using techniques like:

• ·        Shorter paragraphs
• ·        Shorter sentences
• ·        Bulleted lists
• ·        Bold text

See what I did there?

A blog post is not a newspaper article. Journalists are tough to write for newspapers by including the Who, What, When, Where, and How in the first paragraph. Blog posts are written to lead the reader to the most important idea which is usually located at the end.

Sometimes it’s a punch line, or a call-to-action, or even a “moral to the story.”

The point is to make your post be of ultimate value to your audience. Once they see that you are credible, reliable (in your schedule, format, and topics), and that you have sometime worthy to say, trust me, your audience will start coming out of that corn field that is the internet to start playing on your ball field.

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