Why You Should Treat Each Blog Post like a New Product
You know that a blog for your business is an excellent way to get new customers and develop a following online. Even if you’ve done all the research and figured out what your blog will be covering, it can be surprisingly difficult to think of topics that are both valuable and entertaining. Even if you think of a few, you might wonder if they truly represent your brand and your company.
This is not an uncommon problem, and you shouldn’t give up just yet. There are many ways you can brainstorm good blog topics, but one in particular will give you a new outlook on the whole process. Try treating every new blog post as a new product. Even if you’re in a service industry and don’t produce real products, put yourself in the shoes of a company that does. Each product needs to be successful to make it worth the production costs, so a lot of thought should go into every one. Nothing hits the shelves before careful inspection and research. Use the following tips to improve your blog and give every topic a new spin by acting as if each one is a new product.
Think about Supply and Demand
Before selling any type of product on the market, companies first find out where there is demand. An entrepreneur probably wouldn’t design a fast food joint with a specialty in hamburgers, because the market is already saturated with this type of fast food. Instead, the company would look for ways to supply the demand of a new type of food craving. A fast food salad place or soup drive-through might supply the demands of those tired of low-quality burgers. In the same way, you need to identify the demand of your audience and supply it. Look for article topics that have not yet been covered. When you supply a new demand, people will most definitely “buy your product,” or read your articles. By answering specific questions they might have, your site will be the only destination where they can find the information they need.
Never Stop Researching
Similarly, when a company releases a new product, they don’t simply forget about it and move on. They pay attention to the changing opinions of their audience so that they can alter the product as necessary. Luckily, this research process is a lot easier for blog posts than for actual products. To research any of your posts, you can follow the comments on the actual page. First, people might critique you on grammar or spelling, and you can change the post accordingly. Next, they might suggest new topics or alternative solutions to any that you’ve presented, which you can then add to your original post. Finally, they might post nothing at all, which is a sign that they’re not very interested. By measuring your web traffic, shares on social media sites, and comment responses, you can find out which articles are more popular than others, and you can tailor upcoming posts to fit the interests of your target audience. Unlike product developers who have to spend thousands of dollars on focus groups and surveys, your research insights are built into each article.
Make Sure It Represents Your Brand
Each product a company releases ties into the overall brand message of the business. L.L. Bean wouldn’t create bed sheets with Disney princesses on it just the same as Burger King wouldn’t produce a line of exotic tea flavors. Every brand has a specific style and message. Before writing any more blog posts, you and your team should sit down and determine your brand identity. There are hundreds of abstract exercises you can do to determine the voice and message of your brand, but you should be left with one takeaway for your audience. Your blog might have been created to give your audience the best cooking advice, or it might be to teach people with celiac disease to enjoy their meals. When you decide on a brand identity, you should make sure every article represents it. Without representing your brand, your audience will feel that they could easily find the same information elsewhere.
Would Your Customers Pay for Your Blog Post?
In actuality, no one would pay for a blog post unless it was part of a bigger subscription. However, you should ask yourself this question in theory. Every blog post you create should provide value to your customers. Though such value is immeasurable on the Internet, try thinking about it in terms of money. Determine whether or not someone might pay for your blog post, which is the same question you might ask yourself when creating a product. If your post doesn’t seem worth the money, figure out why not and tweak it. In most cases, your post might not be worth money because it isn’t original, so make sure you add your own spin to it for a boost in value. Only once you have decided that your post is worth paying for should you upload it. You won’t be getting any money for it from your audience, but it’s a good way to measure your value prior to posting.
Update Constantly
In addition to researching the success of your post and tailoring those you create in the future, you should also constantly update your articles so that they fit with the times. Where would video games be if we were still on the original Nintendo Entertainment System? How would we communicate effectively if we were still using the rotary phone? These products have kept up with new technology, and your article should keep up with trends in social media and blog posts in general. You might have gotten a lot of shares on Facebook and Twitter initially with your article on smartphone apps last year, and it probably even helped you get more Facebook friendsand followers. However, a lot has changed since then, and your article might be irrelevant now. To keep people interested around the web, consider updating the article to include new apps and new technology.
If you’re creating blog posts for your company’s business page, it can be difficult to decide which topics to cover and how to position each article. However, by thinking of every post as its own product, you can improve the quality of every entry and make each more valuable to your readers. Treating each blog post as its own product will help you garner more blog followers and set yourself apart from similar bloggers around the web.