Personal blogs are different in intent than business blogs. Prospects and clients are reading your business blog postings and forming an opinion of you. There’s probably no room for politics or religion in your business blog, unless your business (or association) is about those topics.
Write About Something You’re Passionate About
That may sound obvious, but focus on your prospects’ and clients’ problems and interests as well. While a blog on Spider-Man and Halo 2 might garner me some readers, they’re probably not the most likely prospects for my business. (I’m not saying my clients might not enjoy the occasional graphic novel or XBox game, just it’s not their defining characteristic.)
I define my best prospects as small business owners, professionals and associations that want to leverage the power of the Web to build their business. These are people who are looking for advice and help on email marketing, search engine optimization, and building a Web site that works.
Thus, I write almost extensively on these topics. Any new tools that I see that can help a client succeed on the Web I’ll write about.
[By the way, do you notice how I link all the important words above?
They all go to specific pages on my Web site that address these issues.
Since linked words, or "anchor text," are often considered more
important or relevant by many top search engines, I'm hoping that this
will improve the ranking of the specific pages I've linked to in
regards to these keywords.]
What are your prospects and clients most interested in? What problems do they face? They will probably search on these topics at Google or Yahoo; if you’ve blogged on these issues there’s a good chance that they will find you…depending of course on
- how popular your blog is,
- how long it’s been around,
- how many people link to it, and
- how focused a posting is on a topic they are interested in.
Yesterday (1/25/05) I noted that Google had most recently visited my site on the 23rd. Today I notice that they were also there on the 24th. It seems–from this very small sampling–that they may be visiting just about every day now, and my blogs are appearing about 2 days after I post them.
Sweet! I’ll keep checking…
Rich Brooks
Portland Web site Designer and Internet Marketer
