Phoenix Business Blogs and writing to succeed

I recently created a list of best practices for a client of ours who has completed a blog. It's a rather good blog I think, mostly because they have so much that is interesting to write about. But I do often find a number of business blogs that stress the sale, the conversion, or the lead generation over the actual writing of something useful to a reader. I can tell you, the client's blog definitely does not do that. Still, many do, and I think this is done by people who don't understand the fundamental benefit of a blog. Years ago, my Father told me, "Go up to 100 women in the street and ask each one to sleep with you. Chances are good you'll get slapped 99 times. But there may be that 1 out of 100 who will say yes." Crude? You bet. But also the way a lot of Phoenix business blogs go about trying to get a return from their blog. They write post after post that is full of sales language: "Come see the cutting edge blah blah blah," usually with three posts like this on the first day of the blog's inception. Then one the next day, and perhaps four days out of seven that week get posts at all as they start to fall off. The following week they post once, they post once more a month later... In short, they have nothing to write about that's interesting, so they slowly stop writing at all. Sure, you could hire some writers to come in and fill that blog, but frankly, if you need to hire writers for your blog, which you are only maintaining so you can get some leads, you don't really have a blog at all. You have an article site. You have a collection of landing pages. These aren't about anything, and they don't ask a reader to take part in a discussion. While a lack of interesting content is why they can't maintain these sites, it's the missing social aspect that keeps it a failure, no matter who is writing it. Frankly, I think Phoenix business blogs like Valley PR blog and Phoenix Real Estate Guy are exceptional at creating solid blog content. The writing and the stories are excellent, and they engage the reader openly. Undoubtedly you have your own favorites, and I'd love to hear about them. Feel free to leave links to them in the comments. See how I did that? Openly encouraging comments by appealing to my reader's ego? Cynical? Yep! :)

About the Author: Eric Reid

I am the Social Media Services Manager for Off Madison Ave. I've been with the company since 2006, when I was hired to do SEO, and link building in particular. When social networking sites started cropping up, at first I started using them to create backlinks - but they weren't the best for that, given all of the "nofollow" attributes. However, I did see the potential for all of the direct referral traffic they represent. Since then I've been actively pursuing both tactics for clients: Links that can help them for search, and social postings that get them involved in the conversation. It's about the coolest job you could ever get. ;)

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