If you’d like your blog to help you attract new customers, you need to provide valuable information in your posts. Forget about you and your business. Your blog needs to focus entirely on your target audience.
The number one mistake businesses make in their blogs is to talk about themselves. It’s like when you walk into a shop and, instead of addressing your concerns, the shop assistants ignore you and continue to talk amongst themselves.
So, imagine that your blog is doing the job of welcoming someone, who is visiting your shop for the first time. If someone is reading your blog – even the first sentence – there’s a decent chance they think that your business offers a product or service that’s relevant to them.
If this was not the case, they would have ignored your post – just like someone walking past a shop, after glancing through the window and deciding that there is nothing of interest on offer. Yes, people do waste time web surfing, but they tend not to stick around on a website unless it’s relevant.
Here’s a shortlist of topics that are likely to grab visitors’ attention:
- The problem that they’re worrying about today
- What they fear might happen if they allow their problem to persist
- Possible solutions that might give them hope of a better future
In many cases, readers are not looking to buy from you. Just like someone visiting a shop for the first time, they’re just browsing, seeing whether you have anything useful to say. All they want is information.
The key point when it comes to your blog is that you should not write about yourself, or your business. It’s a complete waste of time – unless your content impinges directly on what’s happening in the mind of your potential customers. The focus of your blog should be entirely on their problems. The problems to which you have a solution.
When was the last time you searched for a supplier on the internet? Maybe you knew the type of product or service you wanted to buy. Or, perhaps, you were facing a challenge and you were simply looking for someone or something to help you resolve it. Information.
Of course, if you are going to write about the problems that your potential customers face, you must have a good understanding of those people. Who are they? What’s their big problem? What can you do to help them out?
The first step – before you write your blog – is to identify your target audience. I’ll be writing about this in my next post.
