Fact Check: Meat up your Blog!

Author: April Hall

Internet Copywriter

In the age of a million blogs, many companies are now making a business blog part of their overall business strategy. With smaller businesses, it is often the manager who decides to make a blog that showcases his or her own expertise in the industry, with perhaps a mention or two of some anecdotal evidence from some of their peers. Is this type of blog (heavy on personal knowledge, light on research) sufficient for a business-oriented blog? Well, yes and no…

The fact of the matter is that many of the readers of your blog entries will be looking for information about your particular industry, and they want to see evidence that you know what you are talking about. If you are relying on your own personal experience, you’d better include that in the entry (it’s not enough to assume people have read the “author profile” section of your blog!). Any references to industry peers better include links; not only to improve the authenticity of your information, but also to cite your sources to avoid accusations of plagiarism.

So, how do you “meat up your blog”? Find some research that goes along with your entry’s topic-it will likely only take a minute or two extra to perform some quick internet searches. For example, say you are an air conditioning and heating company: a blog entry on the amount of money it costs to cool a home in Texas would be “beefed” up quite a bit if you are able to include hard and fast numbers. My own 20 second search for “utility costs in texas” found that an average utility bill for a 2000 square foot home is $300 to $350 during the summer months. See, that wasn’t too hard, was it?

Okay, granted there are some days that you want to simply add to your blog without taking too much of your valuable time. During those times,consider this:

• Do you really need to blog today? You don’t necessarily have to add a blog entry every single day. If you are simply too busy to blog, skip it.
• Can you provide a simple caveat to your entry, such as “I’m too busy to go into this in too much detail, but…”. Sometimes this is adequate enough to let your readers know that this type of watery writing is not typical of your blog.
• Do you seem to always be too busy to perform research? Or, do you just dislike doing it? If so, you might want to consider obtaining the services of a professional copywriter. They can run your blog for you; and may, in fact, know more about how to make your blog more effective.

For many bloggers, they are writing about a topic they enjoy anyway, so a few moments of research really isn’t work. The days that you do find yourself dreading the research, either skip it, or hire someone else to do it for you!