As an ERP consultant, your time is valuable and you have so much ERP expertise in your head...so how do you find time to share your exapeience and expertise with others to help find and attract new customers? At ERPVAR, we have a goal to blog every day. Most of our blogs are guest blogs that come from other ERP consultants who are experts like you. Some ERP consultants are fortunate enough to have a marketing person to do most of the heaving blog lifting. However, many still do not and find the time to blog.
ERP Consultant 9 More Tips on HOW to Blog Effectively
- Readers Tend to like Bullets and Numbers: Try to include bullets or numbers in blog. People like to read blogs that have a number of things in the title that they will learn from reading your blog. This way your reader will know what they are getting when they read your blog. For example: “5 Ways, 5 Reasons, 5 Tips, etc.” Bullets may also be a way to easily organize your points to stand out to the reader.
- Tips & Tricks & Questions You Already Answer for Customers: ERP software tips and tricks are an easy way to generate content for your blog. You have consultants who answer questions for clients all week. Some of these questions and answers can be easily turned into a blog. Screen shots are a great way to illustrate your answer in a step by step manner.
- Create a Blog Series: If you don’t have a URL associated with a keyword, then Part I-V blogs are recommended to link original blog to subsequent blogs written with keyword focus. This creates valuable links tying keyword from one link to another helps for SEO purposes.
- Share Your Blog in Customer Forums: ERP customer forums are a great way to find popular customer issues and questions and attract potential prospects. When you write a blog about the issue or question on a forum you can then respond to a customer question on the forum with a link to your blog. Most ERP software customer forums that belong to publishers like Sage, Intuit, Dynamics, etc...will allow you to post a blog link while there are some that will not. Some forums try to prevent responses that look like solicitations so adding a link to a blog is a great way to be informative without being overtly promotional. Posting a blog on a forum provides you with a link to a forum with high SEO authority which is good for SEO purposes.
- Share your Blog in LinkedIn Groups: Do you belong to LinkedIn Groups that your customers or target customers join? Sharing blogs to relevant groups are a great way to demonstrate your expertise. If you have a specialized industry focus like the "medical device" field, then find out where those potential future customers hang out in LinkedIn and get involved.
- Informative Beats Promotional: Try to avoid being too promotional in the body of your blog. Blogs are best received when they have valuable informative content for the reader. Blogs that are controversial and reflect the writer’s personality are often shared in social media which creates valuable links for SEO purposes. Save your pitch or about your company at the end of the blog and limit it to 1-2 paragraphs.
- Action Item or CTA: Always include an action item or call to action (CTA) in your blog. What is the reader supposed to do after reading your blog? For example: contact us for a free needs assessment, contact us, visit our website, read our free e-book. Your CTA can be an image associated with a CTA page.
- Length of Blogs: Blogs should be 600 words or more but not too long. If you have 1,200 words in a blog, consider breaking it up into 2 blogs. This may be too long to keep the reader engaged.
- Promote at the End: Always include an about company and about the products and services you support at the end of your blog along with your CTA.
If you still have some blogging questions, please feel free to check out the previous blogs in our series.
Stay tuned for more blogs on the blogging topic and please feel free to like, share and follow our blogs - SUBSCRIBE TO OUR BLOGS HERE. We do not certainly have all the blogging answers or think that blogging is the silver bullet to solve all your marketing challenges. We get a lot of questions around the topic "WHY blog?" and hope this gives you some ideas to get the blogging ideas flowing.
We are happy to discuss with you the WHYs and HOWs of blogging. Please feel free to contact us online or give us a call: 888-253-6705.
About ERPVAR.com
Established in 2012 and headquartered in Orange County, CA, ERP VAR represents the collective expertise of Sage 50 (formerly Peachtree), Sage 100 ERP (formerly MAS90 and MAS 200), Sage 500 ERP (formerly MAS 500), Sage ERP X3, Epicor, Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics SL, Microsoft Dynamics AX, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, NetSuite, Intacct, Infor, Acumatica and QuickBooks Enterprise third party developers combined with the expertise of local implementation ERP consultants. These local ERP consultants provide end users with a thorough needs analysis to determine which ERP software functionality is required to address their unique needs. If a business process assessment is required, the local channel partner is enlisted to provide a comprehensive examination with end user company departments to insure the correct ERP software is selected implemented and the staff is properly trained.
For more information, please visit www.erpvar.com or call 888-253-6705 or info@erpvar.com
If you are an ERP consultant, ERP VAR, ERP Service Provider, ERP Solution Provider, and/or ERP reseller (whatever the terminology you identify with most), please CONTACT US to learn more about the benefits of participating with www.ERPVAR.com
by Kathy Graham at ERPVAR
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