What Should I Blog About?

What is Your Blog For?

There are several different reasons your blog should be an important part of your online business:

  • Personal. A blog encourages you to use a personal voice. It humanises your online presence, which is hard to do with standard web pages. People relate better to people than they do to brochures. Use your blog to project the personality of your business online to make it more interesting for your readers.
  • Conversational. A blog lends itself to a conversational style. Use it to encourage readers to comment, to post about you on their blog, or to subscribe to your feed. Once you have earned some attention, maximise the value of it by building a conversation. Otherwise a lot of visitors to your site will see you once and never return.
  • Trust. Making your presence personal and conversational helps build trust. It is a lot harder to sell online without trust. Build trust, and sales will follow.
  • Reach Out. A blog is an excellent tool for engaging with other bloggers. They have audiences. Earn a blogger’s trust, and they may introduce you to their audience.
  • Sails for Search. Going metaphorical here – if you want your ship to catch the search traffic breeze, you have to throw up your sails. Each blog post is a new sail. By posting regularly, you not only show the search engines fresh content, you are creating new, useful content along the way that simply wasn’t there before.

Here are two simple approaches – targetting search and referral visitors – to attracting relevant visitors using your blog.

Attracting Organic Search Visitors

When someone types a phrase into a search engine, they are presented with a list of organic and paid search results. They are great visitors to attract to your site if what they are searching for relates to your business.

  1. Research. Each month go to Wordtracker and review one or more of your primary key word families.
  2. Plan. Identify useful keyword phrases that have predicted search traffic between 15 and 200. If you find 4 of these, you have one post per week.
  3. Do. Write posts to help solve a problem related to those niche keywords. Use the niche keyword in your article title and link to related posts/pages in your site (and externally, of course). Include a Call to Action in each of your posts.
  4. Review. Check your analytics and see whether these posts are driving traffic to your site. in Google Analytics, check Sources of Traffic to see if they keyword phrases deliver traffic, and check Content to see if your articles are being read. Analyse your effectiveness.

Tip of the hat to Ciaran McKeever – see this post for the full story.

Attracting Referral Visitors

When someone is reading a blog or a website, they may see a link to a related web page. When they click through to that web page, they are called a Referral visitor. If they were reading about something closely related to your business, they are a great visitor to attract to your site.

  1. Research. Review the audience you want to publish for. Consider what blogs they are already reading online. Develop a Top 10 list of blogs, and identify the bloggers involved and how they define their audience. What could you write that would not only solve a problem for your audience, but would also interest the bloggers?
  2. Plan. Each month identify blog posts you can write that will solve a problem and interest a blogger. Once again, choose 4 of these and you have one a week. Regularly read the Top 10 blogs and notice any posts that present an opportunity for you to respond with your own post.
  3. Do. Write one post every week that includes a link to a Top 10 blog. Think about your audience and the audience of the other blog, and make it as relevant as you can to their interests. Include a link to their post in the body of your post. Find their trackback address if it exists and enter it in the trackback field for your post. Write at least one comment every week on a Top 10 blog.
  4. Review. Read the Top 10 blogs and notice if you are attracting interest. Use analytics to review Referral traffic. What is working? Consider asking some of the Top 10 bloggers for advice on how you can improve your blog.

Note: you can also use your blog to help drive social network visitors. However while this can drive a lot of visitors, they are nowhere near as valuable as search or referral visitors. Learning how to get the most out of social networking visitors takes a lot longer.

There are many more ways to use your blog online.