Dude, Blog Your Business!

There is no doubt that a blog is greatly enhanced when you get participation through the comments section. Although you, as the business owner, are trying to demonstrate your knowledge and authority through the blog, readers insights, questions and conversations greatly add to that depth of knowledge. It also goes to increasing a sense of community where people will be much more likely to return and join in that conversation because their input is valued.

There are a number of ways that you can encourage that participation by what you write in your posts. One way is to ask! Simple eh? But how many bloggers do it? At the end of your post you just add a sentence that says something like “If anyone has a different opinion on the matter we’d love to hear from you” or “If anyone knows of other …” etc. Most importantly you should always make the time to answer a comment when you receive one, otherwise you risk missing out on that conversation.

When you do reply, be sure to reply with more than just a generic “thank you for making a good point”. Reply with depth and with something that moves the conversation along. If another person replies to a comment, don’t feel obliged as the blogger to join in the conversation. Sometimes it is better to let the conversation run and, maybe, join in if you have something pertinent to say. If you get a lot of comments on your posts this can be a great way to let the readers lead the conversation rather than you having to answer each and every comment. But it is something you need to closely monitor.

We always try to encourage owners of business blogs to stay positive with both their blog posts and their comments. It sets the tone for the readers and while a negative reader comment can sometimes be useful, in that the business owner can be seen to overcome it, it should always be answered in an equally positive manner. In the end, conversations are what makes blogs so powerful for businesses. It is the next best thing to a face-to-face networking event. Make the most of your conversations!

Something I hear fairly often when I talk to business owners at networking events is that they worry about how much time it is going to take. Well, it is like anything in life, if you don’t put anything in you won’t get anything back. Business owners attend networking meetings – how much out of their day does that take? Two hours? Ultimately, it is the business owner who knows most about their business, and it is their authority and expertise that is being built through the blog – so are they not the best people to post on the blog? We at Dude, Blog Your business certainly think so – we encourage, and even train business owners how to post on their blogs.

In terms of time, it shouldn’t take more than half an hour to post on your blog. You should certainly post on the blog at least twice a week if possible, and space the posts out so each gets picked up by different search engine crawls. The more often you can post the more attention you will get from the search engines, but the content must be useful and worth reading to a potential client. Visitors to your blog won’t bother to return if they see poorly written or unhelpful content. Neither will they share your content with their friends – the point of Social Media Marketing!

You don’t have to write a novel, though. There are no hard and fast rules but 200 – 300 words is plenty. People are more likely to read several bite-sized chunks rather than one long piece. Keep it light and chatty as well – remember who your potential audience is. And PLAN AHEAD! If you need to use technical terms or jargon terms, explain them. Most importantly, always include a picture. It makes the blog post more appealing, more fun to read and will draw people in to the blog far more if you use plenty of images, and videos of course. Just make sure they are relevant and not copyrighted! YouTube is a good source of videos and make it easy for you to embed them into your post. For still images StockXchng   has a good selection of copyright free images.
 
Business owners will need to incorporate their blog into their daily routine, and it is a different mind set than with a website, but it is a rewarding one both on a marketing level and a personal level. And, if you ever need to get an idea of how a post should look and feel, we have plenty of examples on our blog!