I recently heard an interview with Martha Stewart. The interviewer asked whether she ever drew a blank, ever had a day when she couldn’t come up with one more use for glitter, eggshells, or pancetta.
The answer was no. She always has ideas. Me, too. I have, for example, written approximately 336,000 words about house painting in Australia and I still have new ideas every week.
If you are wondering what you should blog about for your company blog because you have trouble coming up with ideas, the smart solution is to hire someone like me to do it for you. Blogging is not the best use of your time.
Let’s imagine, though, that you love to blog for your professional website, and you’re just wondering what kinds of posts are going to do the best job for you. Here are some failsafe options:
- Questions customers, patients, and clients ask you. It’s great to be able to offer people a link to your website when they ask you a question, since it gets them to your website and underscores how valuable that site is.
- Things people wonder about at various points in the purchase process. Write for people when they’re looking to see whether there’s anything new in wound treatments, whether nanotechnology has applied silver’s antibiotic properties to bandages, where they can buy silver bandages, and which company has the best deal on silver bandages. Not only will the people you helped early in the process come back to you, but you may come up repeatedly in their searches, emphasizing your website’s authority.
- Things that let you show off. Does your company have something brand new that no one else has? Have you won an award? Are you an expert on something? Blog about those things.
- Objections people have. Some companies avoid writing about the things that make potential customers think twice about buying. This is a mistake. When you ignore those concerns, they don’t go away — you just don’t have a chance to respond to them. We know that there are people in the SEO industry who are not honest; we figure we benefit when we get a chance to prove that we’re completely honorable. If you know that people think your product is hard to use, write about what makes your product easy. If you meet a lot of price concerns, blog about what explains the prices in your industry.
- What’s new in your industry. I once read that the great thing about ads is that your competitors aren’t there, so you should never bring them up. Blogs aren’t ads, and I’m happy when a client is willing to share information about other companies and events in their space. A client gave us the green light for this recently, saying, “It shows that we know what’s going on in our industry.” I think it also shows confidence and generosity.
We use a lot of data from analytics and online tools sharing trends when we plan editorial calendars, but these five types of topic are probably always going to work for your company blog.
Do you have others you’d add to this list? We’d like to hear about them.
Leave a Reply