Blogging for your Readers or Your Business?

I have just finished reading a fantastic blog post by Chris Brogan, 'A Simple Blog Formula'. It threw up a question, Who Do We Write For?

For those die-hard bloggers who have mastered the formula for successful blog posting, writing a new article on business, interests or market trends can appear an effortless task. For the rest of us, there will always be times when coming up with new content is challenging......a point worth remembering is why we are posting in the first place.

Google provides great tools to analyse our traffic, we can easily calculate where, if at all, we are going wrong, can see how posting a certain article improves traffic or not. It can be too easy to make feedback results the yardstick for future blog content. 

Who do you blog for?

The primary objective of any website or blog is to generate traffic, enquiries and sales for our business and there must be an element of that within our blog posting. It is important to balance that against a need to get a message across in a way that will appeal to a reader....who is following because of a personal interest in what we do.

Getting 'off message'
This can be a common pitfall for bloggers who chase good analytics results.  Avoid changing writing preferences and content just to cater for the reader or providing what you think a follower wants to see. A blog should retain consistency of posts, a common thread running through each article rather than deviating through a wide variety of subjects. Stay 'on message' wherever possible, keep your objectives in mind each time you begin and end a post and take time to review your recent posts to see what you have written, how you could improve it or where the gaps are.

Post Writing Tips....

1. Catchy header
   
2. Pick a topic and stick to it
3. Always use an image to illustrate your post
4. Sub-divide longer sections into shorter paragraphs
5. Make sure you have a 'call to action' 
6. Use links to other articles

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Worth a read....
Blogging As Part Of Your Online Marketing Strategy