Welcome to Lesson 3 of our starting a business blog course.  If you haven’t already, make sure you get caught up on lesson1 and lesson 2 of the series.

During lesson 1 we defined the purpose of our blog as it relates to the wants and needs of our ideal audience.  Then, as part of lesson 2, we had to work on refining our blog’s unique value proposition.  These two steps guide us as we think of who we’re trying to write for and why in the world they’d ever want to read it anyway.  Good stuff.  Now it’s time to look outside ourselves, to the competition.  The best part is, one of the best tools to help you do the job is probably sitting on your desktop right now.  Enter Google!

So, just who is your competition? Who’s that guy doing exactly what you want to be doing at this moment?  Who do you admire?  Who’s tweets do you look out for, who’s in your RSS reader?

Reading other blogs is only the first step.  You should also be commenting on those blogs and learning why other people like them.  Then make sure you incorporate all those best practices into your own blog.   But you’re still not finished, because so far you’re only as good as your competition, you’re still not better.  To get ahead, you need to figure out how to be better.

The key to being better is to circumvent a head-to-head competition.  Find that one thing where you dominate, exploit the hell out of it, and in the process – blow your competition away.  Maybe you have more insider information, or you’re more entertaining, or you’re funnier… whatever.  Figure out your niche, and a group of readers will think your blog is just plain better.  Why?  Because yours has more of what they like – and so starts the domino effect.

Comb through the blogs of your “idols” and figure out how they could be better — then make those improvements on your own blog.  But be careful, this isn’t about adding features or functionality just for the sake of checking a box.  Invest resources and time in things that actually improve  the experience for your readers.  Think about what would make a potential reader prefer your competition’s blog over yours.  More importantly,  think about what you can do to persuade readers to stick around with you instead of  someone else.

Here are a few ideas to help guide your research.  Keep your audience in mind as you brainstorm about ways to make your blog stickier.

1. If the competition blog doesn’t allow comments, maybe you can offer a forum for your readers and encourage community.
2. Does the topic you cover lend itself to merchandise?  Could you / should you offer merchandise on your blog?
3. Can you incorporate design elements into your blog to make it more appealing to your audience?
4. How about usability, can you make improvements to navigation or your site search engine?
5. If the competition’s blog has a closed format, can you link out to other cool stuff where your competition doesn’t?
6. If your competition relies heavily on external sources, can you increase your blog’s value by beefing up your own writing?

Get the one-up on your competition by increasing the value of your blog in the minds of your readers.  I’d love to add to this list, so if you think of additional questions I can add to help guide others, let me know in the comments.

So if you didn’t catch lesson 1 of the Starting a Business blog series, you can find it here. Go ahead and take a gander at that… we’ll wait.

Alright, moving on to the next step in the process:  Once we’ve figured out what topics our blog should cover by first looking at what our intended readers want and need, we have to figure out our Unique Value Proposition so we can properly market the blog.

We need to be able to answer the question in every potential readers’ mind: “Why should I pay attention to you and what you have to say on your blog instead of some other person/company?”  Yes, it’s true, our readers are looking out for #1. And it’s our job to convince them that our blog is of value to them.  They want to know what’s in it for them, what they’re getting and how that makes their life better.

“On our blog, we cover the latest news in our industry.” Awesome. Really. But still not a UVP, so try again. That tells the reader what they’ll will find there, and if in your industry, they will surely understand how that would be important.  However, it still doesn’t explain why they should read YOUR blog rather than some OTHER industry news blog.

There are about a bajillion blogs out there. And let’s face it, everybody’s strapped for time. Justifying the time investment (no matter how small) you’d like your readers to make is critical to the success of your blog. This is the unique part of your UVP. What makes you, and therefore your blog, unique?

Once you’ve figured out what makes you and your blog one of a kind, you have to figure out if it’s sales-worthy.   You need readers, enough of them to make it worth your while. A sizeable audience interested in reading your posts is the other key to success.

So to sum up: The 2 keys of a winning UVP:

1. It must be clear about what makes your blog a standout in the crowd.
2. It has to be something people actually want.

If you don’t have a UVP, or your current value prop needs some work, take time to develop this concept.  To help guide your thinking, we’ve provided a few questions you can ask yourself.

• Do you talk about topics as they relate to a particular segment of the population? demographic?  industry?  entity?
• Do you blog about a niche topic?
• Do you have a unique perspective on a common topic?
• What kind of tone do you take in your blog? funny? casual? educational?
• How will readers participate in your blog? will comments be turned on?  will there be a forum? surveys?
• Are you going to track comments and respond frequently to your readers?
• Are you going to let readers and commentators interact with minimal involvement?
• How are you going to interact with other websites and blogs? links to external content?  guest posts?

Good luck with this – let us know if the task was difficult or easy for you in the comments.

Forrester’s 2009 report about sponsored conversations defended pay-per-posts as a valid approach to drive buzz for companies.  The analysts define  sponsored conversations as:

A marketing technique in which marketers provide financial or material compensation to bloggers in exchange for their posting blog content about a brand.

Each blogger has an audience, the members of which implicitly trust the opinions of said blogger.  Put simply, if the blogger endorses a product or company, their audience will be more inclined to buy it.

Sponsored conversations accomplish a couple of things for your company:

1. They get to show the hands-on experience of using your product, which can’t be otherwise seen through advertising or in-store sales.
2. They widen your exposure for a relatively low investment.

The key to making the arrangement work for all parties is disclosure and authenticity on the part of the blogger and sponsoring company.  Bloggers should be allowed express their honest opinion, so there are some obvious risks.  For one, your whole plan could backfire if you get a negative review.  To be honest though, bloggers, by nature, tend to be genuine types of people, so they probably wouldn’t accept the assignment if they didn’t already have at least a neutral opinion about your brand or product.  The risk is there and it’s real so it’s good to plan ahead in the event such a scenario actually plays out.

I personally have reviewed everything from my delectable (no, really) Epson Workforce 600 to books. I find it’s a great way to engage with a brand and understand how it can help my audience.

So what do you think? Is your company embracing this new form of promotion? Will you start?  Let me know in the comments.

So you’re thinking of launching a business blog but aren’t sure where to begin.  More and more these days, we’re coming across articles, advice, workshops and seminars that systematize blogging.  They all claim to provide the “winning” recipe for a successful business blog – and marketers are only too eager to fall in line.

Here’s the problem – If every blog owner out there starts to follow the same regimented approach to blogging, wouldn’t the blog lose the very quality that makes it compelling to its’ audience?  Its’ uniqueness?  A blog, by definition, is niche.  Everything about it is custom – from writing topic to audience.

Actually, the driving factor behind the success-or not-of any blog comes down simply to product definition.  Successful blogs have a clearly defined purpose and audience.  Every post is written with that perfect reader and commenter in mind.  From topic to language to tone – a well planned, well written, well executed blog is all about the audience.

So before you launch your blog, try to learn what your perfect readers want and need.  Find out what’s important to them and use that insight to play up your writing, captivate their attention, and keep them coming back.  Who do you want hanging around with you on your blog?  Write for that perfect reader and watch your audience grow.

EXERCISE:  Describe your perfect reader in full detail.  Take into account demographic, psychographic, lifestyle and behavioral information and try to develop a person out of all the information you put together.  Give your perfect reader a name and build them as a character.

To guide your thinking, ask yourself relevant questions such as:  Where does your reader live?  What does your reader do for a living?  At what level are they in their career?  Are they happy in their career?  How much money do they make?  Do they have children? If so, what are the genders and ages of their children?  If not, why not?  Are they college graduates?  What did they study while in school?  Are they married or single?

When you take the time to get to know your reader, you really gain a clarity of purpose and begin to set the stage for blogging success.  Have fun with this exercise and let us know in the comments what golden nuggets of information you dig up.