Blogging is an incredibly powerful business tool that can really help you grow your business over the long term. But often, when preparing to write for our blog, we can get caught up with who we should write for. We try and picture our ideal customers and wonder what they will enjoy reading in our blog posts.
- Will customers of a luxury cake design business want to read blog posts about how to create their own luxury cakes?
- Will customers of a family photographer want to learn about taking their own family portraits?
- Will customers of a web design firm want to learn how to create with own websites?
The answer to all of these questions is maybe. Some will, but many won’t. After all, they are approaching you, the creative business owner, to do those things for them. Why would they want to learn to do it themselves? And if you teach them, would they still want to pay you to make it for them? Are you teaching your competitors to be as good as you?
Let’s take a step back and look at what your content is doing for you. It is not purely there to attract your exactly perfect customer.
It is also there to showcase your expertise, which increases trust in the eyes of your customer. And that includes teaching them a bit of what you do.
It is there to attract a wider sphere of interested people than just your target customer. Imagine your business is confined by geography (many creative businesses are). You might think that there isn’t much point in ever attracting people outside of that geographical area. But if people read and enjoy your content, they might recommend you to people they know who do live in your local area. Your content acts as a referral engine.
Your content is there to attract and teach your competitors. This sounds counter-intuitive but the more you teach, the more you people you attract, the greater your perceived authority. By increasing your sphere of influence, you will attract more business and the admiration of your competitors. In fact, don’t think of them as competitors. Think of them as peers. Try and work on good terms with your peers, which includes writing content they would be interested in. They might have a different style, skill or outcome to you. Your peers may end up referring business to you. Or, as often happens, someone who knows your peer may ask them if you are any good. If you have already taught them something, they are more likely to validate your reputation.
Your content is there to support your positioning. We will touch on positioning in another email soon, but in a nutshell, positioning is what you do, who you do it for, and what makes you different in the market place.
In order to figure out who you should write for, it is useful to split it into three content buckets: content for your potential clients; content for your peers and content that supports your positioning. And that split should be roughly:
- 40% of content for your potential clients
- 40% of content for your peers
- 20% of content to support your positioning
Are you yet to start a blog? Let me know what is holding you back. If you already have a blog, is there anything that frustrates you with your blogging efforts?