You Should be Blogging – And Here is a Great New Guide to Help You Get Started

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Blogging is a good way to project your personality and a better way to keep in touch with clients and prospects when there is not a good reason to meet. Many advisors find the prospect of regularly producing posts intimidating. A new book by Susan Weiner can help you get started.

First – you need to be blogging. Establishing a perspective that distinguishes you from other advisors is the foundation of answering a prospective client’s question of why they should choose you from among all the advisors they could work with. It’s difficult to do that with the static pages of your website. A regularly updated blog makes it possible for people to get a much clearer idea of what kind of advice you would offer them. I have commented before that remarkable is referable, so it is important to always be doing things that are worthy of your clients commenting about with their friends. Every post you write offers the opportunity to send out something worthy of comment.

But you are an advisor and not a writer. Regularly publishing 250 word articles is probably outside your wheelhouse. Susan’s book is a great resource. It is a terrific guide for financial advisors who have not done a lot of writing. Though I got some ideas from it as well.

One great point she discusses is to learn how to see a post from the reader’s perspective. So often I have read things by financial advisors that come across as being interesting to the advisor but I am left wondering what the value is to me. That is, if I make it past the third sentence. More likely I would simply lose interest and move on to something else. Susan offers guidance on how to construct posts that the target audience will be drawn into.

There are some great tips on how to generate ideas for posts. Uncover what readers will care about. One question that impressed me was why would a target prospect want to talk with you? Why do they talk with you? Writing about something that is the answer to those questions will help make for compelling posts, and draw those people to you.

The book includes several discussions of the role mind maps can play in helping you create interesting posts. I used to start with an outline when writing articles. In writing my book, however, I discovered a lot of shortcomings to such a linear approach. Mind maps, which I had utilized in strategic planning and other activities, made the process of writing chapters a lot more effective.

Another important discussion in the book is the importance of sticking to a schedule – something I struggle with mightily. Another tremendously successful blogger I respect, Michael Hyatt, has written that publishing consistently is one of the most important elements of building a following. The book includes guidance on this and other great ideas on promoting the blog once you start posting to it.

A blog may be the best vehicle for projecting your unique voice and giving people reasons to talk about you and to you. This book is a great resource to help you get started or to help you improve your existing blog.