Business Blogging is the Red Pill – Everything is Not What it Seems

In the 1999 movie (holy crap, was it really that long ago?) The Matrix, Neo is presented with a choice of pills to swallow: red vs. blue. Morpheus tells him:

You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

You are Neo and I’m Morpheus. You’re about to create a blog in order to market your business. The blue pill is typical blogging advice infesting the rest of the interwebs. The red pill is Wonderland.

Business blogging.

Business blogging isn’t pro-blogging. I know, I know, I’ve said this before. I’m going to keep saying it because it needs to be said. I’ll be the lone voice crying out in the wilderness (with prophet-like beard to match).

You may not realize how deep this rabbit hole goes. If you were writing a “normal” blog or a “monetized” blog (every time you use the word monetized, by the way, you should know God kills a kitten… by clubbing it with a baby seal) and wanted to create a list of “blogging best practices” you’d have something like this:

• Engage the audience.
• Encourage subscribers.
• Promote your blog in social media.
• Follow common SEO “best practices” (oh, oh, beware those words!).
• Write interesting or useful content (a more worthless and unhelpful directive doesn’t exist).

Goals

Audience Engagement

If there’s one area where there’s overlap between the Matrix and the real world, it’s in audience engagement. The techniques for this will work in almost any context:

• Polarize opinion by reducing and simplifying a debate.
• Ask open-ended questions.
• Don’t tell everything you know so others feel obligated to mention what they know.

Subscribers

A pro blog wants subscribers so they can keep presenting advertising and affiliate links to them. A business blog wants customers, not subscribers. I don’t care how many subscribers Remarkablogger has. I care about how many clients I have and whether or not my business is successful. I don’t want a successful blog for its own sake, I want a successful business.  I value my clients much more highly than I value readers who never or never will buy anything from me.

In fact one of my clients will be creating a WordPress-based site but in all likelihood, it will not have a blog on it! Blog consulting indeed…

Promotion

A pro blog or monetized blog (woops, there goes another kitten) basically whores itself out to every imaginable method of promotion because the goal is to build up the size of the audience and have high pageviews so advertising can be sold.

A business blog may not hardly need to be promoted at all. There are cases where the site and the blog act as more of a glorified online “business card” which is visited by a prospect after she is sent your name by a friend. In other words,  word-of-mouth referrals are a chief way of getting leads. Normal blogs don’t deal with this at all. The closest thing they have is sharing via social media or forwarding an email, but it’s not the same.

A business owner is not interested in building a popular blog for its own sake, she’s interested in selling her products or services to the right people. What she does to achieve this is not promotion so much as engaging with the right people (her market) in the right ways.

SEO

The differences here are more subtle but even more crucial. It’s important to remember content creates the audience. As a business owner, if you understand what I call the “three P’s” your content will practically write itself:

• People
• Problem
• Product

Get these right and SEO is a matter of light technical importance. You can achieve leads and sales with only a basic understanding of SEO because the truly hard work—getting your 3 P’s right—already took place. In fact if you take nothing else from this article, you can dramatically improve your business in very short order by taking a hard look at your 3 P’s and nailing them down definitively. If it still seems like mud soup to you, then you may need a blog consultant to help you figure it out. I happen to know one.

Content

This is the big one: content. Interesting content. Good content. On a pro blog, good content keeps people coming back for more ad impressions and click-throughs on affiliate links.

On a business blog, good content gets you leads and sales. You can’t even begin to create good content until you know your 3 P’s. Otherwise, you have no idea who you’re really writing for, what they care about or what you could do that’s worth more than money to them. Do clients get referred to you first and then read your blog, or do they find you online, read and then hire you? That makes a difference, too.

One of the biggest differences between a pro blog and an business blog is that a pro blog’s content is designed to solve problems and be useful, while a business blog’s content should raise questions and take a stand.

What You Didn’t Think About

After you take the red pill and live in Wonderland, you have to consider stuff that people plugged into the Matrix never even consider or will never notice:

• Conversion design – what elements on your site’s pages and their arrangement encourages inquiries.
• Secret sales pages – do you know what parts of your site really convince people to work with you? It’s not what you think.
• Product arc – do you have a master product/service timeline that matches up with the duration a customer is with you?
• Productivity and efficiency – when you have a business to run that’s even somewhat successful, you have far less time to do all the things pro bloggers say you should be doing, because you’re busy helping your clients. I actually spend very little time blogging, commenting and being on social media. The majority of my time is spent creating product and working with clients.

The One

Yeah, I suppose the Matrix analogy may be a bit worn-out after all this time, but let me make one more comparison. Neo is The One. He’s the dude who is more special than anyone else. He’s set apart from the masses, even in the gritty reality of the people who don’t live plugged into the Matrix.

In reality, few people succeed.

Very few.

Think about that.

You are the One of your world, but only if you don’t do what everyone else is doing. Most people, when given the choice, happily swallow the blue pill. And even the ones who want to know the truth—who take the red pill—are still not at the level of “the One.” That takes something not even a different viewpoint can give you.