How do you create a blog for your business that doesn't come across as salesy?

I just wrote about this over on the Liftoff blog.

The key is to throw the CTA out the window, for now. Focus on the value you can provide first. The aim of content marketing is to focus on creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to grow and retain an engaged audience.

Content marketing zooms in on what makes your audience tick. It focuses on the topics they’re deeply interested in learning about and provides answers to their most common questions.

Instead of pitching your products or services up front, you are providing truly relevant and useful content to your readers and customers. You’re helping them learn new things and resolving their issues. The reward is a loyal, targeted, action-oriented audience — the holy grail.

By focusing on content that is highly relevant to your audience, you can build trust and authority around your brand and your products while leading readers towards an eventual purchase.

Don't overthink it. Just write about stuff in your niche... I did this with my first software company, growing it from a solo-venture to 40 employees. For years, the blog is what brought in the leads.

I'm doing it again with my current company. The strategy is to pick keywords that you feel like you can rank for, then provide useful content but don't be afraid to plug your own product along the way. As long as you provide useful content, then it's no biggie.

As an aside, blogging is definitely the way to go, so don't give up on that! In the first 30 days of my new company's blog, it saw 2,083 unique visitors(!)

This is more like a personal blog but for a business that @alexisgrant built. I recently came across the journey she has shared and I did not find it salesy at all. In fact, I am really encouraged to try and do something similar with my product (G&E). Been struggling to get the content + community flywheel going on this one.

You have to focus on creating content that is helpful, informative, and interesting to your target audience. This can be achieved by writing blog posts that provide valuable tips, advice, and insights on topics that are relevant to your industry. You should also avoid using language that is overly promotional or pushy, as this will turn readers off and make them less likely to return to your blog in the future. Instead, focus on creating a blog that is a valuable resource for your target audience, and one that they will enjoy reading on a regular basis.

Write posts/tutorials which solve small issues for potential clients - like how to identify problems in a website (speed, seo, etc), and write tutorials which might me useful for readers who already are clients, but come back with same questions again and again.

Here are some blog tips I've found helpful myself:

https://zenpost.com/blog/write-blog-posts-that-sell/

https://fluxedigitalmarketing.com/how-to-sell-on-your-blog-without-being-salesy/

It's really tough. I'm the same as you, I get put off by business blogs. I do, however, like the ones where they aren't necessarily talking about their product/service but just chit-chatting about stuff in general. That may be boring to others but it feels a bit more 'human' to me.

Check out the plausible.io blog, especially the early posts. They were much more personal from the solo founder back then.

In my opinion, the way for blogs not to feel salesy is to also write about topics that are tangentially related. For example, I recently posted about an analysis about crypto and stocks (https://cryptocdx.io/blog/correlation-crypto-and-stock-market-august-2022/). My SaaS is within crypto, but this blog post is not directly related to the product at all!

I am in exactly the same conflict almost every day.

For me it has been proven that a blog is only worthwhile with content that is interesting for the current customers or target group. If it arises in terms of content, it is then worthwhile to make a connection between the content of the blog and what you sell and to refer to it. A bit along the lines of "And all the benefits are covered with my product."

It's best to start writing the first articles on topics that would have interested you in the beginning and then think about whether you can mention your product in them. That's how I always do it with my articles and I find the balancing act between interesting content and a bit of SEO/sales to have hit well.

don't overthink it. Just write about stuff in your niche... I did this with my first software company i really appreciate it very helpful information
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