Build a Successful Blog for your Consulting Business

Are you trying to build a successful blog for promoting or building a consulting business? Blogging can be a great way to promote yourself, your brand, your products or services. However, it takes more than just writing blog articles and creating more pages to pop up on Google searches. You need to write a blog that people will actually want to read and follow. But how do you do this to help grow a consulting business?

I have several tips to help you build a more successful blog that you can use to help promote your consulting business. These will work whether you’re a solo entrepreneur or part of a larger consulting company.

These are the tips included below:

• Prove Your Expertise
• Write Great Content
• Promote Content, not Consultants
• Build an Email List
• Support Blog Subscriptions
• Post on Blog, promote on Social Media
• Search Google Before Writing
• Analyze Traffic Stats
• Don’t be afraid to update content over time

Let’s take a look at some key points to creating a successful blog that will actually help you grow your consulting business.

Prove Your Expertise

At first glance, it may seem that writing blog articles and content will be giving away secrets somehow that will take away from your consulting business. After all, if you show them how to do it themselves, then why would they pay you to do it for them?

Well, actually, by writing great content and providing amazing help without asking for anything in return, you will establish yourself or your company as an expert. And, by providing this expert help, you will build rapport with potential customers. As your content keeps popping up in their Google searches, or on the social feeds, you will start to build recognition and trust in your brand / name.

Write Great Content

The content that proves expertise is great helpful content. This type of content can be difficult and time consuming to write. But that makes it even more valuable as it’s difficult to produce, so only those with the actual expertise will produce it.

Try to stay away from news type content or current events. These types of posts are generally shallow and don’t provide longevity in staying relevant. Instead, you should work to write content that will stay relevant and helpful for the next 2 - 5 years or even longer. This will help you build an archive of great content that will add up over time to provide sustainable value, rather than news posts that will fade in usefulness over weeks or months.

When you post great content that stays relevant and useful over a long period of time, your page views and search rankings will be maintained more easily. In the end, building expertise and trust with potential customers is all about exposure. After all, you can’t prove you have expertise, if you don’t reach people with it in the first place.

Promote Content, not Consultants

The blog for a consulting company is about promoting your company’s skills and expertise in a helpful way. This is done by writing great content (as mentioned previously). If you show what you know and what expertise you have, then people will be able to see it first-hand. This goes a long way to proving expertise and promoting your services.

It’s also natural to want to promote your top consultants through your website and blog. After all, showing you have top talent is going to prove your company can do the job, right? Well, not entirely. Unless, that talent is a celebrity, almost nobody is going to read the content just because of the person that wrote it.

You should always give credit to the author of the content posted to your company blog, but the content itself should be put first and foremost. The content is why they clicked the link and the reason they are there. While they read the content and get value from it, they will recognize the brand of your company on your blog and see the authors name of who wrote it.

The content will largely get people to share the link to your blob posts, not the company or author of the content.

Build an Email List

You will want to build an email list through your blog. Give people a reason to subscribe for more value after they’ve already gotten value from your blog post(s). This will give you the ability to continue to contact those people later will special offers, or to just keep your brand on their mind.

Most organic traffic landing on your blog generally won’t be purchasing your products or services. People need to get familiar with your brand first, before they’ll be willing to pay you for something. An email list will provide a major benefit to being able to hold on to those people that landed on your blog due to organic Google searches in order for you to later convert them into customers.

Offers of a regular newsletter, eBook, or free course are great things to bait people to joining your email list. Just be sure to keep the offer related to the great content on your blog and make it something that gives them even more value for free.

Support Blog Subscriptions

Subscribing to a blog through a blog feed provides a less intrusive way to subscribe to your content for those who maybe aren’t comfortable giving you their email. Or maybe they don’t want to use email but would rather use a blog feed reader instead.

If you setup a blog for your consulting company, make sure you use some kind of blogging software to host the blog, so it has all the features people are accustomed to seeing on blogs. This most importantly includes the ability to subscribe to the blog using an RSS / ATOM, or some other blog reader. If people like your content, they may want to subscribe so they can be notified of new content when you post it.

I’ve seen companies in the IT industry that create a blog on their website, but then fail to implement an RSS or ATOM feed. When this is done, there’s no way for people to easily subscribe to your blog feed to be notified of new posts when you post them, as this does require having a blog feed on your website.

Post on Blog, promote on Social Media

You want to own your content and create a place you control. Posting content to a blog on your own website will provide you with this. You should write articles and post them to your blog website first. Then, go promote that content with links back to your blog on social media platforms.

This way, you will completely own and keep your content under your control. Posting great content to social media will not do well to associate your brand to the content and grow your brand recognition. Plus, other people promoting your content on social media will have more impact than your own promotion. By posting to your own blog, you will allow anyone to use any social media app to share your blog link.

Search Google Before Writing

While you don’t want to only write post that nobody has written yet, you also don’t want to only write posts others have written about. You also don’t want to copy other people’s content. However, you do really need to do some research once in a while on the topic you’re going to write about.

You’ll want to do some searches for the top content ranking on Google for the topic you’re writing about. Go look at the competition and make sure you write a better article than those others. This could mean longer content, providing more code examples, including missing bullet points the others left out, or really anything else that makes your content better. Write the content you think you’d look for when searching on that topic to the best of your ability.

If all the Google results you find are short articles of like 1,000 or less words. Maybe you should try to write a post that is 1,500 or more words that digs deeper into the topic than the others.

Doing this will help your post to better rank in Google searches than many others over time. However, be patient! Doing this has great benefit, but you won’t rank #1 immediately. It can take a couple months for Google to settle on where to rank your posts over time.

Analyze Traffic Stats

When starting a blog, you’ll need to be patient and write a few articles before starting to get content. When you do start getting page views, you’ll want to look at the traffic stats for what your top articles are over time. This will give you insights into what topics and expertise areas you’ll want to write more content about.

If you see you’re starting to get more traffic about a certain topic, perhaps you’re starting to build expertise and authority in that topic. If you write more content on that topic, you will be able to grow that expertise and authority even further. This will help grow your blog traffic and prove expertise.

Your blogs traffic will give you some great insights into which blog posts you’ve written are of most interest. Then you can double down on those topics and increase the amount of content in that area.

Don’t be afraid to update content over time

Many times, people post to a blog and then that content just sits there forever, as is. When you analyze traffic stats for your blog, you can look at what content is performing poorly. Now, if a post never really took off to get traffic (after like a year or so), you can edit that article to make it better, then change the post date to the current date. This will improve the quality of old content, while changing the published date will make it new again and draw attention to it once again.

This can be don’t to revitalize older content on your blog and keep there from being as many “dead” posts that don’t get traffic over time. Just be sure to keep the post URL the same, so you don’t break any existing back links to your post from other websites.

Conclusion

These are a few tips I have from my nearly 20 years experience of blogging so far, as well we on my even more successful blog over at https://build5nines.com. I’ve used blogging to level up my career, find consulting business, and establish myself as an expert in my field.

If you don’t promote yourself, nobody else will. So don’t be afraid to spread your expertise and help other people. Lifting others up, will help lift yourself up in the long run.