In-Your-Neck-of-the-Woods Blogging for Business

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Listening to the morning weather report on TV, I often hear Al Roker say, “That’s what’s going on around the country. Here’s what’s happening in your neck of the woods”.

In blogging for business, that Roker model is a good one to follow, we teach at Say It For You. Your blog is a way to educate leads and customers by helping them stay generally informed on industry trends and developments, Hubspot explains. Once you are perceived as an expert or “thought leader” in that industry or profession, you can then go on to explain your own products and services, and your very own “neck of the woods” approach.

Hubspot offers examples of blogs that describe the general industry climate before bringing matters down to a local level:

Manufacturing
Manufacturing blogs are used to inform readers about best practices news, and trends in manufacturing, supply chain distribution, and logistics. The Marlin Steel blog, for example, talks about what robotics and automation mean for US manufacturing jobs (national picture), but also provides information on how to use specific steel tools.

Healthcare
In Six Month Smiles’ Chair Time blog, industry experts, doctors, and hygienists write about developments in their field. Potential customers can learn about specific services they may be interested in paying for on a local level.

Ecommerce
The M.M. LaFleur blog discusses general issues of women in the workplace, but then narrows down to specific advice about what to wear to different business occasions.

In fact, the function of “news” in blogs is to inform readers of “what’s-going-on-and-how-do-we-fit-in”. In a blog post, you might cite material from the news story, relating it to new developments in your own industry or field. The idea is not to regurgitate what’s already been said, but to showcase your own expertise and experience, offering a new perspective on that topic.

According to strategist Neen James in Speaker Magazine, a Subject Matter Expert or SME (pronounced “smee”) knows something. A thought leader, by contrast, is known for something. In their blog content, business owners and professional practitioners can first bring their audiences up to speed on general industry issues and developments. Through “in-your-neck-of-the-woods blogging for business,” they then become known for translating that knowledge into usable, actionable steps their readers can follow.

 

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Be-a-Mentor Blogging for Business

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“To gain business with your blog, you should stop thinking like a salesman and start acting like your reader’s mentor. A salesman wonders how to get his next sale. A mentor cares about his students. He wants to help them get ahead and live a more fulfilled life,” Neil Patel advises.

The first way that blogging gets you customers is it shows you’re open for business, Sarah Carnes writes in HubSpot.com. The second way? It educates your prospects. Take your frequently asked questions (FAQs) and turn them into blog posts. Once a potential customer sees you as a resource, they are much more likely to consider you when they are considering buying the product or service you provide. After researching and building your target audience, you know what they care about most – and what keeps them up at night. Using your content to answer those fears means that you can begin to “own” the conversation.

In the book Good People, author Anthony Tjan names five types of mentors. At Say it For You, we realize that in different blog posts, a business owner or professional practitioner can take on one of these mentoring “roles’:

Master of Craft:
Communicate armed with facts from reliable, trusted sources. As a content writer, link to outside sources to add breadth, depth, and credibility to the ideas you’re expressing and the advice you’re offering.

Champion their cause
Comfort and connect with compassion and encouragement. Soft skills such as relationship-building and interpersonal communication are going to be as important in coming years as technical skills.

Co-pilot
“Collaborate” with readers, showing you understand the obstacles and challenges they face. Encourage them to “vent” by answering the tough questions in your content. But searchers haven’t always formulated their questions, and so what I suggest is that we do that for them.

Anchor
An anchor needn’t work in the mentee’s industry, but is someone who offers insights that readers can use to better cope with issues they are facing.

Reverse mentor
A reverse mentor can be of a younger generation with insights to share that can help older readers make sense of technology or see situations from a different vantage point.

What you can do with the blog is offer different kinds of information in different blog posts, curating content from many different points of view. In blogging for business, be a mentor!

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Lists Are a Good Fit for Blogs – Once in a While

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Of all the types of list-style blog posts you could write, the “curated list’ is probably the easiest, Virtasktic.com explains, because “it is more about researching and trying to find content from others than about writing your content from scratch”. Still, curated lists require thought and care, and need to be structured in a way that makes it easy for your readers to consume.

That lists in general are a good fit for blogs is actually something I stress in corporate blogging training sessions.  By most accounts, search engines like lists and bullet points.  Even more important, I’ve found over the years at Say It For You, lists help keep readers – and writers – on track.

Interestingly, I came across two different lists, both listing resource programs available to Indiana residents.

  1. The first of these is on the state’s website, Indiana.gov, and offers a comprehensive list of assistance programs including food and clothing, mental health & addiction, health care, housing & utility assistance, children and family, tax assistance and education, employment.
  2. The second list, also abut resources, appeared in the Indianapolis Business Journal‘s promotional supplement “IN Career Ready. This list is focused on assistance programs in only the area of education. However the title does not make that clear (it’s titled “Free Money from the State of Indiana”.

Each of these two lists would be highly useful for readers searching for information about Indiana assistance programs. There is no attempt to editorialize, advise, or even organize the information in a new way. Each list is simply an organized collection of information.

In marketing a business or practice, organizing relevant and useful information in list form, geared towards the needs of your target audience can be very useful to readers. As in the two examples I found, the lists might be of resources for further information, tactics to try, or alternatives for solving a particular problem. Unlike the case with the IBJ supplement, the title must make very clear precisely what readers will find in the list. “Listicles help present a large amount of information in small, easy-to-scan, numbered sections,” explains Neil Patel.

Are list blogs meant to be an “instead of”? Of course not! For instance, listicles cannot…

  • allow your audience to know, like, and trust you
  • offer soft sales messages in value-added content
  • build community
  • highlight the specific needs fears, and wants of your target audience
  • offer opinion and thought leadership

But, when it comes to sheer utility and convenience – list blogs just can’t be beat!

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NASA Isn’t Looking for Astronauts

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As a speaking agent, James Marshall Reilly explains in the book One Great Speech, his biggest challenge is locating and identifying “experts” in varying fields, based on the requests of buyers and event sponsors. Reilly is looking for people as yet unknown in the speaking world. But don’t be confused, he cautions – when Bank of America wants to pay for a speaker, they’re not looking for a banker or financial services expert. The State Department isn’t looking for a diplomat, and NASA isn’t seeking a speaker who’s an astronaut. These organizations have plenty of their own in-house experts.

So what are these mega-company meeting planners seeking?’ Reilly says it’s someone with:

  • a unique perspective
  • a new idea
  • new information
  • passion
  • a story that resonates

Reilly’s insights sure resonated with me. As blog content writers, those are the very qualities we’re aiming for in helping our clients’ stories resonate with their target audiences.

Unique perspective
The typical website explains what products and services the company offers, who the “players” are and in what geographical area they operate. The better websites give at least a taste of the corporate culture and some of the owners’ core beliefs.  It’s left to the continuously renewed business blog writing, though, to “flesh out” the intangibles, those things that make a company stand out from its peers. In other words, it’s the blog that gives readers context within which to process the information.

But, from whose perspective? We can use blogging to offer searchers the relevant, up to date information they came to find, giving it to them in short paragraphs and in conversational style, then leading them to take action. But it’s crucial to present information from the customer’s perspective, not ours. Where we are is never the starting point!

Passion resonates
When online readers find a blog, one question they need answered is “Who lives here?” In terms of achieving Influencer status – it takes passion, and it takes opinion, we’ve learned at Say It For You. Sharing the obvious slant may be vociferous, but if it’s not passionate, it won’t resonate with readers.

Information
Very much like the folks most likely to be in attendance at a Bank of America or NASA conference, blog site visitors are already interested in the subject at hand and may already know quite a bit of information on that subject. While there’s very little likelihood that the “startling statistics” you offer to capture readers’ attention will be “new news”, facts and statistics need to be “unpackaged” and put into perspective.

No, Bank of America may not be looking for a speaker with a finance degree, and NASA may not hire an astronaut for the keynoter at their conference. But if you can turn information into stories that resonate in your blog posts, online readers may just “hire” -YOU!

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Guest Post: How to Increase Organic Traffic to Your Blog

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The term “organic web traffic” describes the way visitors arrive at your website as a result of “natural” search.

Organic traffic is the reverse of paid traffic, which defines the check-outs generated by paid ads. Organic visitors locate your site after making use of an internet search engine like Google or Bing, and are not “referred” by any other web site.

The simplest method to increase the natural web traffic of your website without getting a traffico anomalo google error is to routinely publish quality and relevant content on your blog site.This is, nevertheless, just one of several techniques to use for getting new visitors.

The science that focuses on enhancing organic circulation is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Organic traffic comes as a result of searches used by readers through search engine, such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

Since organic traffic is free, that is the kind of website traffic that proprietors want the most.

HOW TO BOOST NATURAL WEBSITE TRAFFIC:  11 LEADING SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION TIPS

The challenge for any type of organization ensuring that when people look for a product and services like your own, they find you and not your rival. But there’s no need to rely on pricey pay-per-click advertising and marketing; there’s plenty you can do to increase natural web traffic at no charge except your time.

1. Direct content to your readers, not to internet search engines
Get to know your customers’ personalities, in order to know whose problems your content is solving. By producing quality educational content that reverberates with your perfect customers, you’ll naturally boost your Search Engine Optimization.
Talking about those primary problems, using the keyword phrases they use in search queries is the best path to increasing your audiences. Writing for search engines alone is useless; all you’ll have is keyword-riddled rubbish.
Pleasing your target audience will result in also pleasing internet search engines.

2. Feed your blog site routinely
Blog writing is perhaps the most efficient method to raise your natural site website traffic. Blog content lets you go deeper than your website permits, creating a big, expanding brochure of practical, persona-optimized web content targeted to your market niche.
On the other hand, poorly-written, “spammy” web content will do more damage than help. Avoid it.

3. Connect to the blogosphere
The blogosphere is an area for reciprocators.
Read, comment on, and link to other individuals’ websites as well as their blogs, specifically those operating in your market. That will encourage them to read, comment, and link to your content bringing in even more leads.
An excellent area to start is Quora. A cool tactic for getting your voice out there is to spend some time answering individuals’ concerns on Quora as well as supplying genuine, valuable and concrete understandings for the certain location you are a professional in.
Tip: Always use a VPN while using Quora, which will give you more specific results according to the country designated in your VPN.

4. Use long-tail keywords
Better than using the most prominent search phrases in your market is choosing keywords that are more detailed and specific to your services or product.
In time, Google as well as other internet search engines will certainly recognize your website or blog as an information source for that certain subject, which in turn will boost your web search position while helping your perfect clients find you.
Keep in mind that positioning on Google has to do with having a sphere of influence for a certain niche topic.
This article, for example, is targeted tor those that want detailed advice on enhancing natural website traffic. We’re not targeting every SEO-related keyword.

5. Get your meta down pat
The meta title, the URL, and the description are the three crucial ingredients for maximizing traffic for a website or an article. It’s simple yet reliable.
Meta summaries and meta data are your way of telling Google precisely what you’re speaking about.
We make use of a variety of devices, including Yoast Search Engine Optimization plugin for WordPress, HubSpot’s SEO tools, and Ahrefs to help us optimize our web pages.
But it’s not enough to just ‘mount a plugin’, You need to work on describing each web page in turn.

6. Continually create quality content
Try to compose and release content as often as possible, but not at the expense of top quality! The more high-quality content — including full-sized articles as well as posts — you have on your site or blog, the more opportunities you provide for getting found through organic web traffic.

7. Use internal links
As soon as you’ve accumulated a respectable catalog of content, you can link to older posts, as well as to your own website, guiding visitors to appropriately related content.
Internal linking keeps visitors on your website longer, which helps improve your search rankings.
Don’t, however, overuse interior links. Overuse may begin to look like spam.

8. Encourage incoming web links
Google prioritizes websites that have a lot of inbound web links, especially those coming from other reliable sites.
Urge clients, buddies, family members, distributors, industry mavens, and fellow blog writers to connect to your website.
The more inbound web links you have, the higher your website will rank, because the more reliable sources link to you, the more reliable your site becomes in the eyes of search engines.
Beware Search Engine Optimization “snake oil salespeople”, though. Attempting to trick Google with spammy links from low-reputation websites is a sure path to failure.
Some web links can in fact, damage your Search Engine Optimization.

9. Blow your own horn
In addition to linking to other websites and getting them to link to yours, you can promote your blog content by linking it to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon etc.
If individuals are “hanging around” your web content on social media, that sends a strong signal to Google that the material is relevant, helpful, and intriguing.

10. Use social networks
Build visibility on social media networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
This is a way to get your name and internet site address out on the net. Add “share” buttons to your website to make it easy for individuals to share your content.
Most important, of course, is to compose material worthy of sharing!

11. Use metrics to maximize results
Use Google Analytics to track site visitors to your website and blogsite.
Learning where readers are coming from and which search terms led them to you allows you to fine-tune your content.
Ultimately, to enhance natural, organic website traffic, Give searchers what they want – quality, guidance, and insight..

Millie Oscar writes SEO and technology-related articles and her articles have appeared in a number of sites, including EzineArticles.com, ArticlesBase.com, HubPages.com, and TRCB.com. Her articles focus on balancing information with SEO needs–but never at the expense of providing an entertaining read.

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