10 Tips for Developing Your Business Blog’s Personality
By Robin Callan
Unless you’ve been under the proverbial rock for the past decade, you know a blog is a vital communication tool for your company’s website. So how do you craft a blog that successfully establishes the voice of your design firm? Here are my ten tips for such an endeavor:
1. Determine how your blog will differ from the thousands of other design blogs on the Internets. It’s impossible to create something 100% original anymore, but if you want readers to return to your blog, it’s important to give them something they’re not getting elsewhere. This is easier to craft than you might think! Start with a list of the ways you differentiate your business from other interior design firms in your area, and your blog’s niche will start to reveal itself.
2. Stick with your schtick. Once you commit to a certain theme, be consistent. My business, Room Fu, revolves around providing affordable design solutions for everyday people, so I blog about affordable décor. Sometimes it pains me to restrain myself from posting fantasy-generating eye candy, but I know that when people are looking for inexpensive decorating options, they’ll troll my site before looking elsewhere because that’s what they’ve come to expect from my blog. Meeting readers’ expectations inspires their loyalty, and staying focused on a particular writing style or design aesthetic also helps establish your company’s brand.
3. Don’t be afraid to reveal your true personality. Whatever your quirks, whatever your true personality is—include that in your design blog. People are accustomed to blogs being more authentic and personal than the average corporate communication, so you have a little more latitude with the tone and content of your blog, as long as you stay true to your particular business’ image. The more you reveal about yourself and your opinions, the more personal your blog feels to readers. The more personal it feels to readers, the more interested they are in reading it. If someone wants to hire an interior designer, who do you think they’ll hire…the designer whose blog is all business, all the time, or the designer they feel they know like a friend? You’ll enjoy your work more if you attract like-minded readers and clients this way.
4. Post what you’d want to read. Sure, “How to Select Paint Colors for Your Home’s Interior,” will help you with search engine optimization, but what a snoozefest that’s gonna be if it reads like stereo instructions. Make it funny, or include tons of photos that visually walk a reader through the do’s and don’t’s of paint selection, and you have a post that warrants the golden egg of social media—the clicking of the “Share” button.
5. Avoid taboo topics. There’s a fine line between writing posts that will attract like-minded clients and being stupid enough to drive away a huge percentage of prospective clients. Any time you divert from design-related topics, you risk losing readers, and if you choose to bring politics or religion into your blog, do so with the full knowledge that you are willfully excluding a chunk of the population. If that’s a deliberate move as part of your client filtration system, then that’s your call, but I would recommend being more vague on those subjects.
6. Relate every post to design. It’s great to go off-topic now and then—say, talk about your adorable kiddos or about the blockbuster you saw over the weekend—but you’d better have some point that relates to design or decorating. It’s still your company blog, so your posts should always come back to your core business.
7. Don’t let your business bogart your blog content. I don’t recommend focusing on press-release-style posts that solely revolve around how great your design firm is, or solely featuring your own portfolio photography. You obviously want to showcase your talents and share company news and portfolio pictures on your blog, but people don’t want to cozy up with a business blog week after week. Give them content they’ll want to absorb over coffee, and you get them to return to your site again and again, which keeps your business in their mental forefront.
8. Dot your “I’s” and cross your “t’s.” If writing and grammar aren’t your strong suits, consider hiring a pro to write your blog, or engage a proofreading service to edit your content before you click “Publish.” You don’t have to be an English professor about it, but if you—as the voice of your company—tend to chronically misspell words or abuse grammar rules, it may harm more than help your business.
9. If you do farm out your blog content, acknowledge the farmer. When I worked as a graphic designer in magazine publishing, I was horrified to discover that the CEO didn’t write his own Letter from the Editor. He put his smug mug on the page and signed it with a flourish, but he never created the thing himself. It seemed so misleading, that this “personal” connection with readers was a total ruse. Likewise, if potential customers feel like they know you through your blog and then find out you have a ghostwriter, it betrays the personal connection they assume they have with you. On the other hand, if you’re transparent about the whole thing and identify your writer, readers are still able to develop a personal connection with your company and no one is made to feel like a dupe.
10. Stay on a first-name basis with your clients. Your clients’ privacy is a valuable commodity and you need to treat it as such. Most of them don’t want their designer blabbing to the world about their personality or their decorating project, and they certainly don’t want to be ID’d by their “before” pictures on the Web. If you refer to clients at all, stick to their first name unless they grant you permission—in writing—to do otherwise.
The fact that there are thousands of interior designers out there writing blogs should not deter you from entering the fray. Whether your goal is to develop a worldwide readership or to give prospective clients more insight into what it might be like to work with your design firm, a good company blog is well worth the effort.
Robin Callan is the founding design guru of Room Fu, an Austin, Texas interior design firm and long-time defender of affordable design. Her blog, Fu for Thought,features steals and deals, design-related musings, and interviews with celebrity designers.
