Make Your Readers Your Heroes

Promotion and marketing are usually the main motivations that business bloggers have for starting their blogs.  Yes, they may want to join the conversation in the blogosphere in order to learn more about their niche and interact with other smart people, but in the end, their goal is promote their brand - and there’s nothing wrong with that.

However, many business blogs focus on how wonderful the company is, or how awesome their products are - and while that may be true, a company may provide top-notch services and their products may indeed change users’ lives, these bloggers are neglecting to realize that they are not taking full advantage of their presence in the online community.

In order to really promote your brand, you have to take the focus of you, your abilities, and your products.  You have to make the reader the hero.  Tell your readers what you can do for them, use your blog to provide value by sharing your knowledge, and show them how you, your company, and/or your products can improve their lives.

Testimonials from happy customers can help accomplish this goal, as long as they give a concrete reason why you’re great - be sure each testimonial offers specific examples instead of generic praise.   For instance, if you’re a real estate agent, you would want to feature a testimonial about you found your client their dream home in an ideal neighborhood and helped them negotiate an excellent price, not a testimonial stating “X is a wonderful, hard-working agent.”  If you are going to use testimonials, have your customers tell the blogosphere how you changed their lives.

But while testimonials alone can make your blog good, teaching and helping your readers improve their situations can make it great.  From self-help bloggers like Steve Pavlina (”Personal Development for Smart People) to career bloggers like Deborah Ng (Deborah Ng’s Freelance Writing Jobs), bloggers have used their sites to promote their expertise and brands by helping others.   They’ve made their readers their heroes, and because they truly want to see them succeed, they’ve achieved success themselves.

Making your reader the hero can also lead to a boost in terms of word-of-mouth marketing.  After all, if you help someone solve a problem, they are that much more likely to tell their friends and family about your blog and your business, because people tend to share content that they consider useful and valuable.

In conclusion, remembering that it’s not all about you can have a positive effect on your blog and your business. After all, if it weren’t for your clients, customers, and readers, you wouldn’t even have a business - so make sure they get to be the hero by focusing your blog on their wants and needs.