From brain dump to blog in 7 easy steps
Case Studies and customer success stories are not the only ways to keep up the narrative about your product or service offering.
Another great way is blogging.
But although this web phenomenon has been around since the late 1990s business owners are still not completely comfortable about its use or benefit.
Nevertheless internet users are content hungry. An up-to-date blog on a website is an important indicator of business activity – no one likes to stumble across a great looking product or service only to discover that the last time its purveyors engaged with the online public was 2011! ( Though of course many of us serial bloggers are guilty as charged on that front!)
I got thinking about this when my friend and colleague Lou Johnson of Blue Sky Revenue Generation told me she had to write a guest blog for one of her clients. She was caught like a rabbit in the headlights – but totally up for the challenge. She asked me to take a look at her first draft – and it wasn’t half bad. And as a guest blog post it was pretty comprehensive, and a superb advert for her excellent lead generation service.
The trouble was though it was too detailed. It contained a huge amount of content. It was essentially a brain dump of all the great things Blue Sky can do for your business (which is a lot, and which is really great.)
As a guest blog this probably didn’t matter – Lou only got one shot at telling her business story on her client’s platform.
But for her own blog there was too much.
So I reviewed it for her – and out of her brain dump I identified up to 24 bloggable topics, enough blogs to keep her going for up to two years!
If you are a blogging newbie and nervous about where to start here are my top tips:
1) Start with a brain dump. Tell the complete story of what your business is about – features, benefits, how you work, what your approach is, what results you can help your clients achieve, who is involved, how much you charge – the whole bang shoot.
Don’t worry about refining it. Don’t worry about it being perfectly rendered. This is not the blog proper. It’s just the start point. Just dump it down.
2) Go through it looking for the nuggets. These might be things that differentiate you, or they might be industry insights that you have developed from your experience. Look for up to 5 nuggets, each of which could form one or more blog topics.
3) Go through it again looking for how you might answer your clients’ and customers’ questions. Think of as many questions as possible that your customers or clients might have about your product or service – and find one or two ways of answering each of them. This could yield 2 blogs per question.
4) Split out your brain dump into natural sections and talk about individual aspects of your service.
Then, if you run out of blog material from this initial brain dump try the following:
5) Think about the actual service you have delivered to an actual client – what did you actually do, and how did it differ from what you have described? There is an interesting blog topic in here that can highlight your adaptability.
6) Pay attention to your sector – write a blog responding to trends you are observing.
7) Tell a client’s success story.
Oh – and a note from Lou – don’t do any of this on a Sunday – get a life!
Find Lou’s published guest post here: http://companyshortcuts.com/blog/time-turn-heat/