4 February 2010
If you are passionate about your business, regardless of whether you sell gadgets, PVC pipes or car parts, you can find something exciting to talk about, if you find it exciting, there is a pretty good chance that other people will also be interested - that's where the money lies.

Search Engine Marketeers and Web Designers will all tell you that the best way to get yourself to the top of rankings and get visitors to your site is to get back-links, i.e. links on other websites to yours. If you are the likes of Apple, then that's wonderful, even before Steve Jobs opens his mouth, people are blogging about what they expect him to say, but the chances are you don't have quite the following they do.

However, just because you're not Apple doesn't mean you don't have interesting insights, tips or other information to share. If you are passionate about your business, regardless of whether you sell gadgets, PVC pipes or car parts, you can find something exciting to talk about, if you find it exciting, there is a pretty good chance that other people will also be interested - and that's where the money lies.

With the rise of Twitter and Facebook, businesses are finding that transparency and honesty are becoming increasingly important, nobody can hide anymore. Because of this people often worry about being too strong about their views, but dumbing down your opinion also dumbs down the interest. Dare to be controversial and it's likely to pay off, you'll gain a following of those who agree and those who don't will usually chime in to add their views then, provided you respond professionally, you can easily turn them into loyal visitors/customers too. What you shouldn't be is controversial for the sake of it, if you don't truly believe in your views, you're not going to be able to defend them if anyone questions you.

Tips

If you are totally lost for ideas, a quick Google for a phrase such as "blog post ideas" will conjure up some excellent suggestions, however this won't make you a good author (unless you are already), so here are a few tips on how you should be writing:

1. Connect with your readers, this can be as simple as posing rhetorical questions and using titles like "Your widget is under-performing: how to fix it."

2. Check your spelling and grammar, this should really be the first point it's that important.

3. Keep your posts concise and to the point, people have short attention spans on the Internet.

4. Write for skim-readers, it's very rare that anyone will read a full post top to bottom, so break up your content with formatting such as bullet point lists, headings and imagery. Most people will read the headings before they commit to reading the article, so they are very important.

5. If you mention something that could require further explanation, link it to the relevant article on your site, or somewhere like Wikipedia, so you're not placing the burden of looking things up on the reader.

6. Use research to back up your claims, if possible, and link to the document, for example if you had the phrase "recent research shows that performance can be increased by 15%...", you could link the words "recent research" to the document, and "performance can be increased by 15%" could link to the specific section of the document.

7. Judge your audience, it's okay to use technical terms if you're writing for University professors and the top people in your field, but in most cases you're readership will comprise of mostly Joe Publics so keep it simple. (note: Google Documents has some excellent tools that show reading age and readability of your article)

Hopefully these tips will be the foundation of some great articles that spread your brand to the distant edges of the web and draw in more and more customers.