If you are an online entrepreneur or any kind of entrepreneur for that matter (offline, bricks and mortar, professional, whatever) you may have wondered if you should start a blog.

I’m not going to enumerate the pros and cons of blogging. Instead I want to suggest what an effective business-oriented blog is, and the attitude you should have when you consider creating one. This may help you decide if you should put in the effort to create a business blog.

Business Blogging is Marketing

For our purposes here I am using the term “business” in a fairly broad sense. As I see it when you start engaging in activities for some organized or focused ulterior motive you are engaging in a “business”.

If you have a shoe store, for example, you generally are not selling shoes because you enjoy it. Selling shoes is not like going to the gym, reading a good book, or watching a baseball game on TV. Selling shoes has a point – to make money, earn a living, or whatever else you want to call it.

So first, not to sound too dogmatic about this, people in business have blogs for some marketing objective – they have a “focused ulterior motive” – to “sell” a message.

That doesn’t mean your business blog has to continually hawk products or talk about special deals for your services. But it does mean that it should reflect your business objectives and offer relevant information to your primary target market – your customers and prospective customers.

Sometimes the “marketing” objective of a blog is not very obvious. To take a fairly extreme example, let’s say you are a writer or a “commentator” type – you know, the kind of person who likes to express opinions, “rant”, or just hear him or herself talk.

In that case having a blog gives you a platform for getting out your message and enhancing your professional persona. It doesn’t have to be your only soapbox – you may also want to post videos on Youtube or start a radio program on BlogTalkRadio. But a blog can be the focal point of your empire – the thing that ties it all together and helps you establish a consistent presence.

In other words, business blogging is about marketing. Which means you should figure out your business objectives before starting a business blog. And then fit your blog into those objectives.

Business Blogging is about Publishing

Second, business bloggers should view themselves as publishers. The distinctive thing about “publishing” as opposed to just writing stuff, is that it is done in an organized and focused way with the intention of appealing to specific readers.

Unlike a diary, or even a traditional blog (which is sort of like a diary) you are not primarily writing for yourself in a business blog. A diary is specifically meant not to be read by others. A business blog is the opposite. A primary objective is to give as many readers as possible something interesting to read, watch or listen to.

There is a parallel here with book publishing. Traditional publishers will only publish a book if they think it has a chance of recouping costs and (hopefully) making a profit. When you submit a written work to a traditional publisher you are subjecting your work to the evaluation of a somewhat detached third party. Their primary concern is not to spread your message, but rather to sell your book in order to stay in business.

On the other hand, when you self-publish you pay the costs up front and are not willing to accept some third party’s opinion of the marketability of your writing. This is often called the vanity press because people who self-publish are prepared to pay to have works printed that have no hope of making a traditional publisher any money.

Blogs have been compared to the vanity press because they are self-published, have virtually no cost of entry, and often have no chance of getting a lot of readers.

But business blogs – at least as I have described them here – are more akin to traditional publishing. You should not waste your time and effort on a business blog if it has no chance of giving you some kind of return.

In other words, as a publisher you should be prepared to do what it takes to make your business blog a worthwhile investment. First, that means evaluating your target market and coming up with a game plan. Second, it means creating content that has a chance of getting readers. And third it means promoting your blog because you recognize that without readers you are basically wasting your time and the resources of your business.

When you are just one business among many others who provide the same type of services it is important to be unique. Whether you are a plumber, an accountant, a chiropractor, or a landscaping contractor, giving yourself a unique twist will help distinguish your business from your competitors.

This is what is often called creating a USP – a “Unique Selling Proposition”. Your USP is a feature of your business approach that will set you apart from your competitors, that you can build a service approach around, and that you can use in your marketing so that your brand has a consistent and unique identity.

In many cases your USP can be boiled down to a slogan or catch phrase or tag line. In fact it is often easier to think in these terms. Mass marketers like McDonalds use slogans like “I’m lovin’ it” or “You deserve a break today” to capture some value-added aspect of their service. Or consider this one: “Zero’s Subs. We’re Hot and on a Roll”.

Often your USP will not be a price advantage. Saying “we will beat any competitor’s price” is not particularly unique and it certainly will not usually add to the profitability of your company.

Your USP should add value – a perceived advantage – in the eyes of your prospective customers. It should give your customers and prospects a reason to deal with your business rather than one of your competitors.

An Example – Developing a USP for a Home Renovation Business

Let’s say you run a home renovation service. You have the skills to do virtually any type of home renovation, but there are some aspects that are both more interesting and more profitable. So you decide to focus on providing energy efficiency upgrades.

This can involve everything from recommending and installing new energy efficient heating and cooling systems, to installing higher grade insulation, windows and doors, roofing, to upgrading kitchens and bathrooms and a full range of energy efficient appliances.

Now that you have a rough idea of your proposed area of specialization, you need to crystallize that idea into a short sentence that will serve as your unique selling proposition.

Finding the right way to express your USP is very important and requires some serious thought. You can see how in this example your USP will set the future direction of your business, and will provide you with a focus for every aspect of your marketing.

This is where you may want to consult with a marketing expert. You specialize in home renovations. Marketing people specialize in concepts, words and images. Find someone who can understand your business from the inside out.

Whether you do it yourself or get a marketing expert to help, you should be looking for a short, succinct statement that will summarize your focus and specialization.

It should also be able to serve – perhaps in a shortened form – as a “slogan” or “catch phrase” you can use in your advertising. This should capture the essence of your business in a meaningful and memorable way.

Go ahead and leave a suggestion for a USP for our imaginary home renovation business.

Well known small business marketing guru David Frey has made this Free 50 page ebook available to small business owners, managers and marketers. 6 Deadly Small Business Marketing Mistakes is actually an introduction to his more extensive book The Small Business Marketing Bible.

For the price (free!) this is a great source of information. The “Deadly Mistakes” include:

1. Not Having a Marketing Plan
2. Not Differentiating Your Business from Your Competition
3. Not Having a Systematic Referral Generating Program
4. Neglecting to Communicate and Market to Current Customers
5. Make Money with Other People’s Customers
6. Not Realizing You are in the Marketing Business

This book is highly recommended.

GET IT HERE

Anybody who is even casually aware of how local business has evolved over the last few years knows that one of the most dramatic changes has been the way the internet has eroded traditional local media.

Traditional media have become splintered. Newspapers are losing readers and advertisers. Direct mail has become ineffective because of technology changes. Advertising in local magazines is over-priced because of high production costs and vigorous competition from the web.

And most important, the Yellow Pages are no longer the dominant force they once were because fewer and fewer people actually use them for a whole variety of reasons.

Environmental Concerns

Yellow Pages are definitely not green

So far we haven’t even mentioned the environmental concerns about traditional print-based advertising. Don’t get me wrong. I was involved in the print advertising and related businesses for more than 20 years, and I’m not suggesting all print advertising should be banned because of environmental concerns.

But let’s get real.

Every week we get a big bag of junk mail flyers thrown in our driveway. My wife dutifully retrieves the local newspaper that comes wrapped up in the junk fliers. But I would just as soon chuck the whole mess just out of principal.

And I’m sure I’m not the only one. More and more people are reacting negatively to such ridiculous waste.

Just think of the millions and millions of big yellow books spread across the country. How many people do you think already refuse to use these things because of their environmental impact? Millions I would think. And millions more in the
very near future. Assuming the Yellow Pages even survive that long.

Are traditional media effective?

All of this misses the main reason advertisers have ALWAYS had serious misgivings towards traditional advertising. There is usually no way to monitor its effectiveness!

In fact, many traditional media usually discourage effectiveness monitoring. The reason is pretty simple. They know how ineffective most of their products actually are.

Is web marketing effective?

Unfortunately the same can be said for many web marketing and advertising products.

I am sure you been bombarded with advertising “systems” that promise to put your ads on thousands of websites. The pitch sounds convincing until you realize that nobody ever looks at these ads because nobody ever goes to the websites where the ads are placed.

Web marketing scams like that are a dime a dozen. There are literally thousands of them.

But the difference with web marketing scams is that you can immediately see how ineffective they are. There are hundreds of simple, inexpensive ways of monitoring your website traffic (Google Analytics, for example), and they tell you exactly how much traffic you are getting, and where it is coming from.

The other difference beetween web marketing and traditional advertising is that it is easier to monitor the effectiveness of a web campaign. Of course an effective online campaign has to be done correctly. We will discuss this further in a future post.

Almost everybody who knows anything about online marketing knows the importance of search engines – especially Google. In fact Google has become so dominant it is almost impossible to talk about the internet without immediately discussing the role of Google.

The process of systematically trying to get the search engines to drive (“free” not paid) traffic to your website(s) is called Search Engine Marketing. SEM, as it is often rererred to, involves different ways of trying to influence search engines – especially Google – to give you high ranking for searches done on your most important keywords.

For example, if your most important keywords are “Toledo Real Estate”, SEM involves trying to get high ranking in Google searches for the phrase “Toledo Real Estate”. This way people will click on your link in the Google search results and be taken to your blog or website.

Voila. Traffic.

The two most important techniques used in SEM are

• “Optimizing” your content for specific keywords. This is usually called SEO – short for search engine optimization. SEO involves choosing the most promising keywords, and then making sure those keywords show up in your web content in the most important places.

• Link building. Getting links from other sites pointing to your content is a good way to get the attention of the search engines. They consider inbound links as “votes” by other online bloggers and publishers that your content is worth looking at.

Generally speaking, the more your content focuses on your primary keywords, and the more inbound links you have, the better your website or blog will rank in the search engines.

But there are problems with SEM…

• It is indirect. You are relying on Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. to determine who is or is not a good candidate to visit your site or blog. This can be a very frustrating experience – especially when you are in a competitive market.

• It takes a lot of time and effort (usually) to influence the search engines. Typically you will have to wait at least three months to see any lasting results from SEM and SEO.
• It is unpredictable. We have seen clients rise to #1 for their search terms, and we have seen other clients drop off the map. It is hard to know if this is ever the direct result of a concerted SEM/SEO effort. You do your best to give Google and Bing what they want, but you just don’t know for sure it is going to work.

SEM is just one part of the marketing puzzle

SEM is a valuable long term strategy which every serious online marketer should adopt. But don’t count on immediate results. Eventually as your blog gains credibility you will consistently draw traffic from the search engines. But it can often be a very long and tedious process.

Even more important, SEM will only take you so far. It is what we call a “passive” method of marketing. It is like Social Networking in this regard. Social networking – being active in Facebook, for example – will introduce you to many new “friends” and prospects. But it will generally not do much direct selling for you.

For example, if you own a restaurant and you want to run a one week lunch special, SEM will be almost useless. To generate traffic to your offer page you will need other promotional techniques. These will be discussed in future posts.

Most people who venture into web-based marketing begin by doing a web search for “online marketing” or some similar phrase. It doesn’t take long before they are diverted down the trail of the “business opportunity” seeker.

This is what I refer to as the BOM – the “business opportunity model”. An entire online industry has grown up around the idea of providing people with the opportunity to make money online, working from their homes. No 9 to 5 grind. No daily commute. No “boss” to answer to. And presumably no limit to how much money you can make.

Unfortunately most online “business opportunities” are blind alleys that end up leading nowhere for the vast majority of people who get involved with them. Business opportunity promoters are like the snake oil salesmen of the 1800s. They make all kinds of fantastic promises, but their systems rarely if ever deliver results – except for the promoter himself.

At their core most “business opportunity systems” are pyramid schemes that depend on a large base of gullible and often desperate people. What these schemes claim to sell is the “opportunity” to make lots of money by doing as little as possible.

The business opportunity model has virtually nothing to do with the real world of business. So it is important not to get sidetracked into thinking these promoters can teach you something about using the internet to market your own car dealership or coffee shop or sports bar. They can’t. Marketing real businesses online is a completely different animal from marketing to business opportunity seekers.

It may be true that the Business Opportunity Model can teach us things about the psychology of online buyers, or technical aspects of making sales online. But on the whole if you operate a legitimate business and want to do marketing on the web it will do you more harm than good to study the BOM or try to apply its methods to your own business.

To repeat, that’s because marketing concepts used by the business opportunity promoters are not addressing the real business world. They are not about real products like toothpaste, automobiles, vacation cruises or legal services. They are about selling illusion and deception and so they are best put out of your mind and forgotten.

Let’s imagine that you already have a business selling things to local customers. Or perhaps you want to develop one. It doesn’t really matter what the business is. You could be a restaurant owner, or you might make signs for real estate agents, or you may be an accountant.

Now let’s say you decide you want to promote yourself using the internet. Do you have any idea how to go about it? Is there a source of information that will tell you the alternatives, or the most important steps? Or is the “correct method” different for every type of business?

What you and millions of other local businesses would really like is a web-based marketing model that works for all types of local businesses. You want a strategy that outlines the steps in clear language that every local business person can understand.

You need a simple approach that any local business can apply – whether that business sells tires or kitchen appliances or home renovation services. You want to hear someone say “Here is how you go about marketing your business on the web. Follow this system and you can’t help but get good results.”

Does such a “system” exist? Unfortunately, most people who begin the search for online marketing advice end up wasting months and often years experimenting with schemes that simply don’t work.

Next in this series: The BOM – Business Opportunity Model