Null Media

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Just ran across this statistic from Hubspot: How much business blogging is best? To answer to those questions, I looked at data from 1,531 HubSpot customers (mostly small- and medium-sized businesses). 795 of the businesses in my sample blogged, 736 didn’t. The data was crystal clear: Companies that blog have far better marketing results.

Online, the old adage that “anything goes” may be true, but on your business blog, you need to think about your posting strategy before you write a blog post. What should you write about? Well, it depends on your business. These tips should serve as a guide to help you get started. 1. The Industry – The most common and successful business blogs are used by their owners to discuss current events going on in the industry in which they operate.

Early in my journalism career (more years ago than I care to mention), someone asked me whether I was a better writer or reporter. Without much hesitation, I chose Option A, because I knew I was way too polite to be a real newshound. There were plenty of great reporters on the staff of that weekly newspaper who could barely string coherent sentences together. But boy could they produce compelling information. It was up to the editors and writers on the staff to help them tell their stories.

Businesses get more business when they blog. We’ve already established that. But more and more, video content’s been being trotted out as the next big thing in customer communications. Is video really as big a deal as everyone makes it out to be? Rather than relying on clichés like “Pictures are worth a thousand words,” we dug into the hard numbers to find out.

Leave it to my alumni magazine (The University of Texas at Austin) to offer an insightful look into a major pet peeve of professional writers: Over-use of the word “I.” In years of editing thousands of works of film criticism, this has been perhaps my biggest pet peeve. (And yes, I’m aware that I’m breaking that rule repeatedly in this post.) Junior critics often can’t find any other way to get a handle on a movie review, so they start by talking about, well, themselves.

We’ve said it before but we’ll say it again: The way you get people to pay attention to you in the blog world is not by writing about yourself but about writing about what people are interested in. The Intuit Small Business Blog recently published an interview with Chris Brogan, who puts it in simpler terms. What would you advise a small-business owner who is trying to raise awareness of a company through a blog? What types of posts tend to resonate the most?

Recently I did a little math and calculated that I had written or edited some 15,000 blog posts in my career to date. That’s a mammoth number… and it’s taught me more than a few lessons about what to do and what not to do when writing a blog post for your business. Today I’m digesting them all and sharing them with you here. 1) Give Away Your Secrets – Do you make artisanal chocolate bars? Show how you make them in painstaking detail, step by step.

Dale Carnegie said it best: “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” Attracting new customers and retaining existing ones requires more than simply pushing out marketing messages and waiting for results. Consumers are drawn to companies who genuinely care about their needs, and are constantly asking them what they want.