Business Blogging for Results

What’s the result you’re trying to get when you post something to your blog?

Many of my clients ask me to help copy edit or ghost write their blog posts after they hit a wall of frustration. After all, so much traditional blogging advice suggests keeping up with a cadence of blog posting that feels more like “Lucy in the candy factory” than a systematic approach to audience building.

This frustration fuels a lot of the recent backlash against business blogging. To be fair, folks have been wringing their hands about this since 2006. So, many of us must still be doing something right if it’s taken a decade for the format to still not collapse.

If your analytics aren’t showing a positive return on any investment, you’d naturally want to turn to something else. However, I get the sense that so many business owners crash out of blogging because they’re just not sure how to connect and engage with their audience.

It doesn’t really matter how frequently you post to your website if your words aren’t resonating with readers. Now that most company websites rely on social media for traffic as much as they rely on organic search, the old keyword stuffing tricks won’t work. You’ve got to post updates that enrich the lives of your readers, or they won’t bother coming back.

Remember your real goal for your business blog: to build a cadence of touchpoints over time that grows trust between you and your customer. It’s easy—especially among data-oriented startups—to focus on “getting something published” and tracking a conversion rate against a single piece of content. When you start seeing the post as the deliverable—and not the action you want readers to take—you’re bound to get bored or worse.

However, when you drop a series of focused, empathic, relationship-oriented posts over time, you can guide readers to your next step. Your sales team might want them to close on a big purchase, but it’s more realistic to aim for downloading a white paper. Enough of those small actions over time turn into a real rapport which you’ll really want when it’s time for the really big ask.