6 Things to Avoid in Starting Your Company Blog

Blogging tips for an effective social marketing campaign

Have you ever wondered what you should do when starting a blog? What about what you shouldn’t do? Targeting an audience, creating quality material, and basically generating interest in your brand are the ultimate goals, but there are a few habits that tend to reduce the value our blogs bring to our brand image.

There are certain situations to avoid when constructing and ultimately posting a blog. Start by developing a plan. Basically, your blog should start out as a summary of your profile and goals. But, there are a few more important details to keep in mind when setting up your blog. 

Top Six Things that Must Not Be Overlooked

1. You don’t have to make a blog a group project for your entire business. While advice and even guest activity are welcomed when helping construct material, it shouldn’t be the task of every part of your brand to simultaneously establish a blog. In some cases, it can be useful to spread out the development process, such as investigating a portion of your business separately in each blog. Just be sure that it doesn’t interfere with your brand managers’ endeavors, since that would affect the material in the blog and the ultimate success of your brand. Basically, don’t allow the work on the blog set-up to become a burden - or else it will cost you…

2. This leads to the issue of being unreliable. When a business owner is focused on their business, establishing a blog can seem like a to-do project that can wait on the back-burner forever. But, one of the worst things to do is to establish a blog and fail to follow up regularly. Just like the material in a newspaper, people look for new material regularly, whether it’s in the Sunday comics or the sports. Don’t ever neglect to put in your allotted time and be sure to maintain a regular flow of material.

3. Of course, you don’t want to rush yourself or generate for the sake of posting. A common mistake is to write in order to gain SEO favor instead of creating quality content. Keywords are important, but are only to be used sparingly. Sure it’s a great idea to gain visibility – but only temporarily. SEOs look for current “hot topics” that are favorable and will abandon materials that lack quality content relatively quickly. Additionally such blog material doesn’t really generate interest or conversation, making it something that an audience will see and forget as quickly as a mouse click.  

4. This brings us to the important fact that people avoid blog posters who tend to be just plain boring. You can write a whole lot of words and end up with nothing if you have no structure, readability, or even humor (a little humor goes a long way). 

The main principle is to generate interest and thereby improve word of mouth marketing. You want people to talk about you, not just read the material and continue to surf the web. Make them stop and consider for a moment a simple but applicable point that you make that they are able to relate to their everyday life.

5. Of course, time is valuable to everyone, especially to a business owner or brand operator- hence the reason for ghost writers and guest bloggers. It can be useful at times to gain the aid of a helping hand, but it’s even more important to ensure that the content won’t hurt your brand.

To enunciate we target copyright issues and infringement. There are certain apps available to ensure the content is original, and it is important to filter it through systems so your blog isn’t just a repeating machine or even worse an infringer. Nothing is more upsetting than finding that your material is the result of “copy-and-paste,” even if you weren’t the one to do so. You are responsible so make sure you take all action to ensure the security and sanctity of your material. 

6. Then there are the links to consider. Too many sites have links that don’t work and that fact is noted in the comments. That doesn’t reflect well on your image at all, even if the comments contain praise for content. It can paint you as unprofessional or unprepared if your links don’t carry your audience where they want to go with the click of a button. Speed and availability identify your brand as reliable and efficient. Be sure that you apply yourself in this department. 

Generating a blog can be simple, as long as you avoid some common mistakes. Don’t misuse your publicity or it may cost your brand in the long run. 

Create Effective Content to Market Your Business

As a solopreneur or small business owner, you may think that content marketing is a huge undertaking and that there are better things you can do with your time. You should realize, however, that putting out great content is an excellent marketing tool for building your brand and establishing customer loyalty.

In recent years, there has been a shift in marketing campaigns. Advertisements have lost their power over customers. Nowadays, people buy from brands they like and trust. But where does this trust come from? Through engaging and building relationships with your consumers using effective content. This is essentially known as content marketing.

You want people to subscribe to your blog updates, follow you on Twitter, opt-in to your email campaign, and subscribe to your page in Facebook. Through the repeated exposure of your content to an audience, you effectively build a relationship with them, giving you opportunities to get them to convert.

The tricky part though, is creating excellent content that can connect and engage with your audience. How do you create a social marketing buzz around your brand? Here are some tips:

     1. Know your audience

Before you can create effective content, you must know your audience. What are their likes and dislikes? What makes them happy? What pains them? What are they looking for?

For example, if you’re a small business owner with an online business selling mom and baby products, then it’s important that you understand what moms like. What do they look for, what problems do they suffer from? What kind of content would get them excited?

By knowing your audience, you can create content that’s relevant and focused, and effectively promote and market your business. Keep in mind that you must inform your audience as well as entertain them.

     2. Be unique and creative

Although it’s easier to simply copy what others have done before you, duplicating content is not really going to effectively capture your audience’s attention. Your audience will simply think “been there, done that,” and you’re left feeling discouraged and wondering why it didn’t work for you.

In today’s world, you need to be creative and unique. Don’t just copy what others have done before you; on the other hand, you can pattern your ideas from them and create something new and different. Something that will make your audience stand up in attention and say, “Wow!”

So don’t be a copycat. To create effective content, put your own personality and style into the content you’re offering.

     3. Experiment

If you’re using Facebook, for example, and are not getting the results you want, maybe it’s time to experiment a little bit. Try different kinds of content and use different kinds of platforms to discover what works with your audience. Maybe you need to mix it up a bit and create more meaningful Facebook posts to connect with your followers. Or maybe creating a blog would be better for your small business brand to help you engage with readers.

Experimentation is important because otherwise, how else will you discover what works or not?

     4. Personalize your content

People want to engage with other people, not brands. So it’s important that you show off your personality through the content you offer. Tell your story and make people empathize with you. Don’t be afraid to share something about yourself, because this is how people will be able to relate with you and your brand.

     5. Be consistent

This is a very important thing you need to do in order to effectively market your business. You must post regularly and consistently in order to engage with your audience.

How will people remember you if you don’t provide regular content? If you don’t update your Facebook page, then how are people going to read your valuable Facebook posts?

So be relevant and consistent. If you abandon your blog or Twitter account, then your followers are going to abandon you as well.

Creating effective content to market your business can be tricky, but following these steps may help you find the right balance in engaging with your audience and marketing your small business. Remember to listen to your audience first and learn what they want – the rest usually follows after that.

Using Your Content

Attract customers by making use of content. Businesses take advantage of content marketing in different ways; some have tried through trial and error, on how to disseminate content to broaden their customer reach. 

No matter what you’re doing now with your content marketing approach, it’s always good, especially as we begin the year, to assess and to figure out other places you utilize your content and which one is best for your business and fits your brand, culture, and communication style. Then you can invest time in it in a way that generates leads, increases sales, and retains customers.

A lot of businesses use social media as a means to stay connected with consumers. They maintain websites and blogs where they can share content related to their business. It is a way to maximize the power of the digital world. If you are using the latest approach in content marketing, it is important to keep putting new content on your site. But there will come a time when you will have a hard time thinking about what content to create.

Coming up with new content ideas is not always easy. There will be times when you will experience writer’s block. One way to alleviate this is by repurposing previous content. Find some of your previous and successful posts and refresh them, build new content around that idea.

Here are some ways you can repurpose your content:

Format – re-purposing is more than just spinning content. Take an idea and present that in another valuable way that will help your audience. You can start by changing the format and feel free to add new information. Doing this will keep your audience interested and possibility of attracting new followers. Make use of tools to help you change the format - maybe add a video, slideshow, or podcast; or turn instructive videos into articles with tips & tricks. Be creative and make it somewhat entertaining for your audience.  If you already have a lot of content, you can create a landing page and archive your successful posts, best How-Tos, Guides, etc.

Update articles – look into some of your successful article posts. Choose content with new innovations available regarding that subject; add that valuable information as a way to update your audience. Do a little research to give you more ideas on the latest on that subject. In example, you can get content with updated statistics. You can even do a comparison with the previous statistics and latest information.  Show your audience some of the changes that happened during the course of the year.

Timing of release – content management requires the use of schedules. Regardless of the type of schedule you follow - weekly or daily - having a calendar for when to post your articles will save you valuable time. Having a calendar will also let you plan ahead and think of new ideas to share on your site. A great time to release repurposed articles is when you have an upcoming event that can be related to the article. Your article might contain information that your audience could find helpful for the coming event.

Using your content saves you time and energy; it cuts down the time you spend doing research for new content. If you repurpose your content in a manner that your audience will not even notice that you are refreshing old information, then you stay in a win-win situation. You have a happy audience, and you meet your marketing goals.

Author:
Maria Elena Duron, is managing editor of the Personal Branding Blog and CEO (chief engagement officer) of buzz2bucks.com – a word of mouth marketing firm.   She helps create connection, credibility, community and cha-ching through mobile marketing and social commerce around your brand. She is co-founder of #brandchat - a weekly Twitter chat focused on every aspect of branding.