You have a website and want to use blogging to build up your web presence and offer value to your followers. Obviously you will be blogging about your services – but how many times can you explain that without getting boring? Not that many, right?
So what can you do instead of writing the same-old boring, old-school sales copy that doesn’t inspire anyone to do anything?
Focus on the real life problems that your products and/or services solve
- These types of articles shouldn’t be “benefits” write-ups – tell a story about how people are actually using your service. What have they learned? how have they adapted it? what did you help fix?
- This type of post is a great way to also get really clear about your ideal clients – by writing about real ways your ideal clients are interacting with your products and services, you are improving the focus of your marketing too.
- Do your products need to be disposed of in a particular way? Maybe write an article about recycling in your community and why you chose particular elements in your product – then explain how your product packaging can be recycled.
Focus on people connected to your organization
- Do a highlight piece on your board of directors, or one of them each quarter
- Highlight each of your team members and what they bring to the clients
- Focus on one of your service providers or strategic partnerships
- Maybe you have some awesome volunteers who would be interested in talking about why they volunteer?
- If you take donations, some of your donors might really appreciate a feature story about their contribution to your organization – time? money? in-kind? all count as donations in this type of story.
- Do you have a client who has an interesting story about the use of your product or service? Maybe they’d like the chance to tell that story. You can give them author credit and link to their website if they have one! That can help you both.
Focus on your charitable and community activities
- If you donate money, time or resources to any non-profit or charitable efforts, you should talk about why you picked that organization, how you support them, and create links to that organization. Let them know so they can link to you
- Are you participating in an event in the community – write about it pre or post or a combination of the two! why are you participating? what did you offer? what did you get out of it? Let the other organization know about your blog post and establish some links back and forth.
Focus on your events
- Do you offer courses? why haven’t you got postings about those? what do people learn? do you have testimonials – incorporate them! Maybe include a survey asking interested people to answer a couple of questions about their desired learning outcomes. You can both collect their contact information AND get some new fodder for more courses!
- Do you have Annual General Meetings or other regular meetings that the public can attend? Feature stories about the purpose and outcomes of these meetings are useful on many levels. Not only are you reporting back to your community, but you are also demonstrating your effectiveness and transparency. People are drawn to organizations’ “behind the scenes” activities when the stories are well written.
- Perhaps you have an upcoming team meeting. Why not write a story about some of the topics, some of the challenges you are working on? If you did a team building event, you could write about the relationship building and team culture that benefits your clients!
Prompts from other sources
- Did you read something that you totally disagree with? Write about that and why your approach is different. Likewise if you agree with someone else, you can write about that and link to that article.
- Are there books or resources that you regularly use or recommend? Write a book review that explains your perspective or how its influenced you.
- If you ran a survey, report back on the results and what you are going to do about it.
- Did you mess something else and get a learning or ah-ha moment from it? Write about that!
There are obviously a myriad of other topics you can write about. The thing is to be sincere, use your own voice, and let your personality or corporate culture shine through.
Or if you’d rather and have the money, you can also hire someone like me to do research and writing for you.
Hope this was a useful article – let me know what you think!
(This article was previously published at Online Web Admin, which is now Mindset Marketing Services)
