Define your goals

Maintaining a business blog is a long-term commitment: an investment of time, energy, and effort. As soon as you stop updating it and sharing relevant information, there will be no interest in it. So from the beginning, ask yourself the following questions:

Why am I doing this?
What do I want to get out of the blog?
What will my audience get out of it?
Maybe you’re going to boost sales, or increase the number of clients, or build a business from the ground up, or become the face of a brand, or write a book in general. Depending on what you need, you’ll develop a content plan. Beware of vague categories; your goals should be as specific and detailed as possible. Every time you come up with another topic to write about or determine content, you should refer back to your main objectives and ask yourself how well they fit with your plans.

Research your audience

To create relevant and useful content, you need to know your audience and what they want. You have to meet their need for specific information – exactly what they’re missing. Remember, you can’t please everyone at once.

If you’re providing specific services to a general audience, explain the processes in simpler language, detailing all the mechanics you describe. If you’re the founder of a B2B service and an expert in a specific niche, look for new information useful to professionals. Use your website and social media analytics to find out the socio-demographic makeup of your audience and build a specific reader profile, so you can get started on creating your blog.

Determine the frequency of entries

Consistency is the foundation of blogging. You need to solidify reader expectations and keep a reasonable schedule. How much time are you going to devote to creating valuable content? How many posts can you realistically manage to write without forcing yourself to sit through them overnight? The key is not frequency, but regularity.

If you stop sticking to this parameter, people will get tired of waiting for new content and won’t come back to your blog pages. In addition, the information must be useful and well designed, and if you force yourself to write often, it can have a bad effect on the quality of the material.

Create an editorial calendar

Chances are, you already have a lot of ideas you want to pursue – now it’s just a matter of fixing them. Creating an editorial calendar will make working on your blog much more efficient – you’ll know what day, what time, and what material is due out. There are plenty of tools for creating such a calendar, from Google Docs to various task managers.

Instead of looking at them, let’s focus on the main thing – what items your plan should include. These are posting date, author, title, status, section, tags, notes and call to action.

The editorial calendar and material schedule shouldn’t pressure you-it’s okay if you don’t keep up with something, since it’s not your core business. The main purpose of this tool is to organize you and make sure you have at least a rough idea of what you’ll be writing about tomorrow, this week, or this month.

Write

Now that we’ve figured out your plan and goals, it’s time to turn our attention to content. What you share with your readers depends on your objectives and audience, but we’ll give you a few popular examples:

Company News. Talk about what’s going on in your office, introduce your readers to new employees, share information about company culture.

Research. This might be data about customer behavior, industry information or market forecasting. You may have noticed some changes or trends – don’t necessarily keep them to yourself, share them on the blog.

Opinions on the news. If you see an interesting news story that relates to your business or industry in some way, give readers your perspective on what happened. Stick to the facts, but don’t be afraid to make your point.

Product reviews. These can be recently released tools that help your business, or long-known products with hidden potential that you suddenly discovered. Testing will take some time, but the information may be useful to other industry players, which will provide you with additional traffic and possibly new subscribers.

Promote your blog

After you’ve published an entry, you still have a lot of work to do. Now you need to get the information out to as wide an audience as possible.

Take full advantage of social media.

Create a presentation of publications.

Attach your blog URL to your email signature.

Use keywords.

When posting a link to a post on Twitter, put hashtags that match your topic.

Start your headlines with numbers (people like ordered information).

Link to earlier posts in your posts.

The post 6 steps to creating a successful business blog appeared first on Continuity Compliance.

1. Minimize the barriers customers face

If you focus only on the merits of your offerings, you risk losing sight of the barriers that make products and services inaccessible to consumers. Thereby giving competitors time to create barrier-free equivalents.

Barriers can be of several types:

Operational problems.
For example, installation difficulties, incompatible technology and equipment, ill-conceived distribution, and long delivery times.

It was because of operational problems that BlackBerry’s promising messenger BBM failed. The company dominated the smartphone market before the advent of Android and iOS gadgets. But with the growing popularity of competitors, the demand for BlackBerry began to fall.

And all because the BBM messenger was tied only to its own devices and was not available for new platforms. When BlackBerry realized its mistake and made BBM compatible with other smartphones, it was already too late – WhatsApp was open to all platforms.

Fear of taking risks and experimenting
Users do not want to understand something new and complicated. So make the adaptation process as easy as possible for them.

First, allow them to test the product. The opportunity to try the product or service during the trial period will reduce the fear of the unknown.

Second, educate customers on how to choose and then use the right product from your range. You can do this with articles, video reviews, and special instructions.

Financial Inaccessibility.
To lower the money barrier, make the price psychologically acceptable to the customer and convince them of its fairness.

For example, offer payment in installments, the option of shared ownership or group subscriptions. And minimize risk – offer a refund or product if it doesn’t fit.

2. Choose the right positioning

One of the causes of business failure is unclear positioning. When a company can’t decide which category its product belongs to, the consumer doesn’t know what to expect from it.

People have beliefs that make it easy for them to choose. For example, the more megapixels, the better the camera, and organic products are healthier than others. But if a product does not meet clear quality criteria, it is difficult for it to find its consumer.

This happened with the PlayBook, RIM’s tablet. It was positioned as a “professional” alternative to the iPad. But the gadget did not have access to a VPN, a printing function, an e-mail system, and other options that are important for professional tablets. Because of this, the PlayBook didn’t become as popular as its competitors. The company had to recall $485 million worth of unsold merchandise.

2. Be consistent with your branding

It’s hard to create a strong brand without clear associations – then your company won’t stand out from the competition and won’t be remembered. Associations are formed in two ways:

From the inside out – through marketing
From outside in – on the basis of the real experience of customers.
To make associations work for the brand, you need to:

think about and begin to promote a number of distinctive company characteristics before the word-of-mouth starts to work

Make sure that every offer and level of service reinforces those associations, not contradicts them
If the brand image is at variance with its actions, nothing good will come of it. A prime example of this is Aston Martin, which in 2011 released a small city car, the Cygnet.

It was a “parody” of the budget version of Toyota iQ, which was not associated with the English brand of sports supercars. That is why Aston Martin sold 150 cars in the first year instead of the planned 4 thousand and curtailed production.

The post Solutions that will make your business stronger appeared first on Continuity Compliance.