Advice on what blogs to create

[Hawk-Steve]

Hi all

I have recently finished creating, coding, crying and sweating out our first ever blog section to the website! Now it's time for the good part, creating the blogs themselves and this is where I need your help/advice 

What I am struggling with is defining the blogs themselves. We could have many different combinations of blogs, even with our defined audiences. I am taking a leaf from Hubspot's own blog and think it should be done in a similar way for our audience/business (Hubspot has a blog for marketing, sales and service).

To define us and our audience, our bread and butter is training, short courses and apprenticeships (Staff development all in all).

• Our training, apprenticeships and short courses mainly revolve around:
  • management/leadership
  • business administration
  • childcare
• Our audience can be put into 2 simple groups
  • those that want to be trained/be on an apprenticeship (B2C)
  • those that want their staff trained/want to employ an apprentice or put staff on apprenticeships (B2B)

This brings me to my problem, how would I best set this up?

1. I could create an Apprenticeship blog and a Professional Development Blog, but these mix the audiences, half the apprenticeship articles aimed at employers won't be good reading to the non-employers for example.
2. I could flip it around and create a Personal Development blog and a Staff Training blog, but Apprenticeships and Short Courses are 2 very different things (besides both developing staff). Half the apprenticeship articles won't be good reading for those not interested in apprenticeships for example.
3. Creating all 4 seems like too many. Just having 1 blog with categories seems like a mess waiting to happen, but it would let us blog about other things like staff recruitment and facility hire (a smaller end to our business).

I guess it comes down to Subject vs Audience, I am leaning more towards the 2nd option as it offers the potential to cross-sell and article subjects are more likely to mingle. I would love to hear your thoughts or see how you defined your own blogs. 

Thank you! 

Steve

[MFrankJohnson]

Here's my 2 cents @Hawk-Steve ...

Seems like you've already defined your audiences as B2C and B2B. But your audiences may see thing differently. Setting aside the B2ABC's, every training candidate you're trying to attract is an individual. 

As long as your content delivers value around training and apprenticeship to individuals in every post both direct consumers AND business owners seeking training may find it relatable.

Why commit to (or limit) your segmentation to predefined labels that are often meaningless to the audience? Especially before you produce any content or gain any traction ...

In this case, I say ... One (1) Purpose = (1) Blog = One (1) Purpose

Just a thought.

Hope it helps.

Best,

Frank

Author "Perfect HubSpot" Series

---

MFrankJohnson.com | Connect on LinkedIn

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-UPDATE 12-Dec-2018

Saw this article from Rand Fishkin on blogging today and think it adds value. Certainly worth considering from a seasoned, world-renowned blogger.

- see Can You Still Blog Your Way to Visibility & Credibility?

[Hawk-Steve]

Hi Frank

Some great thoughts, it's true that having blog 'titles' based on our own internally defined categories could just be convenient for us, not for our readers. We also benefit from the fact that no matter who you are, you will always benefit from learning something, director or newbie. I will keep this in mind when moving forward.

Thanks for the thoughts 🙂

Steve

[jjb868]

Have you went through the persona process yet? Defining your common buyer personas, persona overlay documents? This really is at the core of Hubspot's imbound methodology and what we start day 1 with our clients before creating content because it really guides the process.

The whole point is to focus on content that the user wants to see, not what you think they should see or what you want to show off about. The hard truth is, customers don't care about you, they only care about getting their problems solved and your content should get them closer to that. Once fully fleshed out, your persona documents will reveal what content needs to be created and then you can start use Hubspots content strategy tool to group them into Google's new Pillar/Cluster organic update. 

[Hawk-Steve]

Hey jjb

Yep, have everything in hand for personas. The challenge I was facing at the time was the fact we deal with a very wide range of audiences. From 16 year olds fresh out of school, parents of these young people and careers advisors all the way up to line-managers, small and large company owners. The aim was to find a central point of interest for everyone.

I've since quite handily categorised blogs with the right tags for the right people. Visitors should find the right content naturally this way without splitting the blog too many times. We will, however, have an internal careers blog separate to these for obvious reasons.

Steve

[PrimeItSolution]

Here's what you need to do:
1. Regularly add compelling content.
2. Nurture and grow your audience.
3. Engaging through storytelling.
4. Strategically attracting readers.
5. Staying topical.

[john3211]

you could target technology niches which are most hot in today's time, search on internet which thing to target, artificial intelligence,  programming, Iot.

[bethany42423]

first of all do some research on area of your interest, check what is the perspective of  that niche, write some unique content on it and upload it to different blogging sites.

[mjordan8]

you could target innovation specialties which are generally hot in the present time, search on web which thing to target, man-made consciousness, programming, Iot.

[jnix284]

Based on our experience with setting up our blog, you're trying to segement content that doesn't exist yet. If you focus on the SEO side of writing a blog article and drive traffic to your website via the blog, you can build a robust library of high performing blogs. Getting your sales & marketing team to promote these to different contacts & personas will help you see who is engaging with what type of content. In the end - topics might be enough or you might decide that you need to split out the blog, but having 2 slightly empty blogs is not necessarily better than 1 high performing blog. It will also help define the type of content you want to deliver instead of trying to force a specific audience to engage with specific content.

In the beginning, we included articles we thought our homeowners would also engage with, not just our homebuyers/customers - what we learned is that having a knowledge base for homeowners was a bigger value add than a blog. I know everyone is different, but there are so many ways you can leverage the various resources within HubSpot and it doesn't have to fit a predefined mold.

[sharonlicari]

Thank you for sharing @jnix284! 

@Hawk-Steve @jnix284 @mjordan8 @bethany42423 @john3211 I'd like to invite all of you to ask any questions about SEO in our AMA this week with our Community Champion and Elite Partner @rikkilear!

Thanks

Sharon