If you’ve been thinking that some of the material in corporate blogs could’ve been covered on the company’s website, you’re right, say blogging mavens Shel Holtz and Ted Demopoulos. But using a blog provides a number of advantages, they point out, including speed, the ability for readers to comment, and a way to present information in a less “corporate” and more informal manner.

Myth-debunks are a great use of blogs, I’ve found, because many of the misunderstandings about a product or service present themselves in the natural order of business, in the form of questions and comments from readers and customers. Shining the light of day on that misinformation shines light on your own expertise.  If it’s well written, with a bit of tongue in cheek, your blog can offer this enlightenment in a way that engages searchers and keeps them coming. 

The idea is that your making a habit of de-mystifying matters can go a long way towards making your blog a “go-to” site. Sure, web searchers could go to more authoritative sources to find out stuff, but sifting through tens of websites is tedious.  That’s why, as blogger David Markowitz puts it – “Searchers need you, as an expert in your field, to help them make sense of the information.”

In the latest issue of Mental Floss Magazine, I found a cute myth-debunking article about the “Eskimo kiss”. Popular wisdom claims that Eskimos rub noses (because kissing on the lips would cause their mouths to freeze together). (Loud debunk alarm – NOT.) The myth was created in Hollywood for the 1922 movie "Nanook of the North”, and started because the film director saw women giving their babies “kuniks”, pressing their noses against their babies’ cheeks and breathing in their scent. Truth be told, Eskimos kiss on the lips just like everyone else.

Mental Floss offers this sort of thing for readers’ fun and, as the magazine’s name implies, pure mental exercise, unlike blogging for business, which aims to drive traffic to company websites. The thought occurred to me, though, that the Eskimo kiss debunk would be perfect for the blog of a lip balm company, a lipstick manufacturer, or a candy company around Valentine’s Day. I know the tidbit about the Eskimo kiss caught my interest!

What are some common myths in your area of business?  Start mining those nuggets – they could be golden. Then, in your blog, don’t tell ‘em what you have to sell – use myths to show ‘em how much you know!

Finding a way to initiate a conversation is what blogging for business is all about.

Blogging, as I’ve said many times before in these blog posts, is “pull marketing”, and the dynamics are almost eerily the same as with encounters at a bar. Potential clients arrived at your blog because they were searching for something – information, a solution to a problem, a product or service. The title and the content of your blog post matched up with the search phrase they punched in to Google (or Yahoo or MSN), and so you “meet”. It’s a new encounter, so the conversation is tentative, testing to see if this is a relationship the two of you want to pursue further. You, the business owner, didn’t send out a mailing or plaster an ad on a billboard (which would have been “push marketing”.  You “showed up” (in this case, on the search engine) and that’s how you got to meet this potential new customer or client.

Business coach and author Jim Ackerman reminds you that, if you own a business, you may think you’re a jeweler, a plumber, or a real estate agent, but you’re not.  “The day you took ownership of the business is the day you became something else.  That’s the day you became a marketer of jewelry, of plumbing services or property,” he stresses.
 
No encounter at a bar could be called successful without some vital contact information being exchanged (the phone number used to be the prize; today it might be an email address). Ackerman advises being very diligent about collecting contact information from everyone you meet.  In your blog, readers might enter their contact information in order to sign up for your newsletter, a free pamphlet or brochure, a coupon, or even a free product sample or service. Readers might “subscribe” to your blog.

Accessibility goes both ways. Speaker Magazine, in “Around the World In Eight Marketing Tips”, tells marketers to make it “as easy as possible for prospects and clients to contact you. It’s always puzzling to me when someone gives me a business card where the contact information is so tiny as to be illegible, or, worse yet, printed in black ink on a navy background!  Blogs with no clear contact information are even more of a puzzlement – why would you go to all the trouble of “pulling me in” with your blog, and then make it difficult for me to hook up with you?

Bars and blogs – where conversations start, where searchers become buyers, and casual encounters turn into friendships. If your business puts blog posts full of relevant information out there for customers and clients to enjoy and use (whether you or your employees compose the blogs yourselves or hire a professional ghost blogger like me to do it for you) , you won’t need to ask “Do you come here often?”  You know they’ll be doing exactly that!