If you have a blog about your business or industry (and if you don’t, you should!), then one strategy you can use to improve your own blogging is simply to read and comment (politely!) on the blogs of the competition or your partners. A lot of people are understandably afraid of doing this, but the good news is that when it comes to the Internet, people are mostly looking for a specific “niche” they can serve.
You will often find that even amongst your direct competitors, there are specialties that characterize you both and clients will likely go to you for different things.
As such, you actually have a lot to learn mutually from your fellow bloggers and online competitors in the contexts of blog discussions, online forums and many other sites.
Positioning Yourself in Your Industry
Because you most likely have limited time available, you will not always be able to comment on every blog post that your competitors write. You have to carefully pick the posts you comment on if you are looking to position yourself in your industry. The kind of posts that you want your name associated with will be the ones that directly relate to some professional aspect of your industry. For example, if you are working in a research laboratory to do with mechanical engineering, then you might want to comment on posts and blogs around the Internet that talk about engineering processes. Ideally you should freely give your knowledge and information on a topic and help answer questions that the original poster or one of the commenters posed.
Most bloggers who blog for their business find that if they focus the vast majority (as in over 80%) of their posts on informational, professional topics, then they achieve the renown in their field they are looking for.
Show Your Human Side Too
But that’s not to say that you should never post a funny picture or a joke. If it is completely appropriate, then you should. However, it is always best to make it slightly personal. For instance, you could upload a short video explaining how to do something in your own workshop. A graphic designer, for instance, might upload a short video on YouTube about how to rasterize a high resolution image. In this way she can position herself as an expert on the topic and on that merit alone she might bring in a new customer.
