Big Ideas

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The key to writing interesting content is being reader focused.

A common mistake in blogging is to only write about what interests you. However, by neglecting the interests of your readers, you’ll miss out on a lot of new traffic and repeat visitors.

If you follow some of the top blogs, you’ll find that they’ll often get comments like “This is exactly what I was looking for” or “I definitely needed to hear this”. Those bloggers understand what their audiences want and they give it to them on a consistent basis. That’s what makes their blogs so successful.

How to Figure Out What Your Readers are Interested In

So, how do you find out what your readers want? Here are a couple practical methods.

Browsing through forums is an excellent way to do research on your target audience. What you want to look for are threads that get a lot of responses. The topics on these threads are perfect topics for future blog posts. Also, watch out for recurring questions. Many people go to forums to ask questions. Writing in-depth blog posts that answer those questions will earn you a reputation as an expert.

While were talking about questions, Yahoo! Answers is another place where people ask questions. Simply search using common keywords in your niche and see what questions people are asking in your niche.

Keyword tools tell you the popular words in your industry that internet users are searching with. Writing blog posts based on these keywords will not only make your blog more interesting but it will increase your search engine traffic. Here are two free tools to try out: Google AdWords Keyword Tool and SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool. Enter in the name of your industry and see what related words the tool gives you.

If you have a lot of traffic or a big enough email list, it’s a good idea just to ask your readers what kind of content they want. If you have little traffic or a small list, you might not get a lot of responses.

You Don’t Have to Guess

You could guess what content your audience finds interesting. But why guess if you don’t have to? A little bit of research before writing can go a long way to making your blog more interesting.

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Many business owners understand that starting a business blog is a good idea. However, they are hesitant to start blogging because the last time they wrote anything was years ago back in school. They don’t feel like they have the writing skill to attract an audience.

Well, here’s good news if you’re one of those business owners.

If you can talk, you can write.

I got this saying from a writing blog years ago. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the URL or the name of the blog.

You Don’t Need to Be Shakespeare

A common myth in writing is that you have to have your grammar just right and you have to have a big vocabulary or no one will read you. This may be true if you’re writing for a scholastic journal or you’re writing a novel. But you’re not. You’re writing a blog on the web.

The web is an interesting medium. It started out without any commercial elements. And while many businesses have joined the web, the internet has also evolved into a social, interactive environment. Today’s Internet users are not just passive consumers of information. Instead, they are active participants.

They create the information and communicate with other users through sites like Myspace, Facebook, Blogger, and Twitter. Also, many users have their own sites, which they update in their spare time. Most of these people are the average Joes and Janes. They are not English majors or budding authors. So, they are not going to grade your writing like your old English teacher.

The most important things in blogging are not your writing skill and vocabulary, but your expertise, experience, passion, and willingness to interact.

This blogger has over 30,000 subscribers and he definitely is not the most polished writer. His grammar is off in many places. He writes in a very conversational tone. And many of his sentences are clunky and wordy. But he does have something to say. He brings experience and expertise to the table and people listen to him.

I know a blogger from India who has hundreds of subscribers. English is not his first language so some of his blog posts have bad grammar. Yet he has a captive audience because of his passion and consistency.

Write the Way You Talk

As a business blogger, don’t be afraid to write the way you talk. As you write, pretend you’re actually communicating to a specific person that would fit your target audience. There are at least two benefits for doing this.

First, it makes you more personal. It shows that you’re a real person. This build trust and trust leads to sales. Too many businesses are guilty of stuffy, corporate speak. This type of writing makes those businesses seem cold and impersonal.

Second, it lowers your writing time. I believe that much of the time spent on writing is second guessing yourself and over analyzing your writing. However, if you write like you talk, you can write much more freely. And sure, it doesn’t hurt to reread what you’ve written and edit and rewrite as needed.

Traditional advertising is dying.

Billboards get ignored. TV watchers skip commercials with Tivo. The number of radio listeners is going down as people just listen on their iPod to their favorite songs. Newspaper and magazine circulation is declining.

You may think, well, I’ll just advertise on the web. But typical internet advertising is not working as well as it used to.

People are becoming more internet savvy. They are becoming more “blind to ads”. They’ve begun to realize what ads look like so they’re not clicking on them as much as before.

For example, big, flashy banner ads used to be effective at driving traffic a couple years ago, but now a lot less people click on them. These banners ads were replaced by text ads. Text ads get more clicks than banner ads, but as the internet knowledge and experience of online users increases, these ads will get less clicks.

This is already true with younger audiences, since they’ve grown up with the internet. I have a blog that targets the 14 to 30 year old crowd. I have text ads in a prominent location, but I usually only get one click per thousand pageviews.

All these things tell me that people are trying their best to avoid advertising. And technologies like Tivo, iPod, and the internet have made it much easier for them to do so.

So, what’s a small business owner to do? You need to get people’s attention to generate sales. I’ve written multiple times about the effectiveness of blogging to grab people’s attention. But what about advertising? Just give up on it?

No, I don’t think you have to do that. But in a world where advertising gets ignored, you have to do your advertising differently to get noticed. Here’s a simple principle to keep in mind.

Make Your Advertising Useful

Yesterday, I visited MapQuest to get driving directions. On their driving directions page, they had this section at the bottom of the page.

The picture and text highlighted in red caught my attention, because my car was having problems and I was afraid of being stranded during my upcoming out of town trip. I clicked the link and it took me to this useful, informative, interesting article.

By adding useful content to their ad, AutoZone was able to get my attention. However, if they just had the typical “great products and low prices” spiel, I would’ve ignored them.

I like what Brian Clark says:

The plain truth is, great content is the most effective way to advertise online, because to be considered great content, it can’t look anything like what we consider advertising.

So, next time you buy advertising, ask yourself: “How can I add something useful to my ad?”

I’ve written before that offering expert advice on a business blog is a great way to promote your business. The same principle works for advertising. By adding useful content to your ads, not only will you capture the attention of your target audience, but you’ll also improve your brand.

With the web being much more social today than in the last couple of years, many online entrepreneurs are taking advantage of this trend.  They are making their websites more interactive.  They are participating on community sites like forums, blogs, and voting sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.

With all this social activity, the big question for businesses seems to be, “How do you actually interact and communicate with internet users to increase sales?”

Understanding the Average Internet User

To answer this question effectively, you need to understand the mindset of the average internet user.

The average user is not looking so much for slick packaging but authenticity.

Why authenticity?  Because in a social atmosphere like the social web, people act like people.  They don’t act like businesses.

The proper metaphor for the web is not an upscale retail store or stuffy office environment where employees interact with customers using “Sir” and “Ma’am”.

No, the web is much more like a laid-back pub or coffeehouse where people hang out.  These people value community and being real.

You may be wondering, since the web is like this, how does one do business?  You’re thinking, business doesn’t get done in a coffeehouse.

Well, maybe not the actual sale.  But realize that when people hang out, they often make product and service recommendations and non-recommendations.  Also, they show off their purchases.

Here are the type of conversations that go on all over the world, offline and online.

In a pub: “My car is having problems.  Could you recommend a trustworthy mechanic?  I went ABC Mechanic last month and they ripped me off.”

In a Starbucks: “Check out my iPhone.  It’s awesome.”

On Twitter: “Does anyone know if XYZ Web Hosting provides good service and 99% uptime?”

On a blog: “I just got my big screen TV from John Doe’s online store.  I definitely would recommend him to anybody.”

Be Real

If you come off like a business person, you won’t have success.  But if you interact with them like a real person, like a friend that actually wants to help, you’ll gain their trust. And trust is what leads to repeat sales and positive recommendations.

Aaron Wall wrote on page 68 of his discontinued SEO Book:

Write in a conversational tone, as a person, not a company.

Fake fluffery does not go well on the web. People can smell it a mile away. Since the Web started as a non-commercial entity, there are certain etiquettes (or netiquettes) that dictate how we should act. When we go outside these basic ideas, we not only avoid conversion, but also are likely to offend our readers.

Many of the people who have bought this e-book told me they bought it because I sounded honest and real. Some of my blog posts are somewhat random, personal, or humorous, and some people like that.

This is coming from a guy who’s sold over 13,000 copies of his ebook. Many of those were at the price point of $79 before the ebook was repackaged into a training program.

Evaluate Your Business

Look at the text on your website.

• Is it boring, bland, and filled with ambigious, overused corporate jargon?
• If you have a blog, are you writing in a conversational tone?
• Do you have pictures of you and your staff?

Think about how you communicate on social/community websites.

• Do you write like a real person that seeks to help?  Or are you still in the impersonal, corporate mode?

PR is now Personal Relationships not Public Relations.

I got the above comment from Tim Ferriss, the author of the bestselling book 4-Hour Workweek, in a podcast interview. Sadly, I don’t remember which interview it was.

Anyways, Tim Ferriss credits the success of his book to personal relationships. He got a lot of traffic and buzz for his book because many influential, high-traffic bloggers wrote about it.  He connected with these bloggers by meeting them in person at conferences. 

He wrote: 

My entire book cost $25,000 to launch, but subtract $18,000 of that because I was pressured to go with this PR firm at first, so I anted up $6000 a month for them to say, “We’re seeding the ground. We’re working on relationships. We’re just building up momentum.” After three months, they only got one print feature, so I cut it. The remaining money was spent going to conferences to meet bloggers in person.

Notice how much more effective he was versus the PR firm.

As the internet has become social, you don’t need a PR firm to capture the attention of your niche. Instead of hiring a PR firm, you can promote your business by leveraging personal relationships with the influential social media players in your industry. These people could be bloggers with a lot of traffic, popular forum posters, or influential StumbleUpon users.

The key is building relationships with these influencers.

But don’t just giving your product/service pitch. Instead, think in terms of a real life friendship. How does a healthy friendship work? Through give and take.

The influencers have something you want: influence over an audience. What can your give them in return?

In an interview, Tim Ferriss talked about how he made the initial connection with bloggers. Instead of mentioning his book right away, he first showed interest in them by asking them about themselves including their blog. Soon, they would ask about him and he was able to talk about his book in a natural way without having to resort to a “hard sell”.

In Tim’s example, we can see that he brought value to the relationship. He added value through his face-to-face friendship and his book.

You may not have time to go to conferences to meet bloggers like Tim. However, you can still build profitable friendships online. Jon Morrow of Copyblogger wrote a great post about networking. He gave these five great ideas: 

• Write a guest post that gets lots of traffic and adoring comments
• Volunteer to “vote” for any posts that they’re pushing on social media sites like Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon
• Email them an irresistible question, hoping to spark a discussion
• Leave lots of truly memorable comments
• Interview them in either a post or a podcast, making sure to ask lots of intelligent questions

You may not have time to write a book like Tim, but you can create a business blog that adds value to your industry.  

Social media influencers are always looking out for compelling content. If you publish remarkable posts, many of these influencers will link to your content. But first, you may want to build relationships before talking about your posts. This greatly increases your chance of getting a link.

When preparing to launch a website in the future an organization/individual has two likely choices. They might decide to not put anything up on the domain they plan on launching and only announce the site once their is an actual site to show. On the other hand they could put a placeholder page (splash page) up on the domain and whoever visits the site will place it in the back of their mind like the other million sites that people forget to go back and check on.

However, now there is a third option that shouldn’t be ignored. With today’s technology organizations are capable of putting up pre-launch blogs to help maintain the visitors that come to their site.

Most recently I visited the website of my favorite magazine, Play, to find that they had a more sophisticated splash page then one may think. However, I also found that they are missing a great opportunity to improve their image and traffic while also saving a lot of time when their official site launches.

Their target audience consists of people who enjoy video games and technology and the number of people who visit their site is not known, but seeing how this crowd uses the web extensively you could imagine the loss of people their site experiences daily. What they could do is setup a little blog that has frequent updates so that people have a reason to return to the site.

They already have a basic layout on their site and they could fit a blog in there and start writing industry newsbits or keeping everyone updated to the inner workings of the magazine. They may plan on doing this already with their official site, but why not begin that process now?

The Benefits

What this does is help keep people interested in your company. More and more companies are going the route of releasing beta products, software, and websites and a pre-launch blog could be looked at in the same way. You could find out what type of features users want and what they expect to see or you could choose just to write small entries/articles for your readers to enjoy.

More importantly you get your site in search engines immediately. If you type in “play magazine” into Google you won’t even find their website in the first 50 results returned. Obviously, search engine traffic is something that cannot be overlooked, but this is exactly what they are doing. They spent the time to put together a basic website and by the time the real one launches, they will have to invest even more time in getting it established in the search engines.

If you put up a website like they have and then spend 5 months finishing the real one and assuming it takes 2 months to get your site thoroughly established in the search engines, you find that your company has lost 7 months of traffic. However, if you did the basic site with the blog, not only will you get in the search engines, but assuming quality content you will also find your site linked to by other sites. Once the official site launches your website is already moving in full-force with an established customerbase and all it took was a small blog.

If you were to use a hosted service such as Squarespace, you could easily setup a blog that provides interesting content and helps to maintain and grow a customer base before your official site even launches. Even though your site may not be done, it doesn’t mean your ability to win an audience can’t begin now.

When Apple released Aperture, its new professional photo editing application to compete with work alongside Adobe Photoshop, it really turned my head more than most software does. The interface is just beautiful, the features are amazingly thoughtful, and I honestly don’t think I’ll be able to use it to it’s full potential but I’ll probably still buy it. Now how often does somebody say that about a software purchase?

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