You’ve taken the first step and added a blog to your business site. Now comes the hard part: what do you put on it when you hire business bloggers to populate your blog with content? It can be tempting to fill your blog with promotional offers and entries spotlighting your products. But, you’ll get far more mileage by focusing on utility to your customers. One great way to do this? Think of the questions they want answered.
Don’t Trust Your Instincts
You know your business. You can do the basic motions of your business in your sleep. You speak your industry’s jargon fluently, to the point where you don’t even realize you are using words that the layman doesn’t quite recognize as English.
Because of this, you may not understand just what your customers do and don’t already know. Because you are good at your job, you may not realize that the things that are second nature to you may be difficult for others to grasp. While you comprehend what you do implicitly, you may not be the best person to decide what writers should write when you hire business bloggers.
Start with Your Current Customers
Instead, ask people who already do business with you what their questions are. Ask what they wanted to know before they contracted with your small business.
Don’t just conduct informal interviews; you can gain a lot of knowledge from paper or online surveys. The formal disconnect of this approach may mean that you get better answers. There are a number of free online survey programs that you can use to gather data.
Investigate Google’s Auto-Complete Function
When you start to enter a query into Google, it will produce a drop down of potential ends to that sentence. For instance, if you start with “How do I know my HVAC…” it completes with “compressor is bad,” “thermostat is bad,” and “has a heat pump?” These results are based on the most popular searches on these terms, which tells you that these are the questions that potential customers want answered.
Look into a number of queries for your business. “Why should I,” “how do I” and “what does” are all good places to start and can yield many answers. These answers can lead to the questions that your potential customers are asking. By answering them in your blog posts, you can place higher in search engine results, which means that more readers land at your blog.
Go Deeper with Keywords
Google has long tail keyword tools that can help you learn what people search for to land at businesses like yours. By using those in conjunction with the tricks above, you can build topics that will be of use to your future customers.
It will take time to build a following on your blog. But keep your eye on being of use to the people who may eventually be your customers. Doing this, you will provide the valuable information that will lead to trust and make them loyal clients of your business.
Lara S is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments.
