By consistently writing and maintaining a useful blog, it is possible to develop quite a following. Out of this following new friendships bloom, new working relationships can develop and it is also an opportunity to market.

In this post, I want to look at the top bloggers, John Chow and Darren Rowse. These guys have spent years blogging and they know what works with readers in general. Let’s take what their blogs have in common that can be applied to any blog in any niche for effective results:

Consistency – these guys regularly post. In fact, John Chow often posts more than once a day. If you only want to post once per week, then just post once per week. Pick a schedule and stick to it so that your readers know when to expect more content from you.

Valuable content – providing killer content is what will bring you readers. If you regularly post content that offers unique, useful and educational information you will get followers and visitors.

Personality – showing some personality (which is part of your branding as a person and as a company) will allow more people to relate to you and your blog. The more that people can relate to you, the more that you will be ‘allowed’ and accepted into their world.

Passion – these guys write passionately about their business areas as they really enjoy them and this is demonstrated through their writing.

Interaction – by interacting with their readers through the comments, they allow the community to grow. People will do business more easily with people that they know more than with people that they don’t know. Your readers can also teach you a lot that you didn’t know.

Good writing – your writing style doesn’t have to be perfect, you just need to be able to convey the information in a way that people can easily understand.

The above are good practices of any blog. Putting in that extra bit of effort to maintain it can also give you better SEO of your site as you build more posts.

No business is a successful business without clients. Finding them is an essential part of running a business and marketing.

In order to gain new clients, it is essential to understand who your clients are. Once you have a clear idea of who they are, what they are interested in and why they would want to buy your product, you will be in a better position to locate and market to them.

The first step is to build a demographic profile of your ideal client. You will need to consider what types of publications they are reading and what they spend their time doing. Another question is whether your clients are locally based or whether they are global. Other questions you may ask yourself, is what income bracket are they likely to be in and what is their gender.

As part of your customer profiling task, you will also need to understand what issues they have and what information they are seeking. Being aware of this will lead you to your clients as you will have the answer to:

• which online blogs they read
• which publications they buy to read
• where do they drink their coffee
• which online forums do they frequent
• how do they spend their leisure time
• where are they seeking information and answers to their issues and questions

In order to stay in touch with your customers, you will need to be current and stay up to date with the issues and the trends in your particular business niche. You can do this by visiting the sites of your competition, reading industry news and generally keeping yourself in the know. This is also an essential piece of keeping up your knowledge as an industry expert, so time spent in educating yourself and your employees will not be wasted. By employing this technique of getting to know your ideal client in order to locate you will be in a stronger position to build your client base.