You CAN Make Your Blog a Must-Read for Customers (& Attract LOTS More Web Traffic)
You sit there, staring at a blank page on your computer screen. You tip back your chair and look at the ceiling. You balance on two legs, willing yourself not to fall backward. You squeeze your eyes shut—hard—because, after all, the tighter you squeeze them, the more vigorously your brain works, right? Nevertheless, despite all of these strenuous efforts, you still can’t come up with an idea for your next blog.
Aargh!
One of the keys to ensuring your blog successfully supports the SEO (search-engine optimization) efforts of your website is regularity. You need to regularly add content—that is, write an article and post it to your blog. But coming up with ideas? That can be hard for lots of florists.
It shouldn’t be, though. The topics for your blogs are all around you! You actually discuss them daily with your customers and your staff. How’s that? Because the topics about which your customers are asking are the perfect topics for your blog. More specifically, the questions your customers ask you are the perfect headlines and topics for your blog.
One small-business owner learned this firsthand a few years ago when he faced a crisis in his pool-construction company. The recession had hit hard, and his company’s marketing and advertising budget was reduced to a tenth of what it had been. Being forced to overhaul his marketing and do something drastic to encourage some sales, the owner, Marcus Sheridan, focused almost exclusively on generating sales by writing informational blog posts and videos. Today, his efforts have resulted in his company recovering and surpassing what it had achieved before the recession hit.
And it’s all due to his blog. Seriously.
In fact, his content-marketing efforts have been so successful that, today, while he still is part owner of his pool-construction biz, he spends nearly all of his time consulting and mentoring other businesses so they can duplicate his success. And one of his favorite tips on determining what content to post on your blog? Answering customers’ questions.
In an interview with The New York Times, a reporter asked Sheridan how content marketing saved his company. He replied that he started thinking about how he uses the Internet—how, when he types in a search, he’s looking for an answer to a specific question.
"The problem in my industry, and a lot of industries, is you don’t get a lot of great search results because most businesses don’t want to give answers,” he told The Times. He explained that most businesses just want to talk about themselves. He realized that if he simply answered the questions that people asked about his product—fiberglass pools—then he might be able to generate enough interest from web surfers to save his company.
His technique worked. He started off by answering his most-frequently asked question, “How much does a fiberglass pool cost?” He followed that with a blog on “Problems with fiberglass pools.” And he kept writing, taking every question customers have ever asked him or his staff and turning them into blog posts.
Now, you’re likely shaking your head, thinking, “I can’t tell people how much flowers cost on my website! There are too many variables!” But that’s the point, Sheridan says. All those different variables are what you discuss in your article. As he points out, “That’s the magic behind this (technique). Google’s search engine doesn’t really care if we answer the question. It’s just looking for companies that are willing to address the question.”
So, in Sheridan’s blog on price, he describes how the customer has lots of options, about the huge variances in price and then offers up the range between lowest and highest prices. Within 24 hours of posting his article, he said it was No. 1 for every fiberglass-pool, cost-related phrase typed in to Google, Yahoo! and the other search engines. To this day, he says, he can track a minimum of $1.7 million in sales to that one article.
Sheridan offers lots more great advice in that Times article, on his marketing website and also in a free e-book he wrote, Inbound and Content Marketing Made Easy. You definitely should check out each of these links. In the meantime, though, I pulled together a list of some questions you can use to develop your upcoming blog articles. (It's included in the first comment section below.) Add your own ideas to this list to ensure you cover all the questions your customers ask. (Keep a notepad next to your phone or cash register and religiously add every customer question to it whenever you or your staff hear one.)
Never again be at a loss for what to write about for your next blog. The answer (and question) are already staring you in the face…
Have you answered similar questions on your blog? What has been the response? Share your experience in the comments below.
