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Grab more blog readers without losing your brand identity

Guest post by: Bonnie Harris

Article Overview: It’s essential that you maintain your brand values and image on your blog, but when the world is your oyster when it comes to blog topics, it can be hard to know where to draw the line for relevance. Typically with blogs to attract the greatest number of readers within the target audience, I suggest that we look at topics that are relevant to the broader industry not a very specific niche.

Grab more blog readers without losing your brand identity

It’s essential that you maintain your brand values and image on your blog, but when the world is your oyster when it comes to blog topics, it can be hard to know where to draw the line for relevance. Typically with blogs to attract the greatest number of readers within the target audience, I suggest that we look at topics that are relevant to the broader industry not a very specific niche. A good example to illustrate what I mean is retailers that dispense ‘healthcare’ products like reading glasses and hearing aids. The specific niche topics that would be relevant on these blogs would include choosing reading glasses, determining the strength, trends in fashion, how hearing aids work, the different types of hearing aids etc. Expanding to other industry-relevant topics to appeal to a target audience would involve writing about eye health and hearing loss, because these are things that individuals shopping for these items would want to know, logically.

Some businesses worry that expanding the scope of topics is betraying their brand image. Using the examples above, reading glasses retailers worry that people will make assumptions that they are doctors or experts in eye health and hearing aid retailers may have similar concerns. You always want to stay in line with your brand values, but going this route does not put you off course, and here are some points to help you remember how and why that’s true.

• Just because you’re sharing resources about other things relevant to your business but beyond your niche doesn’t misrepresent who you are or what services you provide. Sharing these resources does prove you’re an expert in your industry, and that you’re in touch with everything that’s important and relevant to it.
• By providing additional resources you’re simply anticipating the needs of your target market. It’s logical that people shopping for reading glasses would like to learn more about eye health and vision loss. If you’re proactive in presenting this information, they’ll appreciate that you’re going that extra mile (even if the information is coming from other resources and not your own personal knowledge) to provide for their needs. If you don’t offer up this information, they’ll just find it somewhere else anyway.
• While your blog does indirectly market your business, you don’t need to follow the specific rules of marketing. Every post doesn’t need to support your brand only by pushing your services.
• It’s harder to get readers for very niche topics. Your loyal blog visitors already invested in the industry might be interested, as would those specifically searching for the types of services you offer. But, if you’re serious about attracting others that could become future clientele, only focusing on the niche topics just isn’t going to do it for you.
• If you’re only focusing on the niche topics, you may be overselling as far as your readers are concerned, and they won’t keep reading if they feel that way.

My suggestion to those that understand the above, but still aren’t 100% convinced, is to continue to maintain the balance between niche and industry general. But you can always make it very clear with footnote style references (rather than post body text links) that some of your general information is coming from other sources that way they know exactly what your intentions are.

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Article Tags: blog topics, blogging small business, business blogging, promoting small business with a blog, small business marketing, small business promotion, starting a blog, writing a blog



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