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4N Altrincham - Altrincham HQ Blog Talk

4N Altrincham – Altrincham HQ Blog Talk

Encouraging Local Businesses To Blog

Earlier this week I delivered a talk on Blogging at 4N Altrincham to encourage 20+ local businesses to blog

The simple fact is – not enough local businesses are seizing the power of blogging and turning their own business into a publisher

As an ex Journalist i’ve been aware of the power of blogging for a long time and at the start I simply asked

Which sounds better to you?

539,467 Views of One of My Blogs

Vs

50,000 printed publications

Everybody in the room put up their hands for the former – as a journalist I had literally wrote articles that had attracted those numbers and even my 62yr old dad had wrote blogs previously that had been read by over 88,000 people. With blogging everything is trackable – the reads, the unique page views – with tradition print media you know the overall sales, but still have to rely on guesswork to work out how many people read a specific article

I won’t fill you in the full details on the talk – there’s a document you can get that covers the basics that you can get by signing up to our mailing list here

Instead each time I deliver this blog talk I will cover some of the questions raised by the attendees of the talk

Thanks to Kieron Hill, Paul Henry, George Dearsley, Susan Leigh for raising these points in the Q&A Session after the talk

Q: Can you change your blogs after they are initially written?
Yes the great things about blogs is the original blog can be updated at any time – unlike printed articles which once they go out there are there to stay

Some industries are fast changing so it’s important blogs are kept up to date

Q: I understand you should blog at least once a week, but when I do post out blogs I get a handful of reads. What do I do?
Like anything you do in business the key in it’s success is in the marketing

Have a great lead in on your tweets that inspires people to click on the link to the blog and vary that accordingly to hit different markets. A single blog could have 5 or 6 lead ins that appeal to different types of businesses and people

Also make sure your mailing list is up to date and each blog post had the intro and lead in posted out to that

Remember if the blogs are timeless they can be posted out at regular intervals to appeal to new followers – I still post blogs out that are 8 months old because we get new followers every day who more than likely haven’t read the blog before

Q: The blogs that appeal to people are my humorous video blogs rather than the serious article blogs?
I’m a firm believer in the public decide what they want

If the best way to appeal to your target market is via video blogs then concentrate on that and have the option of a serious follow up blog if people want to know more about the subject

Q: I work in an industry where client confidentiality is key – how do I blog regularly while maintaining that confidentiality?
The key with case studies is how you helped the client rather than the specific client themselves

The easiest way is to keep the details vague or change them to they’re unrecognisable – change gender and change town

The following disclaimer is from Law and Order UK and could be adapted in areas of client confidentiality

“Although inspired in part by a true incident, the following story is fictional and does not depict any actual person or event?”

OUR NEXT TALK ON BLOGGING

Keep checking our twitter feed @altrinchamhq for details of our next blogging talk and after the next talk we will deliver another Blogging FAQ blog for questions

Any questions on working out a blogging strategy as part of your overall social media strategy – use the quick contact form >>>>>>>

BLOGGING BRAINSTORMING SESSION – POST YOUR BLOGS BELOW
As part of each blogging session we run a blogging ideas brainstorming session so any of the businesses photographed above feel free to post your blog links below – we want to inspire every business we talk to blog regularly

Attendees included:
Sandra Savage-Fisher (QuaLETy Ltd), David Crick (The Utility Warehouse), Melvyn Henaughan (MH Safety Services) Iain Girling (Arbonne International), Andy Graham (Aspire Act Achieve), Louise Barson (Silver Concierge), Darren Bardsley (Bardsley Photography), George Dearsley (Avanti Media Ltd), Paul Henry (Sales & Business Development Strategies), Sethon Freeman (St James Place Wealth Management), Susan Leigh (Susan Leigh), Chris Robinson (24/7 Uptime), David Bellin (Software Assistance), Rick Robinson (J Leaf Solar), Sharon Dineed (The Debt Advisor), Mark Rea (SolarTrack Systems), Kieron Hill (KHES Ltd), Neil Barlow (Redstar Telecom)

Alex McCann

Author Alex McCann

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