By Tony Attwood
Put another way: what would be the benefit of being seen as an expert in your field of work, to whom people turned for advice?
OK, so your first reaction might be that you couldn’t stand the strain and you’ve got enough work to do without people asking questions all day long.
But on the other hand, it could be a great advantage. For if people wanted to know about the area you are involved in, and they turned to you to get advice, you would have a lot of potential customers coming to you.
Now let’s suppose that getting your company to be the one that everyone in the world of education turned to took you maybe 20 minutes a day, and as a result, over time, your company became known as a the source of information on the sorts of things you deal with your subject area….
Would that be worth those 20 minutes a day?
For example, think of a company that supplied school furniture. You’d be the source that people would turn to for questions of what is cheapest, how furniture aids learning, how furniture affects attitudes, how outdoor furniture makes an impact and so on, why sometimes it is not the best thing to buy the cheapest, how parental reactions change according to the furniture in the classroom.
In other words you would be seen as an expert, and so people would ask your opinion. You’d have to give up a bit of time both to establishing yourself as the expert and to answering questions, but the benefit in terms of the trade that could come from this would be significant.
So how is it done? How do you become an expert in your field?
Basically there are two routes. One is you advertise a lot, for example with Google Ad Words. The other is that you write a blog. The experiments that have been undertaken comparing the results of both show that the blog is a much more cost effective way of building up a reputation.
So why don’t more companies do this?
First, a lot of companies start, but then stop simply because it is not a priority. They intend to write it, but just seem to run out of time.
Second, although the rules of blog writing for a business are clear (write about your subject area, not about you and your company) most firms quickly drift into writing about themselves. It doesn’t work, the readership doesn’t build, and they give up.
Schools.co.uk is very happy to help companies get a blog rolling – we’re also happy to write your blog for you. This can be done as part of our Velocity programme in which we handle a lot, if not all, of your marketing, or it can be done as an individual project.
So what’s the impact you can expect?
The blog can greatly enhance your reputation as “the people who know” as well as your position in the marketplace. It can take you right up the Google rankings. In short you can become seen as a market leader long before you are.
If you would like to see one way (and it is only one way) of delivering this sort of approach please do click here. We have also delivered blogs in completely different ways so that, for example, the blog itself makes money and gets itself to the top of Google for its listings (one example, right away from the schools market is here).
To talk the issue of blogs through, please do call 01604 880 927 or if you have some questions do email Stephen@schools.co.uk