A Genuine Article

Simple advice to absolute beginners with business blogs in 2014

By Marc Carson · Monday December 23, 2013

If you just started a business blog, you may feel overwhelmed. What to write about?

Please do these things:

• Blog as frequently as you can. If that means “once a month”, hire somebody to do it for you on a more frequent basis. Twelve posts a year isn’t enough to build a significant online marketing effort.
• Blog about things that helped your customers or clients. Hopefully those are your products and services. But what about your products and services helped them? Be specific. “Today I was thinking about a problem that many of my customers have,” or “One of my clients recently had a breakthrough with…” are the types of starter sentences that may help you develop useful, popular blog posts.
• Avoid the urge to blog about things that won’t be helpful to anybody. You know the type: “We are so wonderful. Blah blah blah us, me, we.” Don’t tell people how wonderful you are. Show them why you are wonderful.
• Use exact terms. If you say you have a great technique or product, don’t hide any important details. Explain how it works.
• Practice writing new blog posts in less than ten minutes. Write three sentences, just to practice. Did you get the general points down in three sentences? Get to the point quickly and deliver what your headline says you are going to talk about. Later on you can take longer, flesh things out and add more information to your articles after you publish them. But short-form blogging is super valuable. You don’t have to write a “full page” or anything like that.
• As soon as you publish anything, share it on Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter. If you can’t do that, pick either Facebook or Twitter at a minimum. Place your blog article link into your status message and see if there’s any response in the next day.
• Over time, watch to see what kinds of blog posts get you the best response. Refer to your visitor reports to find out what’s getting to be popular.

Don’t do these things:

• Don’t trick people with headlines that over-promise. They’ll remember. If you say you have an amazing product, or an amazing technique that will change lives, that had better be the actual fact. If it’s debatable, maybe correcting e.g. “change your life” to “change the way you think about your career” would be more appropriate.
• Don’t speak in vague general terms as if you’re keeping a secret.
• DON’T USE ALL CAPS. This will scare people off because it sounds too urgent and shouty. You can use it sparingly if you really need to.
• Don’t worry about being perfect. Your blog is there to help people find out about you! Just dive in and start writing and making mistakes, and fixing mistakes, like we all do.