By Greg Balanko-Dickson, Professional Business Coach
Own a business? Have a blog? As a business owner, you are writing and blogging as part of your marketing and online promotion. There was a time when a blogging purest might have said that business and blogging should never mix.
Today, blogging and business go hand in hand.
People Don’t Care How Much You Know
Your customer, prospect, or blog reader does not care about you, they care about themselves and their needs. As the adage says:
People Don’t Care How Much You Know, Until They Know How Much You Care - anonymous
Leave the bravado, self promotion, and broad sweeping generalizations for the competition. Write with purpose, write with the consumer in mind.
Forget Me Not: The Cautious Consumer
The constant barrage of marketing and advertising has trained our culture well, too well, the audience reading your blog have well developed crap detectors - they are looking for the genuine article, the real deal, and business people who care.
First Build Trust
We must give people a reason to trust our writing. The easiest way to accomplish that is to provide value. Help them by providing information that they can put to use and use immediately.
Rapport Develops Over Time
When every post you write provides your readers with value the trust grows into rapport. A harmonious relationship where you show you understand the reader and they know you understand and care about them. I call it the currency of every business relationship - trust and rapport.
Writing Is Work
Writing original content for your blog is hard work. It takes time, thoughtful consideration, and energy. As William Zinsser says, “Writing is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.”
If you are going to take the time, effort, and energy to write, why not make sure it builds your reputation at the same time? Create trust and rapport by providing useful, practical, and meaningful information.
Authored by Greg Balanko-Dickson, a Professional Business Coach, author, and entrepreneur.
© 2007 All rights reserved.
5 Comments
I might add that if your blog is new and you have yet to build up trust and rapport with your blog readers, you can skip ads and affiliate links on your home page, too. Those are telltale signs that convey the appearance that you’re out to make a buck, not help them. Great guest post, Greg! Short and to the point.
Excellent points, Greg. And Michael, I’m totally with you on the ads. I really think that new bloggers should not use ads until they’ve been blogging for 12-18 months. It’s about then you really figure out if you like this blogging stuff and know what you are blogging about.
Michael: you nailed it and we are all in business to make a buck but do you have to nag me all the time? When ads are splashed all over a blog, that is like following a customer around all day and repeatedly asking, “Can we do business? Can we do business? Huh, huh?” Sooner or later the customer is going to turnaround and tell you to get lost. On your blog, they leave and never come back.
I like those lines about building trust and rapport with your readers , clients or customers. That will make things a lot easier.
I love that quote, “People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.”
Excellent pointers.
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