In this article, I’m going to talk about using a blog to promote your business and help you identify what to write about in your blog. The answer is ridiculously simple — in fact, you’ll be amazed how simple it truly is.
Think about the content marketing strategy called, “They Ask We Answer.” There’s actually a book that talks about this very model. It’s a great book and I highly recommend. The total cost on Amazon is around $17-18 and it’s money well-spent. You can also listen to the audio book if you’re too busy too read.
When you think about what to write about in your company blog, think about the questions your prospective customers, clients and patients are asking. Document all of those questions. You can use a notepad or a Google Doc or a spreadsheet. Just write down every single question that people ask and then each blog post should be an answer to those questions.
This is how simple it is. You do not need to come up with any ideas. Your customers, clients, patients already gave you all of the ideas that you need in order to write your blog. It’s a strategy used in the best company blogs and is a truly effective source of online content marketing.
By following this model, it will make it a lot easier for you to actually create the content, and here’s why.
You don’t need to pile on extra work. You already answer these questions day in and day, out so what could be simpler than writing down, or dictating these answers into a recording device and letting some software transcribe the words?
Let me tell you a story that is very near and dear to my heart because it happened to me 6 years ago when I was at the conference in Boston and I met Bob. Bob was this guy in his late 50s. He asked me what I did and I told him and asked him what he did, and he said: I’m semi-retired and looking for the next big idea.
I asked him: Bob what’d you do before?
And he said: Sasha, I owned four sleep clinics in the state of Alaska.
I said: Interesting. Did you sell those?
And he said: No, I didn’t sell them, but what happened was around 2009, one of my associates who was answering the phone came up to me and said: “Bob, people call us and ask us the same stupid questions time and time and time and again, so why don’t we – instead of answering the same stupid questions – just write up an FAQ section on our website and when they call we just send them to the website so they can read the answers for themselves?”
Bob thought to himself: That’s interesting. If people are asking the same questions on the phone, chances are there are some people who are asking the very same questions online. He also thought that sending people who are calling him to the website was a stupid idea since you already have them on the phone, but it’s a good idea to write up all of the FAQs, so Bob ask his phone staff that, for the next two weeks, to write down every question that people ask.
In the end it took them 3 weeks to come up with a list of 113 unique questions, and then Bob tells them: OK, we cannot create an FAQ section with 113 unique questions and answers. That will be too long so what we’re going to do instead is that for every question that we’ve been asked we’re going to create a blog post. His team rebelled. They said, you want us to write 113 pages of answers? No way.
And he tells them: Calm down because, no, you don’t have to do it overnight or next week. Let’s do a couple of posts per day, each one of you.
It took them a few months to produce 113 pages of content, but once they started publishing that content, Bob noticed an interesting thing: the traffic volume to his website started dramatically increasing. Why? Because they created a lot of content that was in demand. People were actually looking for that information online but they didn’t find it until his website came up on the search engines. Now they could find the answers to questions they were looking for and Google began ranking Bob’s website fairly high.
And because that information was viable and valuable, people actually spent a considerable amount of time interacting with that information, reading it so they stayed longer on the website.
When Google looks at how much time people spend on your website versus your competitors and sees that they’re spending a considerable amount of time on your website versus your competitors, chances are Google is going to increase your ranking and as it increases your ranking, more and more people will see your website on search and more and more people will come to your website.
Long story short. More and more people started coming to Bob’s website and more people started actually coming to his clinics so his traffic increased dramatically and his revenue increased substantially as a result.
But what happened four years later in 2013? One of his large mainland competitors came to him and said: “Bob we want to buy you out”
“You want to buy my clinics?” Bob replied. And his competitor said: “We’re not interested in your clinics, what we are interested in is your website.”
Bob sold his website for 17 million dollars. The one secret ingredient was 113 pages of content. That content answered the common questions that people ask. If you follow the very same strategy with your blog, chances are your traffic is going to increase dramatically, especially if your competitors have not taken the time to do this.
In turn, your revenue will start increasing substantially. Do this and your business will grow. You can thank me later. Don’t do this as I assume the vast majority of people will not, and your business will not grow, at least, it will not grow as fast.
I really beg you to take the time and put in the time and effort to do this because your business will be so much better off for it.
By the way, here’s a hack that you could use to speed up the production process. Just as I am recording this video in the format of somebody has asked me a question: ‘What content should I write on my blog?” I’m providing an answer and video. After I’m done recording this video, someone on my team is going to send this recording to a transcription service or software which will transcribe this content and one of my copywriters is going to take that transcription and make it look even better.
Then we’re going to post this video and the written content for this blog post and it’s going to take all of about 20 minutes of my time because I already knew the answer to this question.
Using this strategy – because you answer questions all the time – you could do the exact same thing. Instead of actually typing up content which most people hate to do, just stand in front of a camera (even a smartphone) and record answers to those questions.
You may have 100 questions or 200 questions or 50 questions. Do as many as there are questions and then send them to transcription service, then have a copywriter type it up for you and then – voila – have it posted on your website, make sure that’s also optimized. You can do this, your staff members can do this, or you can hire a content marketing agency to do it for you.
So the moral of the story is that content marketing for business can be handled easily and efficiently. Just listen to your customers, scour social media for what prospects are talking about, and you’ll never run out of business blog ideas again.
There’s quite a bit of science to that. If you want to learn how to make sure that your posts yield the greatest return is in getting the most attention and converting people into an actual viable business, reach out to us. Just hit contact on our website and go fill out the contact form and say you’d like to learn how to get better results for my blog. We’ll happily advise you absolutely free of charge.
Sure, and this blog post is a clear example of why blogging still matters. This blog post tells you how you can create a blog for your business and what you should write about. Blogging is about giving people, in this case, small business owners, answers and information that will benefit them. And those people you help find what they're looking for can become your potential customers.
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