But what do I blog about?

When I am out there training business how to manage an effective online marketing brand, and we’ve gone through keywords, hosting, purchasing a keyword rich domain for their business, and learning how to customise their new blog website, we are then ready to blog and the apprehension of clients becomes apparent:

But what do I write about?

How can I make people like what I write?

My business is actually quite boring?

It’s always at this point; we take off the pressure, and have some fun. I then ask them what made them start up their own business. A strange thing happens, the shy blogger suddenly starts to become animate, they start to ramble on passionately helping me to understand all their compelling reasons why they are the best at what they do, how their product or service destroys the competition and how their idea will rock the world and make a difference, when they are finished I say:

“Well right there, you have just given me great subject material for twenty blogs that I believe people will love to read!”

It is fear of failure that is probably the main reason there are not more blogs out there, I don’t believe anyone hates to write, as I am writing this, I am talking as if someone is sat there on the other side of the table and it’s something I need them to understand. Anyone can do the same.

 I was asked recently what University I graduated from, I was flattered, and they were somewhat bemused when I said I left school at 17 to work in a Butchers shop!

I am not a trained writer, I have my detractors, the spell check and grammar people who pick me always for typos and little errors, but I am never phased for long, it’s my subject most people want to read about, and incidentally when you are churning out 5-10 blogs a week you are going to have the odd err here and there!

Consistency and subject emotions are so much more important than being grammatically perfect or having a piece of work so well written Shakespeare would be proud. (So far 12 spell checks as I go along, as I said nobody is perfect!)

Consider a blog as your personal journal of what you know, and write about your experiences and make sure it has feeling behind it! Nothing is sold without an emotion, the stronger the emotion, the more people will identify with you, and that’s the whole point of a blog!

Blogs, and for that matter social media, is not any sort of a place to sell. The smart marketers develop friendships through blogs and social media, hence the reason the top people in Media advise you not to outsource your social media under any circumstances. Your readers will eventually make their own decision to visit your online shops and corporate websites, and they will be in the ‘mood’ to buy because they already know you through your blogs and they trust you!

So you are boring so what!

If you sell Ceiling paint (which is my own personal nightmare) or a business you consider dreary, well get another business you are passionate about, er, no I mean ok, you love it, but you believe others find it humdrum and not at all exciting, then the answer is; don’t write about it, find a peripheral area to write about, you can brand yourself online just as well writing about the peripherals.

For example;

You sell ceiling paint; write about the Sistine chapel and other great buildings that are works of art and what painting can become!

If you are tax collector, write about how people can actually save money, you can’t be all bad! Can you?

If you are a Funeral Director write about the great lives of the people you have sent off!

Just have fun with it, people who train in public speaking train you to have fun with it, when a speaker is relaxed, so is everyone else. Don’t think about selling or even writing for someone else, most of us would been rapt if we could read someone else’s diaries, think about how Anne Frank had a best seller long after her sad demise, she wrote for herself and found solace in that. Write for yourself and you will find a kind of inner peace in it, heck you may even learn something new about yourself along the way!

Worry not about your readership when you start, even if you don’t get many likes or shares, look at your analytics to see how many people are reading if you must, you don’t share everything you read do you?  After a while, a few months you will have someone contact you and say they have read your blogs or went to your main corporate site after reading about you. A great feeling to know you have a brand online, I assure you!

To get on an online marketing and social media marketing course contact Netmedia Thailand