Tops 10 Tips on Building Your Blog – and Advancing Your Business Online

We all want to have a better blog – and we all want to help drive traffic to the blog we create – so how do you do that?  Here are 10 tips on how to build your business by better blogging (alliteration is so much fun!) 1. Show how you were a super hero – with case studies…take a few minutes to explain how you helped clients and what you did for them that no one else could do.

2. Find areas you can carve a niche in – specialties you know you are good at, and that can benefit you both in pay and in consistent business.  Focus on those in special features on your blog – it helps with your SEO and helps with your referral-ability.

3. Write articles about things that are hot industry topics – and be someone that stands out – make a statement – even if they don’t agree, they’ll often listen.  Some of the best clients I’ve ever had were people who didn’t agree with me, either to start, or ever – at least not on the issue they found me through.

4. Forumlate a Top 10 “Questions I Always Answer” – and then replies and a quick 2-3 paragraphs on all of them, to give the standard reponse – yes it’s a BLOG-FAQ. 

5. Pass along the best of what you’ve heard and learned.  It is very helpful to the readers of your blog to know that you also credit others – for instance, a lot of what we learn here comes from blogs out there – and when we borrow info, we give credit – so here we will thank the E-zine Queen, the folks at Duct Tape Marketing and Yanik Silver.

6. Letterman isn’t the only one to make Top 10 Lists that are popular.  Call it the “ADD” or “Follow the Shiny Object” syndrome of America, but people love top 5 or 10 lists.  Build a list of things people need to know about and place it on your blog.  C’mon, it isn’t that hard.  There are plenty of things you know about that, broken down into 10 subsets, makes for an interesting entry in your blog.

7. Post reviews of products or services that compliment what you do for a business – and see if you can work out reciprical blogroll links with the people on the other end, or perhaps some sort of shared referral agreement.
8.  Interview a competing associate for a blog spot – ask 3-5 questions that matter to the readers of your blog – and get their input on how THEY would handle things (I’d use this tip about once a month, personally.)

9. Find Books,  Blogs, Speakers, others, that you can write reviews of, and that you can crosslink with.  This ties into #7 but is different in the fundamental approach and reason for doing.  With Authors, Bloggers and Speakers, you have an unlimited audience of people who will Google that person’s name and find your review or comments.

10. Actually ask for people to write you – and listen to the people you write for each week – take questions – answer and post.  This is a great way to lend credibility to your blog and to your audience.  I try to answer posts whenever I can on the blogs I help maintain.

BONUS TIP:  Be sure to do “reader activities” or “spotlights” – guest articles, testimonials and other info is vital to the continued success of your blog.  This is another great weekly, bi-weekly or monthly feature on your blog. And then, to go Gitomer on you – here’s 10.5 – be consistent with your output – be sure to post one or two times a week, at minimum.  And finally, when we figure it out, we’ll post about WordPress’s widget for expanding your blog even further. Thanks for listening!

Andy, Lee and the crew at www.uniquenessispower.com

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