Ailing business blog? Gene Therapy is the cure!

Have you ever thought seriously about how your readers view your business blog? Does it come across as useful and trustworthy, or do people think of your blog as a severe case of blowing your own trumpet?

Trust is the foundation upon which every successful business blog is built, which is why we were delighted to read the very insightful article that our client Jean-Paul Pangalos, Sales and Marketing Director at Gomasper, just forwarded this morning. The article, Health Check: How Trusted is Your Coprporate Blog?, by ‘blog doctor’ Jeremiah Owyang, is basically an 8 point fitness test for your blog.

However, before you read it and see how your business blog measures up, we want to just chime in and tell you not to be alarmed if you happen to get the worst diagnosis, which we can only hope was written with tongue very firmly in cheek:

Terminally Ill: Lastly, if less than 25% of your criteria is good or great, you really need to consider shutting it down –you’re not getting it and your culture, strategy, or team should focus elsewhere. Giving you the advice to take two in the morning ain’t going to cut it, it’s time for euthanasia.

You see, today there is really nothing incurable when it comes to blogging – at least not if you get hold of some of the latest radical gene therapy and re-engineer the bits that are broken. So, let’s run through Dr. Jeremiah’s checklist and outline the solutions you should be adopting to fix each of your blog’s shortcomings.

1. Writing Style:

Dr. Jeremiah’s advice: Write in a human voice.

Gene therapy: Build trust by throwing out the corporate mindset and bring in a good dose of human DNA into your business blog. Write from the heart and don’t be afraid to say what comes to mind as long as it’s useful to your readers.  Self censorship will show through and kill your blog (whether it’s you or your boss doing it) so drink a glass of your favourite wine, beer or whatever and open up.

2. Topics

Dr. Jeremiah’s advice: Discuss the lifestyle (or workstyle) of actual customers

Gene therapy: Put your customers (current and prospective) at the focus of your blog. You’ll need a microscope and a sharp scalpel to cut all the ‘you’ out and make it about them and their wants and needs.

3. Humility

Dr. Jeremiah’s advice: Admit when you are wrong. Discuss in open the shortcomings of the company and product and show how it will be improved

Gene therapy: Nothing is perfect and your company is no exception, of course. So if something is wrong, admit it, then explain in your blog how you are fixing the root cause. Build trust through honesty. Doctor’s orders! A layer of makeup won’t cover anything up. You need to go straight to your company’s DNA and replace the genes that are misfiring.

4. Linking Behaviour

Dr. Jeremiah’s advice: Links out to other sources, even competitors or critics

Gene therapy: Spread the link love! Contrary to popular belief it you won’t catch any diseases, but exposure to the link gene pool out there will make you stronger in turn, partly because you show your readers that you are not afraid of the competition, and partly because you’re bound to get your share of links back.

5. Customer Inclusion

Dr. Jeremiah’s advice: Let your customers write as guests on your blog, or include snippets of their experiences

Gene therapy: Revisualise your business blog and change your mindset to bring your customers even more to the forefront than in step 2. Give them a voice by letting them write in your blog. Interview them. Write about their real experiences with you or your products. (Take a look at the way our clients Pearly Grey write about their guests and owners for a great example of this. They have made customer inclusion into an science!)

6. Dialog

Dr. Jeremiah’s advice: Enable comments and let them be published intstantly

Gene therapy: Allow your business blog to be exposed to external information, even if it may appear harmful. Just make sure you have the right antibodies in place (see 7 below).

7. Comment Moderation

Dr. Jeremiah’s advice: Comments (other than spam or off topic) are allowed, including direct disagreements

Gene therapy: Get a good spam filter (like Askimet for WordPress) added to your business blog so you’ll be safe against those kinds of germs, but otherwise let the free speech flow. Don’t censor negative comments, but by all means reply to them and explain your point of view. Also, do keep an eye on obvious spam that might make it through the filter and apply a good dose of localised antibiotics where necessary.

8. Frequency

Dr. Jeremiah’s advice: Write a steady publication rate of posts appropriate to the speed of that market

Gene therapy: Well, not quite gene therapy. No drastic changes involved here, other than a regular amount of exercise in the form of new posts that will keep your business blog healthy.

So there you go! Focus on fixing each of the above points and even if your blog has no heartbeat at the moment, it will be well on its way to recovery before you know it. Better still, carefully engineer your blog’s genes to achieve optimum, trustworthy, gold-medal winning fitness! And if you need any other help or advice, just comment here or contact the Sorted Sites Blog Clinic directly. We’ll be glad to help out.

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Tagged as: business blog, Dr. Jeremiah's