4 Questions: State of the Purposeful Blog Address

Unless Barack Obama is seriously distracted from delivering on Tuesday night’s promises, you’re probably not campaigning for re-election to be President. But if you have a blog, you do have some common characteristics with our nation’s top brass.  As a blogger, you are interested in wooing supporters.

Wooing someone once can be easy, but wooing someone all the way to the voting booth — a.k.a a signed contract, the online purchase confirmation button or wherever in your process money essentially changes hands — takes persistent purpose. Sometimes creative types (guilty) get distracted by purely entertaining inspirations and lose sight of purpose in their blog posts, so here are four questions you can ask yourself before and after your post is written to be sure you’re posting with purpose.

1. Will my readers find this useful? A tenet of content marketing is giving your audience content that they can actually use. Your reader needs to finish reading your post with knowledge, inspiration or tips that they can put into action. The actions can vastly range: buying a book based on your review, exploring new varieties of apples for pie-making, revealing ways your C-level leaders can improve their communication skills or checking out a YouTube video. Evaluate the usefulness of your post to be sure there is something the reader can do with the content after reading it.
2. Will my readers think I’m smart? Your blog should establish you as a legal thought leader, an industry insider, a technology whiz or some other lofty persona. Mediocrity won’t cut it. Be sure you sound smart.
3. Is there one clear point to this post? Don’t use your blog as a stream of consciousness vehicle. Leave that to the poets. If your post seems to have more than one point, consider removing the secondary points and building those into additional blog posts.
4. What’s in it for me? Be sure the post serves a purpose for you and your company as well as your reader. For example, exploring topics and writing about them will strengthen your own knowledge on a subject. Showing your smarts improves your professional image and makes you more marketable. While your posts should focus on your audience, don’t forget that you should be getting something valuable out of them, too.

Blog on!