You needn’t be a professional copywriter or experienced marketer to write business blogs. To improve your blog posts, you just need to know how to use them to your advantage. Whether you can knock out a quick article in under 30 minutes, or spend hours agonising over the right opening line to snag your audience, the most important thing to remember is that you know your business better than anyone else. Couple that with these four essential steps, and you can improve your blog posts and increase your chances of converting readers. 1. Choose the right topics Content marketing agency professionals spend years honing the craft of topic ideation and delivery – it’s why they’re so good at taking businesses large and small to the next level. But you don’t have to be a content marketing expert to recognise the importance of choosing the right topics. After all, without an interesting topic, no one is going to read your blogs. And if no one reads your blogs, your online presence will suffer greatly. So just how do you choose the right topics? Start by asking yourself the following: What are you passionate about? If you’re not interested in the topic, or it’s not relevant to your business, that will seep into your writing and turn off the reader. Who’s the audience? As a business owner, you likely cater to multiple demographics and have more than one target audience. Do your blogs appeal to everyone, or are they niche topics where you can drive readers towards a particular product or service? Is it evergreen? An ‘evergreen’ blog is one that has long-term appeal. It’s...
Does your internal communications strategy incorporate storytelling as a tool? Prose that leads people to action can appear in the most unexpected places. A rare moment of poignancy from a tormented author. A whimsical sonnet scribed by a long-dead anonymous poet. Even a bare inner-city building can become a blank canvas for the literary-inclined – the legality of graffiti notwithstanding. Many of us hold a narrow view on where we should find moving phrases and flashes of verbal brilliance – in novels and memoirs, poetry and song. But what those people often forget is that we live in a hyper-digital world. Our pencil gave way to the keyboard years ago. Why, then, can’t we tell stories without pen and paper – why should it be reserved for fiction? Let’s go even further – beyond the explosion of online journalism, blogs, editorials and interactive novels. Why can’t we bring storytelling into the workplace? No one has ownership of business storytelling. And content marketing isn’t the only outlet to drive people to action. If you have a story to tell and you know how to tell it, why shouldn’t you drive that message home through your internal communications? After all, if a story about hobbits can lead universities the world over to create Lord of the Rings-specific courses, think what your business could achieve once you embrace storytelling. Storytelling in internal communications drives engagement The biggest corporate buzzword in recent years has been ‘engagement’. The C-suite wants every employee to be fully engaged while on the clock. Supervisors want to engage their teams on a personal level. But when you look...
A content preferences survey in 2017 found that 78% of buyers prefer to use case studies over all other types of content when researching purchases. It’s easy to understand why they are such a valuable content format, but as many marketing managers could attest, the process of planning and writing case studies can be challenging. If you haven’t had to plan and write case studies before, or you’ve found the process challenging, I hope our seven tips below will make the task easier. How to plan and write case studies Click To Tweet What is a case study? A marketing case study is piece of content that showcases a successful project. It typically sets out the commencing situation, the solution recommended by the company creating the case study, how the solution was implemented, implementation actions, along with challenges encountered and how success was achieved. Why do case studies work so well? A case study provides an overview of a positive business transaction with a client. Unlike a testimonial, it’s not just a review or report from a customer who supports your business. It’s a success story. A detailed account of how you were able to successfully solve a problem your client faced. If you are targeting particular industries, writing case studies that resolve challenges unique or highly relevant to those industries, can help you gain the confidence of prospective clients. They’re often a key part of the content strategy for B2B products or services. Case studies can attract new customers, build trust in your business, and make the work of your sales team a bit easier. They also provide...
Are you aiming to write articles or blog posts that demonstrate thought leadership? Writing thought leadership articles has become a popular strategy for professionals, consultants and business owners, to increase visibility, build credibility, increase connections and even generate high level leads. But thought leadership writing isn’t as easy as it sounds, as you might have already discovered if you’re writing your own content. There are content marketing services in Melbourne and Sydney that will do the writing for you, but if you’re keen to persist and do it yourself, here are our tips for making that work. How to write a thought leadership article The following 7 tips briefly cover some of the topics included in our recently launched Thought Leadership Writing Course for professionals, consultants and business owners. 7 Tips for Thought Leadership Writing Click To Tweet It’s the thought that counts – don’t forget to include yours The term ‘thought leadership’ defines itself, but I’ve recently created my own definition: Thought leaders are individuals who are forward-thinking experts in their field, who by sharing their views and perspectives, have the capacity to change the way we see something. To be a thought leader means you must stand out from the crowd of topic experts, by having a unique perspective, or be sharing something of greater value than most ‘experts’ are sharing. So if your aim is to write thought leadership articles, simply repeating other people’s ideas won’t cut it. Being a thought leader means you’re not locked on the current way of doing things in your role or industry. You want to improve the way things are...
Would you like to create the kind of content that draws in a crowd, generates engagement and results in new connections and opportunities? Of course you would! But how do you go about it? When you want to be a champion, one of the best things to do is to look to the real champions, and check out what they do and how they do it. Naturally you don’t want to plagiarise, but imitation is the greatest form of flattery after all, and there’s nothing wrong with picking up a few tips from the high flyers! CEOs who pull this off really well often have these things in common: They courageously tell it like it is – or at least how they see it. They use descriptive language to tell stories that people can relate to. They are generous in sharing their thoughts, ideas and experiences without asking for anything in return. They bring their personality with them so that you get a glimpse of it through their posts. To demonstrate, let’s turn to LinkedIn Pulse and look at three very different business owners who do this well, each in their own way – Mark Bouris, Moby Siddique, and Thang Ngo. Before we dive in, let me point out that Moby and Thang don’t yet have massive followings on Pulse, but they’re on the way with over 1200 and 1700 followers respectively, and if they continue to publish content with heart, (and in Moby’s case a little more often!) their followings are likely to grow substantially. As you might expect, with the advantage of being well known, Mark Bouris...
As a content marketing tool, blogging can be very good for just about any type or size of business. Business blogging can help you to better connect with your customers, to provide them with valuable information on a topic, and to inject fresh content into your website. However, while just about anyone can write a few paragraphs on a topic, successful blogging involves a great deal more than that. Business blogging must be planned well, done wisely, and provide real value to target audiences. MORE: Choosing the Best Channels for Promoting Business Content In the sections below we cover some of the benefits of blogging, and provide tips on how to blog successfully. Keep in mind that if you don’t have blog writers on your in-house team, it’s possible to engage a professional business blog writing service. 7 Benefits of business blogging Creates fresh content: Search engines make a point of giving preference to quality websites that show signs of being active. This means that while you are not likely to update or change your web pages very often, blogging can give you the opportunity to regularly inject new, relevant content on your site and create new pages for search engine indexing and ranking. This can help to increase the likelihood of your content showing up in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) than if your website was just left to go ‘stale’. Better connect with customers: Blogging allows you to create content that offers value to your target audiences and customers, and to connect with them by allowing comments, interaction and feedback. Provides opportunities for sharing and promotion: Your blogs can...
