The Wax Blog

by Beth Graddon-Hodgson

Most people could refrain from a cute panda picture when writing about this topic. I could not. B.

The changes implemented earlier this year by Google Panda have caused widespread panic online with many businesses seeing a drop in their rankings.  Now that the dust has settled,  over the next couple of weeks we are going to be exploring some of the things that you can do to make your blog content a bit more in line with the new guidelines that Google has set out.

But first, to give you a better understanding of what these changes mean, let’s look at the pros and cons as they pertain to your blog content: (more…)

As many businesses grow, the hassle of managing employees grows along with it. Two of the hardest groups to manage for me were outbound sales and customer service.  In the technology industry in the 1990′s (which is where my management career started and ended) had few processes developed for inbound and outbound calls. In a small business, your “super admins” end up dealing with most of these things and often get burned out.

Many, many call centers existing in the United States that are affordable, well-managed and easy to integrate into your business. It’s not all the stereotypical Indian or Malaysian call center that we’ve all come to dread. If you’re overwhelmed because you’ve got more business than you can handle, you might want to consider outsourcing call centers as an option. But just what do they do? (more…)

I love this post….the Wax blog is quite popular in the UK for some reason . Does our humor seem British? BH

Last year I wrote about a few things that you should consider when you’re using language to reach your target audience. Since this blog has a large international following, it’s a topic worth revisiting to learn how you can ensure that your blog appeals to your readers from the UK and other international destinations!

Here are a few things to consider whether you’re a US business trying to have more worldwide appeal, or you’re an international business trying to appeal to that core target audience: (more…)

By Beth Graddon-Hodgson

not Beth's husband

Most businesses use blogging as a marketing tool, and that’s the way it should be; but people are uncertain exactly what that means. Do you use traditional rules of marketing when you’re writing your blog posts? Write for a target audience? Try to sell a product? Include a call to action?  Well, those are more questions than I can answer here, and I’ve answered many of them before. But to summarize, yes to be an effective marketing tool you do have to think as you would when writing marketing copy (identify your target audience, make statements that are appealing and capture interest,  and she some light on your business). But the similarities end there.

By Beth Graddon- Hodgson

It’s essential that you maintain your brand values and image on your blog, but when the world is your oyster when it comes to blog topics, it can be hard to know where to draw the line for relevance.  Typically with blogs to attract the greatest number of readers within the target audience, I suggest that we look at topics that are relevant to the broader industry not a very specific niche.

A good example to illustrate what I mean is retailers that dispense ‘healthcare’ products like reading glasses and hearing aids. The specific niche topics that would be relevant on these blogs would include choosing reading glasses, determining the strength, trends in fashion, how hearing aids work, the different types of hearing aids etc. Expanding to other industry-relevant topics to appeal to a target audience would involve writing about eye health and hearing loss, because these are things that individuals shopping for these items would want to know, logically.

Some businesses worry that expanding the scope of topics is betraying their brand image. Using the examples above, reading glasses retailers worry that people will make assumptions that they are doctors or experts in eye health and hearing aid retailers may have similar concerns.  You always want to stay in line with your brand values, but going this route does not put you off course, and here are some points to help you remember how and why that’s true.

• Just because you’re sharing resources about other things relevant to your business but beyond your niche doesn’t misrepresent who you are or what services you provide. Sharing these resources does prove you’re an expert in your industry, and that you’re in touch with everything that’s important and relevant to it.
• By providing additional resources you’re simply anticipating the needs of your target market. It’s logical that people shopping for reading glasses would like to learn more about eye health and vision loss. If you’re proactive in presenting this information, they’ll appreciate that you’re going that extra mile (even if the information is coming from other resources and not your own personal knowledge) to provide for their needs. If you don’t offer up this information, they’ll just find it somewhere else anyway.
• While your blog does indirectly market your business, you don’t need to follow the specific rules of marketing. Every post doesn’t need to support your brand only by pushing your services.
• It’s harder to get readers for very niche topics. Your loyal blog visitors already invested in the industry might be interested, as would those specifically searching for the types of services you offer. But, if you’re serious about attracting others that could become future clientele, only focusing on the niche topics just isn’t going to do it for you.
• If you’re only focusing on the niche topics, you may be overselling as far as your readers are concerned, and they won’t keep reading if they feel that way.

My suggestion to those that understand the above, but still aren’t 100% convinced, is to continue to maintain the balance between niche and industry general. But you can always make it very clear with footnote style references (rather than post body text links) that some of your general information is coming from other sources that way they know exactly what your intentions are.

A few weeks back, I wrote about the top mistakes that business bloggers make that can hurt rather than help their business. After quite a bit of discussion in the comments from readers wondering what constitutes overselling, I thought it would be a great subject to dive  a little bit deeper into. The thing is, it is kind of a touchy subject, because the promotional limits of one blog may not be the same as another. At the end of the day, it’s all about what appeals to your readers and that can lead to big variations in strategy from one blog to the next. There’s no way to give you a guidebook to avoid the potentially fatal mistake of overselling on our blog, but here are a few things you need to think about. (more…)