What Do I Write On My Blog – Answering Your Customers Questions Before They Ask

The most asked question I receive from people when they are thinking of marketing with a blog is

What do I write about?

The first five or six are easy. But it quickly goes down hill from there.

So you start creating posts like:

What I Did For Spring Break

Or

My Weekend Trip To Ski Town USA

Nope, not going to help you.

But where can you get ideas? And what source can help you find out what your clients are thinking way before they know to ask it?

If you are there with content on your blog before they think it, you’ll be well prepared when they type it into Google and look for it.

The best place to go and do a little research is: Amazon. Yep, Amazon. Millions upon millions of books exist on every subject matter you could ever imagine. And with a little creative thinking, you’ll quickly discover things to write about, and in many cases, even find potential titles that your audience really is looking for.

Let me show you how it works with an example.

Let’s say we are a commercial photography studio, and our target market are art directors for creative companies. The creative director that would potentially hire us looks for photographs for two reasons.

1. She regularly puts together a catalog of her products to send out to potential buyers

2. She creates brochures, postcards and advertisements for a variety of sources

So she needs photography on a continual basis, depending on her new inventory and the focus of her latest ad campaign.

How do we know what she is looking for online?

To start, we know she is always looking for the latest and greatest information on how to make her “stuff” better. She wants a catalog, brochure, postcards and advertisement that bring more people in.

So we can head over to Amazon and start looking up concepts related to her interests.

Amazon Search Results 1

In this case, we have 1,249 results for our search phrase.

Amazon Search Results 2

Some will be more applicable than others. As you look through your results, focus in on the books that have the Look Inside! feature. With those books you can take a peek at the table of contents, and find out what things matter most to a person that is concentrating on developing a successful catalog.

Amazon Search Results 3

With this book’s information, you can find a variety of things to blog about.

Amazon Search Results 4

You could do a full post on “catalog photography”. Fill it with advice on the type of imagery you need to sell through a catalog – good lighting, close up images to show detail, etc.

You could do a post on page production, and talk about different image size, how images relate to copy, color vs black and white, etc.

You could do a post on catalog organization. The more you know as a photographer, the more you can photograph things together to build relationships as a person moves from page to page, section to section.

Your goal as a photographer – in this case specializing in commercial photography – is to give your clients 110 percent service and give them more than they ever expected, or received, from any other photographer.

If you know a ton of information about catalog production and creating advertising and marketing pieces that gain traction with their recipients – and can prove it with samples and case studies – who do you think your next prospect will pick?

If this seems like a lot of work, put yourself in your prospects and/or customers shoes. They have a job to do. They have money to spend. Yes, they might be looking for a deal, especially with budget cuts and economic problems. But they also want value. They are willing to pay a little more for someone who knows exactly what they are doing and can provide even more than they thought they wanted. They want the full experience of working with someone knowledgeable about what they are doing.

Use your blog to communicate and build that relationship long before they ever talk to you. If you can prove you’ll go the extra mile – if they find you by doing quick searches and stay with your site because they like what they see