“Right” Answers Make for Great Business Blog Content Writing

One of the givens for us content writers is that people are online searching for answers to questions they have and for solutions for dilemmas they’re facing. I really believe that blog writing for business will succeed only if two things are apparent to readers, and in the order presented here:

1. It’s clear you (the business owner or professional practitioner) understand online searchers’ concerns and needs
2. You and your staff have the experience, the information, the products, and the services to solve exactly those problems and meet precisely those needs.

The problem, though, and it’s an extremely common one, is that buyers tend to ask the wrong questions.  I read a marvelous commentary on this very point by Allen Hammer of email service provider Delivra. Among the top worst questions, Hammer observes, are:

• How much does it cost?  (You should be asking “What value does your solution bring?”
• What features does your system have? (Better to ask “How will your technology help us reach our goals?”)
• How many clients do you have? (Better: “How do most of your clients partner with your company?”)

So, how can we get readers asking the right questions so we can offer the right answers? One way is to let some of your other customers provide the answers before the questions are even asked, say the authors of Tips and Traps for Marketing Your Business. Testimonials showing how your technology (or your product or your service) helped other clients reach their goals offer the right answer even if the reader, absent your blog post, might have asked one of those wrong questions Hammer lists.

What’s more, while question-answer is actually a very good format for presenting information to online readers, there’s actually no need to wait until readers actually write in questions.  Every practitioner hears questions from clients; every business owner fields customer queries daily. Sharing some of those – both Hammer’s “right” ones and the ones he thinks are “wrong” –  can remind readers of challenges they face and issues they’ve had with their current providers of products and services.

“Right’ answers make for great business blog content writing!