Category Archives: Blogging

Can You Publish Bad Content On Your Business Blog?

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Back in November, we published a piece around the ability to write the perfect blog post.  Essentially explaining that whilst a perfect blog post is a possibility, there isn’t one uniformed way – a template, for example – that can be followed to always produce it time and time again.

Although this might be the case and we explained that all perfect blog posts have one common denominator – they are focused on the specific audience – what we didn’t say is that it’s actually a possibility to produce not simply a poor quality blog post, but a blog post that has a negative impact on your business blogging strategy.

However, a more accurate phrase would be quality content is king, as consistently poor content can – perhaps surprisingly to some – have a detrimental effect on your entire digital marketing strategy.

The reason behind this is that both Google and the average consumer can distinguish between content that has been produced to a high standard and that which has been thrown together for the sake of it.

Whilst the first point here is interesting itself – not many people realise that Google is intelligent enough to understand the difference between the content – it’s the second that is of particular interest to many, as a lot of people don’t realise they’re making a decision as to whether they should buy from a certain company because of the content the company produces.

For instance, a standard shopping process could be to search in Google for a product, come across a blog post about it, like what we’ve read, click through to the product page and purchase it.

But would you have clicked through to the product page if the blog post was poorly written, offered no real information than that which you already knew and appeared to be a complete and utter sales pitch?

You might say ‘potentially’ now, but at the time, it’s highly likely your sub-conscience would make other decisions.

And when it comes to content and Google in terms of SEO, there are a whole host of reasons why you really can publish bad content on your blog.

For example, several years ago you could have seen success by publishing content on your blog that was full of keywords and backlinks.  Today, however, creating this type of blog post would see you be penalised heavily – it’s not natural, it’s not organic and it’s content that is likely to make for poor reading, something Google is heavily against.

Whenever we work with clients, we always tell them that they can publish content on their blog alongside that which we publish.  However, we also ensure they are fully aware of the consequences of just publishing content for the sake of it, as although it might take a lot of time to produce a perfect blog post that has a hugely positive impact on your digital marketing strategy, the unfortunate truth is it could take only a fraction of the time to produce one that would have a considerably detrimental impact on it.

5 Things To Ask Yourself If You’re Not Seeing The Results You Expect From Business Blogging

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The benefits of regular business blogging are vast and varied, but it must always be remembered that blogging isn’t a quick fix.  You won’t see huge increases in traffic a day after you publish your first blog post, nor will you rocket up the search engine rankings a week or so later.

Patience is definitely a virtue when it comes to blogging and we always recommended our business blogging services are utilised for a minimum of 12 weeks – this is the amount of time our experience has shown to be the minimum required before you start to see results from blogging.  Of course, you’re likely to see improvements before this, but a three month period allows for the blog to become established, a good amount of content to be produced and a decent, basic presence on social networks to be developed.

If you’re six months into your blogging and social media strategy and you’re not seeing the results you expected, however, it’s time to start asking questions why, with these five being a great place to start.

1.  Are you expecting too much?

One of the most common reasons why you’re strategy isn’t delivering the results you expect is because you’re expecting too much.

At the start of any blogging and social media strategy, we sit down with our clients and talk about their expectations.  We look at what they’re wanting to achieve and give details of how this relates to blogging.  Often we can develop strategies to deliver the results exactly as the client first wishes, but other times we have to tweak the expectations in one way or another.

For example, it wouldn’t be unrealistic to say that a properly maintained business blog could help you see at the very least a 10% increase in website traffic month-on-month, even from the start of the strategy.  However, we’ve seen it be considerably higher than this (over 100%) and always mention this to clients, so to explain the possibilities and potential – yet a lot of clients take these higher figures as standard, when the truth is they are achievable, but only over time through continuous development.

2.  How many blog posts are being produced?

It’s understandable that some clients don’t want to invest heavily in blogging to start with.  It’s still a relatively new resource in the commercial sense and as results often aren’t seen for at least 12 weeks, it doesn’t give an immediate return on investment.

However, generally speaking, the more blog posts that are produced, the quicker the results are going to be seen.

Quality must always come before quantity, but if you’re only publishing one blog post per month, you’re not going to see results in the same timeframe as you are if you’re publishing a weekly blog post, which in turn isn’t going to produce results within the same period as two weekly blog posts.

3.  What’s happening after your blog posts are being published?

If blog posts are published on a blog and simply left, the blog will naturally develop over time.  People will visit, they’ll return time and time again to see what’s new and your blog will be active.

However, by promoting your blog posts in a variety of ways – such as via social media or e-mail – you’ll find that the results appear considerably quicker than if the blog posts were just left on the blog to develop on their own with no assistance.

As with the number of blog posts produced, quality should always come first to quantity, but even a basic amount of social media activity should see your blog posts put in front of an audience that they simply wouldn’t have been if they were just left on the blog without any promotion.

4.  Is social media being properly utilised?

We mentioned above that through social media, you can promote blog posts and raise the awareness of them, driving more visitors to your blog.

The problem that we so often see is that people fail to stick by the quality over quantity rule in various senses.

For instance, rather than working on developing a fantastic following on one or two popular and industry suitable platforms, they try to have a presence on half a dozen platforms, believing the more channels they can promote their content through, the better.

And yes, this is generally a great idea – but only if you can have a high quality, active presence on each platform.  No one wants to see updates from a company who are just promoting their blog posts and the occasional bit of company news.  They want to see a company who is regularly engaging with others, providing content of all types and interacting with their audience.

When this happens, you develop loyal followers, followers who are waiting for you to talk again, essentially giving you another established audience for your blog post content.

5.  What do your statistics look like to date?

Whilst you should generally see great results from blogging by the six month point, the simple fact is no one can guarantee this.  Just like SEO agencies can’t guarantee they’ll get you in the first position on Google for your chosen keywords, no one can say for definite that after six month’s of blogging, you’ll be seeing an x percent increase in traffic, y amount of top of funnel leads or z new clients – it’s an impossibility.

For some clients, the results of blogging are seen earlier than expected and for others, they take slightly longer.  It really does vary from organisation to organisation and industry to industry and so it’s important that if you’re results aren’t as expected yet, you check your statistics so far to see if you’re heading in the right direction.

Are unique visitor numbers rising?  What about returning visitor numbers?  Does your ‘average time spent on site’ figure look healthy?  Is your bounce rate decreasing?

If things look like they’re moving forward, chances are you’ll start to see the results you expect soon and it’s just been a slow start, as it can be.

Business blogging is still new.  Yes, it’s been around for a few years and blogging itself has been available to utilise for over a decade, but compared to other digital resources, such as search engine optimisation, business blogging is still in its infancy (and there are plenty of people out there who don’t fully understand SEO – it’s just the nature of the resource).

And because of this, we – understandably – see people getting frustrated as the results of their blogging strategy aren’t being seen as quick – or to the extent – that they expected.

If this is the case, it’s important that you don’t simply give up on blogging, but instead take the time to work out why the expected results aren’t showing – there’s a chance it’s because of something to do with the blogging strategy itself, but there’s also every chance that the strategy is working perfectly and you simply need to reevaluate your expectations.

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3 Things You Need To Know When Looking For Blog Post Ideas

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Whenever we start talking to organisations about our business blogging services, we always explain that they can have as much or as little involvement as they wish.  Some prefer to be really hands-on, working closely with us during all parts of the blogging strategy, while others take more of a back seat, providing input only as and when needed.

A lot of our clients naturally tend to sit somewhere in the middle, with one of they key parts they get involved in being the development of blog post ideas.  Something we actively encourage, as alongside our knowledge and experience of blogging, our research team’s work and our client’s understanding of their industry, we are able to develop the most suitable content possible for their audience.

When clients want to get involved at the blog post ideas stage, however, we always discuss the process in-depth with them and what we’re looking for as topics.  The reason behind this is our focus for the blog posts can vary widely on the client’s original ideas and we need to ensure that they are as beneficial as they can be when produced for client and customer alike.

Covering a range of different points, these three give you an insight into the things we tell our clients when they’re looking to be actively involved in developing blog post ideas.

1.  You need to think like your readers

It might sound a little cliché (or like an ancient Chinese proverb), but it’s important you look at your blog – and the ideas for the content – as if you were a reader, not the writer.  The blog obviously needs to have a commercial focus, but it generally shouldn’t be in the blog posts themselves, as this is likely to do nothing more than put readers off.

Imagine your blog was attached to your sports equipment website as an example.  Although the footballs you have on sale and the new tennis rackets you’ve just got in are likely to feature on your blog, as a reader, is this really something you’d want to be reading about every day?

You need to be focusing on sports in general, linking back to your website occasionally, such as through an overview of the last cricket match or an insight into the next boxing event.  Remember, blogging is about engaging with your readers and it’s not about selling to them – develop a community feel where readers return regularly and your blog will grow considerably and organically to the extent that when you do publish the occasional piece of sales-type copy, your audience will be more likely to respond to it in a positive way.

2.  Topical pieces often work very well – as long as they offer something different

Some of the most successful blog posts are those that are produced around a topical news item.  As the subject is already being heavily discussed, you can essentially piggy back on its success.  It doesn’t have to be something that’s directly related to your organisation or industry either – however, it has to be understood that you can’t simply replicate it or put your own spin on it.

Think about it logically.  Your readers will no doubt have read all about it on news websites, heard about it on the radio and seen it on TV, so why would they want to read all about it again on your blog?

What you need to do is use the topic in a way that’s going to make the post stand out.  Without doubt link back to the news item, but the piece in general needs to focus on something different.  Something that’s going to make the reader want to get to the end of the piece and believe they’ve just read something from an organisation who aren’t simply churning out the same content as everyone else.

The reason we’re mentioning this is when we get e-mailed a link to a news story from a client, their expectations of the post that’s created around it aren’t usually what we recommend and so it’s important to know why – and understand the impact of not doing so – from the start.

3.  Your business blog isn’t the only one out there

Getting inspiration from other blogs is always a good idea.  Part of our research team’s focus is to look at what a client’s competitors are doing, what worked for them and see if we can develop content that follows the same path in some way.

But what we never do is blatantly copy content, ideas or focus.  Not only does this show a lack of imagination, understanding of your audience and a generally poor business approach, but it just provides the same content to your readers.

What a lot of organisations fail to realise is that even if their blog has hundreds or thousands of regular readers, it’s unlikely to be the only blog those readers visit – and if you therefore don’t provide fresh, unique content, when they visit your blog, they’re going to be quickly put off as they’re just seeing reworked copy from another blog.

The most important aspect of blogging is to provide content that’s fresh and unique.  People don’t want to be seeing content that they’ve read elsewhere, even if you do take a slightly different spin on it.  As we said, getting inspiration from other blogs can be great, but you have to realise that the end product is likely to be vastly different, as that’s exactly what your readers will want.

We always encourage our clients to be as involved as they can be in our business blogging strategies.  We’re more than happy to develop and implement their blogging and social media strategies with only minimal involvement from themselves, but as we always aim to be as transparent as possible with our services, when our clients see exactly what’s happening and how we approach certain aspects, their involvement can not only be beneficial to the strategy, but to their organisation as a whole.

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How Far In Advance Should You Schedule Your Business’s Blog Posts?

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No matter which business blogging strategy you look at, the one constant between them all is the production of quality content on a regular basis.

The topics will change from organisation to organisation and the style, tone and general approach can all vary massively.   It doesn’t matter what type of content it is, however – the most effective blogging strategies are the ones that deliver quality consistently several times a week.

To the reader, it can seem as though the blog post was written and published immediately that day.  There is nothing to indicate otherwise.

However, the business blogs that see the most success are very often the ones that not only utilise a long-term content strategy, but the ones that schedule content ahead of time.

Having an array of benefits, one of the questions we often get asked is just how far in advance you should schedule your blog posts.  A content strategy might be accurate for the next twelve weeks, but does this mean you need to have twelve week’s worth of blog posts scheduled and ready to go live?

Generally speaking, the answer is no.  In fact, with all of our business blogging services, we generally work one week advance.

Meaning we can produce content that’s topical or on trend with the latest discussions, getting the content ready a week in advance also ensures that any changes that need to be made can be done so with enough time from our point of view and the client’s.  It could be something small, such as a quote has been made that now needs to be included or it could be something similar to a full rewrite, due to a change in the news that has brought something new to light.

Imagine that happened if you weren’t scheduling your blog posts.  It’s never a good idea to edit an already published blog post, so you’d simply have to keep it unchanged, something that could potentially have a negative impact.

Whilst one week in advance is a good guide, it shouldn’t be stuck to rigidly, as for some organisations and in some general situations, more flexibility is required to meet the different needs.

One of the most common examples of this is when we are unable to work with a client for a temporary period in regards to messaging or content approval.  It could be a client’s internal project which is going to mean they won’t be available or it might be that they’re simply going on holiday.  In these situations, we often need to schedule blog posts two or three weeks in advance.

It does mean the blog posts won’t be as topical as they could possibly be, but for a temporary period, that doesn’t have to be too much of a problem.  It’s simply a matter of taking the time to develop content that will make readers not miss the topical feel – a ‘How To’ series, for instance.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are some organisations who are almost unable to schedule their blog posts any more than a day or two in advance.  Perhaps they have a technology blog or they simply like to provide the most up-to-date information within their industry, something that their readers have come to expect.

In these instances, although one week is unlikely to be a possibility, there should still be procedures in place that stipulate a blog post needs to be scheduled in advance, whether that’s by 12 hours or two days.  If nothing else, it ensures there is sufficient time to make any last-minute edits before it gets published to an audience of what could easily be thousands.

All blog post content should be scheduled in advance.  There might be the very rare occasion where a last-minute post needs to be published, but these occasions are few and far between.  Giving you a tremendous amount of control over the content that’s being produced and delivered to your audience, scheduling your blog posts should never be the question – instead, it should be ‘how far in advance?’.

And although all organisations’ needs vary, a good rule of thumb is one week.  For the majority, anything less is likely to be unnecessary and anything more could result in content that isn’t as topical as it could be.

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How To Get A Guest Blog Post Spot Here On The Blogshop’s Blog

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We’ve talked previously about our love for guest blogging.  We’ve used it ourselves, for our clients and have had people produce great guest blog posts here on our blog.

Sometimes we’ve talked about the benefits of guest blogging and other times about how you can go about securing a guest blog post.

We get e-mails on a regular basis from individuals asking whether they can produce content for our blog in exchange for a link, but the whole conversation is almost always poor for a variety of reasons.

The following information should give you a clear understanding of what we’re looking for (and undoubtedly what others are looking for), but don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any questions.

Triple check your e-mail

As humans, we aren’t perfect and the occasional typo passes through everyone’s checking procedure.  However, when you’re writing an e-mail asking to publish content on someone else’s blog, you need to be certain that the e-mail copy is as near to perfect as it can be.

If you add in an extra letter to a word (let’s say you wrote ‘For exampple’), chances are it’s a genuine error that’s simply been overlooked.  However, if you wrote ‘its’ when you actually meant ‘it’s’ all the way through the e-mail, that just shows either a lack of understanding of the English language or an inability to truly check through your work.

Ask to produce relevant content…

Blogging is a varied subject and with a little thought and imagination, you should be able to tie it in to a range of subjects.

We’re also quite open about content here at The Blogshop.  Yes, we like our blog content to have a focus on blogging, but the most important point is that it’s of value to you, our readers.  Therefore, if you approached us about a blog post on SEO that only touches briefly on blogging, chances are we’d be interested – our audience are interested in various digital tools, resources and platforms, so as long as there’s a bit of a discussion around blogging, an SEO focused article would work.

What we don’t want to see is an e-mail suggesting topics around medical insurance or football coaching.  Unless you have some fantastic story about them that you can link to blogging, the content is going to be irrelevant – and therefore useless – to our audience.

…and talk about relevant links

In the past we’ve had people contact us who want to produce content around blogging, which is fantastic – but they’ve then gone on to say they would like a link back to their completely unrelated website.

Whilst the content is going to be suitable, by providing a link to a seemingly pointless website, it’s going to be of little benefit to the guest blogger (guest blogging is a great way to develop backlinks, but SEO isn’t just about getting any links – one backlink on a relevant website will be better than 10 links on unrelated websites) and it’s going to potentially alienate our readers (remember, guest blogging might be of benefit to you as the blogger, but it needs to first and foremost be of benefit to the audience and the company you’re going to be guest blogging for).

Don’t forget to reply

Arguably one of the most annoying things we’ve encountered with guest bloggers is their inability to reply to e-mails.  They’ve e-mailed us, we liked their idea, got back in touch – and then never heard anything back.

Even when we don’t like an idea, we always reply thanking them for their time and explaining we’d be open to future suggestions if they were more appropriate, but we don’t get any response.

Whilst such a reply would mean you’ve essentially got your foot in the door and have developed that relationship with the company, it’s simply common courtesy to reply – you’ve contacted a company, they’ve replied, so an e-mail in return is considered to be the right, polite thing to do.

From increasing your online reach to improving the awareness of your brand, an effective guest blogging strategy to supplement your own business blogging activities can see some fantastic results.

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How Important Is It To Add Meta Data To Your Blog Posts?

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For several years, completing your website’s meta data was seen as an integral part of the SEO process.  Particularly with regards to the title, description and tags sections, filling these in for every live page on your website was considered to be an attributing factor to a high positioning in the search engines for your chosen keywords.

Whilst today its importance when it comes to SEO isn’t as substantial as it once was – some even say that its SEO value is negligible – the effective completion of your meta data when it comes to your blog posts can be extremely important to their success.

It must be understood that you don’t have to complete meta data for your blog posts to be a success.  Just like you don’t have to share them via social media and you don’t have to stick to a strict posting schedule, completing your meta data properly, however, can help your blog posts be as successful as they can possibly be.

The idea here isn’t to think of meta data as part of SEO, but instead, as a marketing tool and for this reason, we’re not going to talk about the tags aspect.  Yes, most WordPress plugins will give you the option to fill them in – and it’s good practice to do so – but it’s the meta title and description where, if used properly, you’ll be able to see some potentially huge benefits.

If you’re not particularly au fait with the meta title and description information, they’re the pieces of text you see for each individual website when you type a phrase into a search engine, meaning meta data is often the first interaction a potential customer will have with a company.

As an example, when you type “The Blogshop” into Google, “Business Blogging Services, Blog Writing Services | The Blogshop” is our meta title and “The Blogshop is a dedicated business blogging agency providing tailor made, SEO friendly business blogging services, from SME to enterprise level.” is our meta description.

With this example, we’ve used the meta data as advertising copy.  We’ve used it to attract the readers’ attention and provide them with a basic introduction to our company, including what we deliver so they know what to expect when they click through.

And this is exactly what you need to do with your meta data for each and every one of your blog posts.    You need to treat it as an advertising resource, thinking of it as something you can utilise to first grab the readers’ attention and then draw them in to your blog post – which is where, as a business, you’ll not only have your customer-focused content, but your calls to action.  Your links, your signup boxes and your promotions.

Starting with the meta title, this shouldn’t be too much of an issue, as it will almost always be your blog post title.  As this itself should be as attractive and enticing as it can be, it should be able to be copied word-for-word into your meta title.

Generally speaking, search engines only show the first 60 characters of the meta title and it’s therefore important that any text you enter here fits in – no one likes to see a title that cuts off mid-word.  This shouldn’t mean you have to completely rewrite your blog post title and more often than not, it’s simply a matter of restructuring the wording and potentially omitting a few words that aren’t absolutely necessary.

The meta description, however, can be slightly more tricky.

You have around 160 characters to draw the reader in.  You can’t use any more, as you’ll simply be cut off mid-word and you don’t want to use any less, as you want to ensure you fully utilise the characters you have available.  You want to refrain from giving away too much information, but you want to provide enough to make the reader interested and perhaps most importantly, you want to feel confident that as a reader, you’d want to click through.

The 160 characters need to be engaging.  They need to be informative.  They need to be honest.    They need to leave no room for manipulation.  In essence, the 160 characters need to act as direct sales copy for the blog post.

And once, as a reader, you’ve clicked through and are on the blog post itself, your expectations should instantly be met, else your work on the meta title and description is potentially going to be wasted.

For traditional SEO purposes, meta data isn’t as useful as it once was and completing the information for SEO is likely to have only a minimal impact on your positioning.

However, completing it for advertising, promotion and even reputation purposes could benefit your blog tremendously, not only helping to improve click-through traffic, but sending visitors who are highly targeted and more likely to convert from top of funnel leads into paying customers.

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How Often Should Your Business Blog’s Data Be Analysed?

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Take a look at a customer service strategy as an example – if you’re not analysing what your footfall or website traffic is, what your customer surveys say and what your overall feedback is telling you, how can you be certain that the level of service you’re delivering is meeting the needs of your customers?

Yet although it’s imperative any strategy’s data is analysed, it can be complicated knowing just how often the analysis needs to be carried out.

With blogging, there are various times throughout a strategy that analysis is required.  Sometimes it needs to be in-depth, other times a brief look will suffice and here we provide an insight into the times when we carry out data analysis as part of our business blogging services.

Annually / six-monthly

A business blogging strategy should run continually.  Blogging is a resource that should be invested in for the long term and considered an integral part of your organisation.  However, it’s important that a full and in-depth analysis of the strategy is carried out at least once every year, so to ensure the techniques used continue to be of the most benefit they possibly can be to both your target audience and your organisation.

In most industries, audience requirements change.  Customers start to have different needs and they look for different information from the organisations they interact with.  Therefore, what worked 12 months ago when you first kicked off your business blogging strategy may not necessarily be working today or continue to work in the future.  If the data suggests that this is the case, you need to discover (amongst other things) when the change started to happen, as you should then be able to work out which content wasn’t being as well received as it possibly could have been and how you need to develop it going forward.

Monthly

As part of our business blogging strategies, we carry out an in-depth monthly analysis of all blogging and social media activity.  Very similar to an annual / six monthly analysis, the monthly reports we produce provide an insight into how successful the strategy was throughout the previous month.

Looking at everything from unique visitor numbers on the blog posts through to interactions on Twitter, it’s vital that the strategy’s data is analysed after every month has ended.  Just as on an annual basis, customer requirements can change so quickly that you need to be confident you can respond in the quickest way possible – an annual review might highlight where you need to develop your strategy, but what if reader requirements changed only 30 days after the last annual review and you didn’t analyse your data on a monthly basis?

Weekly

A monthly review of your business blogging strategy should be considered the minimum, but a weekly analysis can be beneficial for a variety of reasons, particularly when looking to ensure your content is as user-focused as it can be.

No matter how involved you are with your target audience, you can never be certain that the messaging you’re delivering on any platform is as suited as it can be without understanding what it is they want and enjoy – and the only way to do this is to analyse the success of your previous blog posts.

When creating content for our clients’ business blogging strategies, as a general rule of thumb we keep two key points in mind – a subject that is either topical or informative (such as a news items or a ‘How To’ piece) and a focus, style or tone that has proven to be successful previously, information we gain by analysing the previous weeks’ data.

Daily

When you’re producing content for your business blog to keep your audience updated on business activities, a daily analysis of data isn’t generally required.  If you’re integrating your business blogging activities with other strategies, however, a daily analysis could prove to be extremely beneficial.

Imagine you had a landing page for one of your products or services and you were using blogging to drive traffic to it over the course of a month.  An analysis of the data on both your blog and landing page would tell you, for example, how many people clicked through to the landing page from which blog posts and how many readers followed a call to action on the landing page.  However, it would also help to highlight any problems with the page or if certain blog posts weren’t sending visitors.

By analysing data regularly, you would be able to see which blog posts were the most successful (allowing you to replicate their success moving forward) and make any necessary amendments to the landing page, so to increase the number of conversions (and ultimately sales).

All business blogging strategies need to include a period of data analysis – it’s the only way you can be certain the strategy is as successful as it can be.  With various periods of data analysis, the four here are those that we look at for our client’s strategies and which we strongly believe will allow you to see the most success when utilising our business blogging services.

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The Halo Effect, Brand Strength And Business Blogging

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In 1920, American psychologist Edward Thorndike published a paper which gave details of what he called the ‘halo effect’, five years after discussing the topic in one of his many studies around educational behaviour.

Having been studied heavily by a number of psychologists since, the halo effect has come to describe the process of an individual or organisation being thought of in a particularly positive light due to excelling in one specific area.  In its most basic commercial form, it showcases that if a brand does one thing really well, their audience will come to think of them as a being a generally great company.

A phrase you’re likely to be familiar with if you’re an experienced marketer, as the halo effect can essentially be the driving force behind a fantastic brand and its success, we want to provide details on the association with blogging, as it can very easily prove to be the perfect tool to achieve the halo effect for your brand.

Your customers need to see success

One of the key points to achieving or witnessing the halo effect is to ensure your customers can see what you’re doing well.  They need to see the success you’re achieving on a specific channel or with a certain procedure.  We can all showcase testimonials from our past customers and these are without doubt fantastic, but you’re effectively just telling people how good you are – you need to be showing them.

You don’t need to show how good you are at everything, but you need to have something that you’re particularly fantastic at, something that will make people stop and think.  It’s a common misconception that you have to show your positive qualities in regards to something that you’re actually offering, such as a product or service.  Although it obviously helps to have great products or services, the halo effect can be achieved by having a positive response to other activities, which is why a business blog can prove to be the perfect option.

Happy customers are customers who are being engaged with

The basic principle behind the halo effect with regards to business is when customers see an organisation doing something particularly well, they see the company in an overall positive light.  Having an unbelievable impact on brand strength, if you can satisfy a large number of customers in one way, they’ll be satisfied with your brand overall.

With business blogging, you get to reach to what could, in theory, be your entire past, present and potential audience.

Generally speaking, a blog is a public platform.  It’s one that as long as you have access to the internet, you will be able to view.  It’s a platform that allows the organisation to speak to their audience on a vast array of different topics.

You can cover product information, service updates or company news.  You can give your own take on the industry, provide details of your internal developments or simply just offer something that’s going to make your audience smile.

Whatever it is, it’s a form of customer engagement – and as customer requirements are increasingly being focused around an improved level of engagement from brands, the more a customer is engaged with, the more satisfied they are.

Business blogging is affordable

And whilst a high level of effective customer engagement is possible through other channels, one of the key reasons why blogging is such a suitable option is because it is one of the most cost-effective resources you can utilise.

The basic focus of business blogging is to provide customer-focused content to as many people as possible.  Taking this offline, let’s imagine you wanted to provide the same content to all of your customers in a bi-weekly newsletter.  With a distribution list of even just 1,000 regular readers, if we said creating, printing and posting the newsletter cost the equivalent of £1.50 per newsletter, that’s £3,000 per month to deliver your messaging to your audience.

As of September 2012, our blogging strategies start at just £350 per month.   And we have other business blogging services that come in under that price, too.

Blogging is in no way an easy option to achieving the halo effect and just like any other process, it’s not a guaranteed way to do so either.  However, when carried out effectively, business blogging can deliver all of the basic principles required behind the halo effect, suggesting that a properly developed and implemented business blogging strategy can have much more of an impact than simply ensuring you are continually communicating with your target audience.

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3 Reasons You Should Get Your Staff Involved In Business Blogging – And 3 Reasons You Shouldn’t

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Blogging is one of the most versatile resources any organisation can utilise and because of this, our business blogging strategies are extremely flexible.

From budgets through to content, the versatility of blogging means that whatever type of organisation you are and whichever industry you operate in, blogging will be able to be of benefit.

Something that more and more organisations are coming to realise, what is still quite a surprise to some is that we can develop our business blogging strategies in such a way that we can work together seamlessly with clients to deliver their bespoke strategies.  There’s no doubt that we love to fully manage blogging and social media for our clients, but we do understand that there’s very often a need – or simply a desire – to be active in the strategy’s implementation.

Definitely something that can be fantastic, whenever we discuss this with clients, we always explain the positive aspects and the potential pitfalls, many of which come about through the organisation’s involvement in terms of their staff.  Sometimes it can work perfectly, but other times getting your staff involved can prove to be extremely problematic and the following information covers the ‘highlights’ of why you should and shouldn’t get your staff involved in business blogging.

They know what problems they’re facing on a daily basis and know what information they’re looking for.  Therefore, if they can gain an understanding of the basics behind blogging, they should be able to provide some invaluable input for content suggestions.

2.  They can increase the reach of your messaging – most people have a social media account of some kind.  It might be a professional Twitter account with several thousand followers or a private Facebook account with one hundred friends, but most people are active on social media to some extent.  As social media is a fantastic way to increase the reach of your blog posts, involving your employees in the process can mean your content is not only published via your company social media accounts, but by numerous employees’, too.

3.  It can improve staff morale – staff want to be involved.  It doesn’t matter whether they’re fantastic at working alone or they blatantly express their need to work in large groups, engaging internally with your staff is seen as one of the most effective ways of getting the most from them.  If you can involve them in some aspect of the blogging process, whether that’s suggesting ideas or helping to promote the final piece, you’ll find they feel they’re contributing, engaging and interacting more with both their audience and their organisation as a whole.

Shouldn’t

1.  It can impact upon them as an individual – staff should never be made to get involved with blogging.  By all means encourage them, but if they’re forced to come up with ideas for content or write draft blog posts on a weekly basis when they don’t want to, you’re not just likely to get poor ideas or content, but chances are you’ll have an unhappy workforce.

2.  Their productivity may decrease – even if your employees want to get involved with blogging, it shouldn’t simply be a straightforward decision.  Blogging involves a substantial amount of work – much more than most people first realise – and without the correct planning and preparation, an employee’s productivity outside of blogging may decrease, jeopardising their role, their duties and the organisation as a whole.

3.  Not everyone can blog – whilst blogging’s versatility can be of benefit in various respects, it can also cause problems, particularly in the sense that even on the content side alone, there can be huge variances in what’s expected.  For example, you may have a member of staff who is competent at writing a press release for your organisation and who you think could handle regular blogging, but not only is a 400 word blog post different to a 400 word press release, but a blog post can vary on everything from whether you’re a B2B or B2c organisation right through to the demographics of your target audience.

Weighing up the pros and cons of your level of involvement as an organisation when it comes to implementing your business blogging strategy and making a decision on it can be difficult enough – deciding on your employees’ involvement can prove to be one that’s too difficult to make.

As part of the development process with any of our business blogging services, we always talk through the various different aspects that need to be considered when it comes to staff involvement, so to ensure we achieve an outcome that is as suitable and effective as it can possibly be.  However, if you would like to discuss the possibilities of your staff being involved – or not being involved – in a business blogging strategy at any point, please feel free to get in touch.

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