Starting a Business Blog That Doesn’t Suck

“I’m a landscaper or plumber – how do I start a business blog? Who would want to read it?” Exactly. Or maybe. I hear that a lot. It’s a reasonable question.

“And if I write it, and I don’t know what I’m doing, won’t it suck.” Probably not. It could, if you don’t keep an open mind. But it won’t otherwise.

So how is it done? That’s the first part. Let’s give a couple of different examples:

Let’s say  you’re a plumber who does gardening on the side: You might do a plumber blog, but you might add more value by doing a niche blog on your related interest – gardening (both are vaguely related to home ownership), and then have a sidebar offering your plumbing services, and linking back to  your main site. Or if you’re interested in home maintenance or remodeling or handywork over all, you could go down that path. What drives blogs is “passion” for something in particular, consistency (these two tend to be deeply related), and perhaps a touch of presumption (the willingness to treat your most recent observation, whatever it is, as something that might have value for other people).

I’m a self-employed internet marketing consultant. I write a blog about work. I didn’t really know, at first, what I wanted to blog about. Like a lot of people, I ended up changing the name of it as I settled on a theme. In fact, it used to just be my personal everything blog, until I realized what I was doing with it, and split it in two, and then I split it again, and started another blog on my corporate site. Now this site is very thematic. Areas where I do a lot of thinking or have a lot of observations are prime blogging areas. I started out blogging about whatever, inserting whatever I was thinking about when I was in the shower or driving, and then I noticed a pattern starting to form that clarified my mission. My blog is about work, especially self-employment, contracting, freelancing, free agents, and the culture’s misconceptions about work. These topics sort of bleed over into my business though (my clients are often entrepreneurs), and that lets me add value. One doesn’t have to start several blogs – one will do, but I mention it to show how, over time, one tends to carve out a niche.

EXAMPLE: You’re a real estate appraiser and you want to focus on a search engine optimized blog on your main site: Ok, so you need several things. 1. the content has to be original. Cutting and pasting will not only get you in legal trouble, it’ll get you drowned in Google. Don’t do it. 2. the content has to be relevant and search-term rich (you need all your various place names – towns and counties you serve, and all your various services – divorce appraisals, estate appraisals, as well as words like appraiser, appraise, appraising to show up over time in various blog posts). 3. you have to be consistent. A blog post a month is a search engine and social network marketing death sentence. It’s a blog-coma. So how do you do that well? You give yourself an assignment that every other day, busy or not, tired or not, turned off the computer already or not, you’ll sit down and ask yourself what you thought about today, and pick something from a list like this one and write one 200 word post, or at least write for 10minutes.

• A common misconception is… (clarification)
• A little known bit of information is… (fact)
• A service we offer that is often underused is… (option)
• Something happened locally today that affects all of us… (news & analysis)
• Today, I was thinking about… (insight)
• Here’s a tip for those of you… (advice)

So those are a few examples. You might have different ones. But you get the point. But “I sound awful, and write worse than that”, you say?

In other words, how can it not suck?

The failings of most small business blogs are that:

• they try to sound corporate instead of personal. Don’t compose – it’s not prayer – just write like you talk on the phone or when you’re comfortable. Use a conversational tone. People don’t want to read an essay, so don’t write one.
• they’re just a lot of sales copy. It doesn’t have to be badly worded to suck. It can pass legal, HR, and Stunk and White’s style guide, and still be crap. Give something away – don’t horde your thoughts, don’t pander, and don’t just keep shlepping your services (“we offer… we offer… we offer…”) – people are getting enough offers – you’ve got to add value. What were you *really* thinking about today, related to what you were doing? Now why would I care? Or how is that related to your work?
• they have little expertise in your area or interest showing through in their writing style – can happen when you hire someone other than you to ‘keep up with it’ (some of us are professional bloggers who specialize in research and flair, but just getting your nephew who is computer savvy is usually a bad idea). The best blogs though? They’re written by you. Heck, I don’t even spell check a lot of the time. Yeah, I know, that’s unprofessional. That’s why I usually do spell check. But sometimes I’d rather be genuine, responsive, and dash something off in the moment than impress you with the fact that I too have an electronic spell checker installed.
• they aren’t updated consistently – happens when you don’t carea about what you’re writing (you’re writing the wrong stuff) – or, honestly, when life gets out of whack – when something hits you hard (sickness, a flood of business, whatever) and you don’t stop to eat, shower, or blog. If you want to be really successful? Don’t shower until you’ve done  your blog post. Or no coffee until you’ve posted. Or you’re not allowed to brush your teeth… you get the point. It’s 10minutes – it isn’t that you don’t have time.
• they aren’t updated at all – happens when you convince yourself you can’t generate 200 intelligent words, but still managed to get certified in whatever you do for a living. Is that too blunt? Good. Because even you wouldn’t believe you. If you’re able to answer an e-mail, or respond to a phone call, you can shell out a readable paragraph. Besides blog content (which just means dynamic, original, relevant content) is not just an option if you intend to market seriously online -it’s a requirement. Anyone that tells you different either isn’t paying attention or is selling you something I wouldn’t wish on an enemy.
• they aren’t original – lots of copied content – bad for you (legally), bad for searches (Google will bury you – they don’t get where they are by presenting duplicate results), bad for readers (it’s a snoozer)

But the number one failing of all time? They aren’t creative enough. Before you get worried that that means you have to be Woodward and Berstein, just make it interesting to others. Usually, the reason it isn’t is because you are not actually interested in anything (or won’t tell us what it is that you’re interested in). In other words, the blog sounds like dry lumber, because you’ve chosen a topic you don’t really care about. Perhaps you’re not thinking outside the box – you’re falling back on that culture that says anything with character hanging out of it might risk someone not liking your business. Folks? To *Hell* with that one. If you’ve not had your head buried in the sand for the last few years, you’ll know that blogs, Facebook, and Twitter have changed all of that. A little edge, a little scruff, some rough sides hanging out – those are now exactly the reason lots of small, up and coming business are getting attention and corporate blogs make you want to scratch your eyes out from boredom. The answer is somewhere between shock jock and school cafeteria food, but the message is Stand Out!

Are there people who get annoyed, because they don’t want to hear the real answer one of my blogs is giving to a key question they have? You bet. For every one of them, there are three who are glad someone said something, anything, beyond “There are many solutions to these complex issues. Which one you favor will depend, invariably, on you.” Zilch. That’s zilch. No one digs that kind of glop, especially not in a post-blogging online world.

But it doesn’t have to be controversial, if you’re not an idea person. There are excellent, well-followed, highly-popular blogs on gardening, deep sea fishing, vintage motorcycles, or whatever you want. If you have to, do what I did. Start a blog about nothing. Seinfeld was a show about nothing, and it only stopped making new seasons because Jerry Seinfeld wanted to go out on a high note. Your blogging won’t be about nothing for long. I made my blog an avenue of self-discovery, self-knowledge, and self-understanding. What I got out of that was direction and meaning. If you’re done with self-knowledge, I don’t want to tell you. I figure if you’re there already, you already know enough to know what you want to write about, what passion drives you (and hopefully you’re working in or around it), and you don’t need my advice. And for everything else, there’s Mastercard.

By the way, some people get hung up on the word “blog” or “blogging” as though it were some sort of subculture (it started that way, and now Chrysler and Pepsi and Oprah are doing it).  If you want, you can call it dynamic site updates – or constant additions to your website content. Whatever you call it, it’s not enough to do some back-end search engine optimization, anymore, if you want to maintain an audience. It hasn’t been enough for years, now. Front-end search engine optimization is about frequently updated original, relevant content. It’s just that no one came out and made the announcement. It’s sort of information that’s leaked out into the reluctant culture a little at a time, like e-mail.

The first and most important step in starting a business blog that doesn’t suck is [drumroll...] starting a blog. If your site isn’t equipped with one, it can be added. If you want to start it off-site and work it for a while until you’re comfortable, you can do that too. My company, Market Moose, is happy to help set you up, and provide consulting and training. But if you feel comfortable setting it up on your own, what are you waiting for?

Google’s Ultimate Information Manager

I’m deliriously happy.

Happy to be wrong, that is. The other day I said Google didn’t know how to do “to do” lists properly. They don’t. But that’s beside the point – it seems google has figured out  that I don’t yet know how to do “to do” lists. In the same way, I used to think documents were slow-moving, local objects that you protect on a hard drive, and now I think they’re collaborative ‘events’ that you share on the internet – that expand, connect and relate, because of that. I was telling Google that to do lists are like emails to yourself. Google already has it figured out. I don’t know if they realize it, but their new PIM turns e-mails back into “to do” lists. If it’s not an action item, folks, honestly, in the world of work, what is it? Someone said that when you make books, write to do lists, not “notes”, otherwise you’re reading the wrong books. Why would it be different for e-mail?

Google recently added two glorious features to gmail – the best app in the world (we don’t capitalize it around here – it’s your OS in the future). By far, the best new feature is multiple inboxes (it’s in your settings) and a close second is the ultra-fast “move to” dropdown. The inboxes change the meaning of the application, turning it into a book of work, and the “move to” feature is like a rotary sander vs. a wood block – with the one you have a business – the other is just good enough for a quick job.

I spent a good chunk of time cleaning up my giant inbox, before I found these. I had about 270 messages, and I just was never going to find out what I’d forgotten to do on page 3. So I started backwards, processing, doing, eliminating… I made it to about 170 messages, when I got really tired of it and went fiddling w. my gmail settings.

Within a few minutes, I had several inboxes on one page. I didn’t even know how to do it right – I just named them, and it automatically used the names to categorize messages, so I instantly saw my schema – the picture, at a glance, of what I’m doing and care about right now. I was floored. But it works particularly well when you base each inbox on a label. So I started cleaning up my labels. I got it from about 40+ labels to about 10. The 10 that matter to me, now. Consolidate, consolidate – that’s the rule. Don’t have a label called “information”. Is it information for its own sake? If so, it’s the wrong information. What are you going to *do* with it? Assign it a purpose or an action.

In cleaning up labels, I discovered the instant “move to” function. Holy wow! That wasn’t there, before! Put these things together, and within a few minutes – yes, minutes! – I had separate inboxes for Clients, Contractors, Business Partners, Accounting, and yes… To Do. Ta Da!. It was so good that I added some GTD by creating To Do Right Away and To Do Eventually. Google, I need room for one more inbox. Hell, just give me 10. Paired with making decisions right away, as to whether something will get further attention, this is an effective time-management tool. It’s a life-management tool – after all, just categorizing something based on an action represents a decision.

My gmail is now a PIM (personal information manager). Combined with my sidebars showing my calendar items, google docs, and chat, it’s about 10 times the app it was just a little while ago. It’s gmail raised to an exponent. Needs twitter integration tho. Google, just go ahead and buy them! You know you want to. Yes, Twitter, it’ll hurt a bit, but it’ll hurt so good. Put my Twitter and my Facebook wall in there, Google, and you’ve got an even bigger winner.

I nearly said “woman”. Google, if you were a woman, I’d… Anyway, it’s fantastic. For those of you that think I’m gushing, needlessly, look, technology has given me arms and legs. I was a mere mortal before technology, and now I’m batman. I walk by and kick sand in the face of small tasks. Google has given me a toolbelt fit for a superhero. Thank you, Google. I’ll use it all. Including my Google Notebook – you can have my Notebook when you pry it from my… on second thought, you can’t have it, even then!

By the way, I’m a Firefox fanatic. And I’ve got Flock, now. Flock rocks. But fastest browser? Google Chrome. Just launched all three and I was typing this before the others opened. Googlepress? Hmm.

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