What to write about - telling tales

Once you know the community you want to connect with, you'll need to start writing interesting, relevant stories. And make no mistake - blogging is all about story telling.

So why tell tales?

Blogging is a craft you need to understand and use if you're going to build a rapport with your community. This applies to sole-traders, owner-managers of small firms, corporate giants, charities, community action groups, local govt services etc. The list goes on, but the principle is the same. You build the community around you. That community then follows you.  

What you offer your community

Contrary to what most people - particularly marketing professionals - think, blogs and social networks are about dialogue with your community, not simply sales tools. Or to think of it another way, they're sales tools only if used in a subliminal sense. For example, financial journalists talking in the pub after work about an inside scoop on the imminent collapse of a multinational are selling themselves, their newspapers/websites and their work as writers. But they're clearly not selling advertising space for the newspaper.
 
For a blog to work, you need people to follow your blogs, talk about them, bookmark them and share them. That won't happen if you're constantly trying to hard sell or simply using Twitter, Facebook etc as response mechanisms to answer complaints or for general chitchat. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ etc are only as good as the info surging through them. The rest, as Henry Ford would say, is bunk.

So without wanting to labour the point (which, of course, I have) blogs are about stories, about connecting, about conversations. A story has to be interesting. Has to be written well. Has to be succinct, short(ish) and has to mean something to  the reader. Try to be anecdotal. Use real lives. Make it funny. Sad. Informative.

I'll go into more detail on all this later, but for the time being here are a few tips on what to write about and what content could interest your audience.

§  Tips

§  Case studies

§  Your history

§  Your company’s history

§  Debates

§  Reviews of products

§  Review a book

§  Build lists

§  Interview experts

§  Write an A-Z guide

§  Comment on a survey

§  Write about your own survey

§  Use a quotation

§  Make a video