The Wax Blog

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.

I realized after 8 years in business I’ve seen some trends in how entrepreneurs kick off a new year. One thing I know I need to work on is calibrating the right sense of urgency in terms of all my goals and plans for 2011.  This seems to be an issue for many small business owners as well.  It’s not easy to keep everything in balance this time of year – not burning out too fast OR taking too long to plan. See if you can identify any of your own traits in these characterizations: (more…)

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…)

By Beth Graddon-Hodgson (follow her on Twitter @writesourcing )

Sometimes the best inspiration to write comes from real life situations, and over the past week, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the different perspectives of SEO. Everyone who works to build an SEO strategy whether it’s through a blog, web copy, social networking, link building and the like has the same goal in mind; get people to visit a business’ site, get the visitors to increase the SEO rankings, and turn those visits into sales. But it doesn’t mean that we all use the same method to get there. Yes, WriteSourcing’s work uses SEO techniques, but I would never classify us as traditional SEOs because we’re not technical-minded, we’re creative and customer- oriented. (more…)

By Beth Graddon-Hodgson

There are people that think a blog’s a blog. Provided it offers a place to publish content, it’s all the same. Unfortunately, using a proprietary sub-standard publishing tool as offered by many web hosting companies can backfire, proving this ideology very wrong. When some of the most basic features are missing that you think are just there for your own convenience, the do impact your blog success. I’ve covered some of the topics outlined here in different ways. Just remember, here we’re focusing on what you should ensure your blog software offers and why.
1. A scheduling function – it’s not just for a blogger’s convenience to be able to post ahead of time (something that’s essential for a pro blogger with a lot on the roster), as I’ve said before, scheduling your blog posts offers readers consistency. This is so important when readers expect ultimate convenience. Things happen when you’re running a business, and there may be times when you get pulled away for an afternoon or an hour when readers expect to find your new post. Planning ahead by scheduling ensures you never disappoint them. Make sure the blog software you choose has a scheduling function. If it’s missing, there will be times you pull your hair out and your traffic will decline. (more…)