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The Best Source for Business Blog Post Topics

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The more I’ve been blogging, the more I see that tapping into your experience is the best source for blog post topics.

The posts where I share my experience are usually better received than my other posts. They get more traffic and comments.

Business Owners Have an Advantage

If you’re not familiar with blogs, you may not realize that many non-business bloggers don’t have a lot of experience. As a business owner, you have an advantage because you’re involved in your industry on a day to day basis whereas your average blogger is an amateur or a hobbyist.

I don’t want to downplay amateurs. In fact, there are many amateurs that have as much or more expertise than business owners. But for the most part, business owners have more experience.

Experience Trumps Book Knowledge

For many new business bloggers, after blogging for a while, they feel like they are running out of things to say. They had a good number of topics to cover but they can’t thing of any more topics.

For these bloggers, the problem is not seeing their experience as a source of blog topics. They feel like they don’t have anything left to share because they don’t keep up with their industry as much as they would like by reading books and magazines. However, practical experience is usually a better teacher than sharing something from a book.

Once these bloggers start seeing their experience as a vast knowledge pool, they overcome writer’s block and generate more than enough topics to keep their blog going.

This article, Report vs Expert, helped me realize this point. Yaro Starak, the author, argues that expert status is gained by having relevant experience and then sharing it.  By sharing your experience, you give evidence that you are an expert in your field and your knowledge is worth listening to.  You’re not just a reporter, or someone who just relays someone else’s content.

Yaro writes that it’s all about leveraging what you’ve experienced and overcoming fear and insecurity by sharing it with others.  Here’s a relevant quote from his article:

Most people fail to become experts (or perceived as experts) because they don’t leverage what they already know. Every person who lives a life learns things as they go, takes action every day and knows something about something. The reason why they never become an expert is because they choose not to (which is fine for some, not everyone wants to be an expert), but if your goal is to blog your way to expertise and leave the world of reporting behind you have to start teaching and doing so by leveraging real experience.

Experience can come from what you do today and what you have done previously, you just need to take enough steps to demonstrate what you already know and what you are presently learning along your journey. I know so many people in my life who are experts simply by virtue of the life they have lived, yet they are so insecure about what they know, they never commit their knowledge to words for fear of…well fear.

Over to You

How often do you blog about your experience?

Should You Add a Forum on Your Business Site?

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One trend I’ve been noticing is that website owners are adding forums on their business site to go along with their existing business blog.

If you’ve read this blog, you know that I definitely think having a blog is a good idea. But what about forums?

Why Forums are Great

Forums in general are a great tool.

First, they build community on your site. Second, you get free content that can drive traffic through the search engines. Third, you’ll increase repeat visitors since people will be coming back to see if anyone replies to their posts. Fourth, as people create content and participate on your forums, they’ll have sense of belonging and involvement. This often leads them to tell their friends to check out their posts and participate on the forum.

Forums Need a Critical Mass of Users

Despite all these great benefits, it’s not enough to just add forum software to your site and wait for people to show up and start conversing.

To make a forum work, you have to have the right foundation in place. Here are some of the things to consider.

Forums need a critical mass of users to work. When I say users, I mean people that actually participate in the forum and create content. Even if you have a lot of traffic, that doesn’t mean that your forum will do well.

Many people will be glad to read forum posts but they don’t want to participate. I would check your blog and see if you get a lot of blog comments. If you do, that’s a good sign.

Also, if you have regular commenters, that’s another good sign since forums thrive when there is a group of regular users that form the backbone of the forum community.

Finally, unless you have a huge amount of comments like 20+ per post, you may want to shut down your blog comments and just have a forum section where people can respond to your blog posts. After you close your blog comments, start creating a forum thread for each of your new blog posts and then link to the appropriate thread at the end of each blog post.

Over to You

What do you think of forums?

Do you participate on them? Have you ever tried running one?

Business Blog Profile: Team JAPANiCAN Staff Blog

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This is my first business blog profile, but I hope to review specific business blogs every couple of weeks. Today, we’ll be looking at Team JAPANiCAN Staff Blog. This is the business blog of JAPANiCAN.com, a site that lets you book Japan hotels.

Good Qualities

The JAPANiCAN staff is doing a lot things right with their blog.

First, they use pictures liberally. I’ve written before that images can improve a blog so much and that’s especially true when you’re working in the travel niche. Nearly every post on JAPANiCAN’s blog has an image and many of them have more than one image.

Second, I like how JAPANiCAN adds a personal touch to their blog by including pictures of their staff. I’ve inserted their blog’s header at the top of this post and you can see that it has a small group picture of the staff. Also, each post has a link to the author of the post. The author pages have a short bio and picture of the author.

I think it’s great that the head of the staff actually writes blog entries. His name is Hiro Imaizumi and here is his profile.

By the way, I like that JAPANiCAN has multiple bloggers. Having multiple authors for your business blog is a great idea. More authors lets you have more blog posts and each author brings a different point of view, which gives your blog variety in topics and writing style.

Third, JAPANiCAN updates their blog pretty regularly. They started it about a year ago and have averaged about eight posts per month. Their posting frequency shows they are committed to their blog. They only have three posts for this month but hopefully they’ll turn that around and start posting more frequently like they did before.

Fourth, they have a good mixture of posts that just give information and posts that have both information and offers. I’ve written before about the importance of making offers but you don’t want to overdo it and make your blog look like a big sales pitch.

Recommendations

Here are some recommendations I would give to the JAPANiCAN staff about their blog.

On the home page of the site, I didn’t find a link to the blog. I would insert a link to the blog on the home page that’s easy to find.

I would place the links to the author profiles at a more prominent place.  A good spot is close to the blog post titles. This will get readers to click on the links and get to know the bloggers better.

The current blog URL is http://blog.japanican.com/en/staffblog/index.html. It would be cleaner to use the short URL http://blog.japanican.com/.

Finally, I recommend that the header be linked to the blog home page.

Great Video About Being More Productive for Business Bloggers

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Eben Pagan has some of the best productivity/time management content for small business owners especially those that do their work on the internet. Here’s a recent video he did. It has a lot of great advice. I don’t usually take notes while consuming content, but Eben’s video had such great content that I found myself pausing the video at important points and taking notes.

Here are the concepts I found useful.

Don’t Multitask; Instead, Focus

The best work schedule is filled with short work bursts of concentrated focus of about one hour. Studies have shown that this time period is about how long we are capable of staying focused on a task without needing a break or experiencing degradation in our ability to focus.

Multitasking is very bad for productivity. Very bad. Multitasking lowers your IQ more than marijuana! Therefore, we need work environments that keep distractions and interruptions at a minimum.

Avoiding multitasking means doing one thing and one thing only.  Adhering to this rule is very important since it’s so easy to get distracted while working online.

We have to learn how control our “monkey mind”. This terms refers to the times when our brain stops focusing and gets distracted with thoughts unrelated to the task at hand. Having short work periods of about one hour helps, but we still have to be disciplined to continually refocus our mind when it wanders.

Breaks are Good

Our bodies have a natural rhythm. We will have energy for about 90-120 minutes and then we’ll hit a lull. Anticipate this lull and don’t fight it.  It’s your body telling you to take a break.  Taking a short 10 minute break away from work to let the body rejuvenate itself. If you avoid these breaks, you’ll overwork and damage your body.

Overwork leads to missing out on the big picture. We lose who we are and why we got into the business world in the first place.

Set Yourself Up With a Great First Hour

The first hour of your day is the most important hour of the day. You yourself are the biggest leverage point in your business, so use that hour to take care of yourself. Focus on making yourself strong physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Eben’s sample first hour goes something like this:

  1. Drink one liter of water
  2. Exercise for 20-30 minutes
  3. Meditate for 5-10 minutes
  4. Eat a healthy meal
  5. Read for 5-10 minutes

Along with improving your productivity, this first hour will help you produce better work.  If you’re taking care of yourself, you’ll take care of your customers and business partners better.

Again, here’s the video. Check it out and let me know what you think.

How to Write Guest Posts That Actually Get Published

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In my last post, I talked about guest posts as a powerful marketing strategy for your business blog. But if you’ve never done a guest post, you may wonder if other bloggers will actually publish your content. So today I’ll cover some fundamental tips to increase the success of your posts.

Observe the Target Blog First

Before you write a guest post, you should observe your target blog, or the blog where you want your post to be published. Read the last 10 posts of blog. There are couple of reasons to take this preliminary step.

First, you don’t want to write about a topic that’s been recently covered. There’s a good chance your post will be rejected if your cover a recent topic.

Second, you want to make sure your post will fit well with the existing content. This means your guest post needs to be related to the same industry as your target blog. Consider the tone and style of the blogger. Is he writing in a formal voice that’s suited for academic journals? Or does he write in a more informal tone? Also, keep in mind the post length. On average, how long are the blogger’s posts?

Third, you want to understand where the blog’s readers are coming from. Check out the comments and see what kind of readers the blog has.

Fourth, you can generate ideas for a useful topic. As you read the blog, you’ll see that certain topics are not covered or are not covered with a lot of depth. You can create a guest post in those topics. Also, you might come up with a topic while reading the comment section. For example, you find a question there that wasn’t answered by the blogger. You can craft your guest post to answer that question.

Some bloggers write their guest post without checking out their target blogs. Don’t be like them. The best guest bloggers always check out their target blogs first. This allows them to tailor their posts to fit well on those blogs.

Write the Post

Once you’ve checked out your target blog, you should have some ideas for a guest post topic. Go through your ideas and pick the best one based on your expertise and how well the topic fits the target blog.

Don’t forget to include your bio and link. Also, be strategic with your link. You don’t have to link to your blog home page every time. Oftentimes, it’s a good idea to link to one of your blog posts especially if that blog post would be useful to the target blog’s audience.

For example, if I was writing a guest post for a link building blog, I would link to this post, 7 Types of Posts That Attract Links, instead of the home page.

Pitch Your Post

Once you’ve finished create your post, it’s time to send it to the blogger. I use a simple email template like this one:

Hi [name],

I’m a fan of your blog. I especially found [one of their recent posts] helpful.

I wrote a guest post that I think your readers would find interesting. The post is below my signature.

I know you’re probably busy, so I don’t need a quick response. If I haven’t received a response in the next 30 days, I’ll assume it’s okay to send the post to another blogger. Thanks for your time.

Your Signature

Bloggers are busy people, so I like to give them 30 days to give me a response. If you’re targeting a very popular blogger, you might want to give them more time since they get a lot of email.

Over to You

Do you have any tips for getting your guest posts published?