ONTRAPORT is a software company that specializes in an all-in-one solution for small businesses.
The key behind their offering is that small businesses are doing all kinds of important tasks, but with different tools and software. I look at my own company and realize that describes us.
Then I look around at local businesses and realize that it’s also true for many of them. It’s definitely a challenge to figure out and manage all kinds of different things especially with software. There are enough different things to manage in a business. Software is great, but too much software is confusing and frustrating.
There seems to be many more details on what ONTRAPORT can do for businesses, but as we always do we’re going to look at their blogging effort and see what good lessons we can learn.
1. Great Categories
The first thing that stood out to me is something I really like on a business blog: Categories.
Right at the top of the ONTRAPORT blog you’ll see categories:
- Better Business
- Entrepreneurial Life
- Automation
- Marketing
- Success Stories
Categories are meant to help readers navigate your blog. It also helps you to form a blogging strategy. These categories make perfect sense for a company like ONTRAPORT. The focus for each category is on the questions that the target reader, business owners or managers, would be search for.
I really like the one on Entrepreneurial Life. Throughout its content you can tell that ONTRAPORT really understands living as an entrepreneur. It’s good to have topics like marketing and automation, but sometimes this target reader just wants a few tips on life in general. Maybe something on finding time to spend with family or how to deal with stress.
These categories are great and many businesses could use categories like this on their own blog.
2. Multiple Writers
It looks like ONTRAPORT is using multiple writers for their blog. It can be a challenge to maintain a business blog. Even weekly posts can be a challenge to maintain. There are a few tricks for sticking to a blogging schedule. One of the best things we’ve learned is to separate the brainstorming for topics and titles from the researching and writing. You work on the titles every couple months and put them in a schedule with a few notes. Then each week you can simply see what title there is to write and get cracking.
Multiple writers can help as well. And it seems that ONTRAPORT has a strategy defined for their blog. That gets the multiple writers on the same page so they can all work toward the same goal, which I would imagine is bringing their target clients to the blog as new visitors.
Multiple writers can help make sure that you’re adding a good amount of content to your business blog. We recommend at least weekly posts as a way to build your company’s online authority. And if your posts are good then your audience will demand as much as possible.
It even looks like ONTRAPORT has guest writers on occasion. That’s another way to get more consistent content on a company blog.
3. A More Interactive Post
This post was pretty cool. The post addresses a frustration that many businesses would have: Why are my sales not working? The post provides an overview of how to create a position statement.
One of the challenges with any business is honing in on the right niche. The tendency is to try and do too many things. This confuses you, the business owner, and it confuses potential customers. If you can’t hone in on what you do how are customers supposed to figure it out?
This post is straightforward and provides an exercise to help businesses build a position statement. And they also provide a neat little download that you can fill out. I like this idea for including something tangible like a download in a post. It’s a way to make the post more interactive.
4. How To Posts
Let’s bring it back to basics here.
How To posts are some of the best posts you can write. You probably see them all the time online. You search for a question on Google and you likely get results full of how to posts and articles and videos and other content. You browse social media and you probably see the same thing.
We live in a great time because we have access to information that can teach us how to do all kinds of things.
This post focuses on how to make sure your emails don’t go in the spam boxes. That’s obviously important for businesses. It’s really frustrating when someone, even someone that signs up for your emails, has your email go into their spam filter. This post addresses that challenge with good, easy to understand instructions.
5. Company Update, Vision
On the first of the year the company’s CEO published a post. It’s pretty cool that he posts on the blog and not just with this post.
But in this post he looked back on the previous year and shared a few company updates and reaffirmed what the vision for the company is. That’s always something that current clients (and future clients) are curious about. They want to know what the plan is for the company so they can decide if they want to be part of it going forward.
That’s why I always like these types of posts. It’s a little way to communicate with your audience so there are no surprises when changes come. Contrary to popular belief, nobody likes surprises.
Conclusion
ONTRAPORT is really doing some good things with their blog. It seems like they’re posting about twice weekly. That’s a great frequency. We always recommend at least weekly and multiple times each week can really lead to some great inbound and SEO results.
I also really like how they setup their categories. They know their stuff and I like that they included a category for Entrepreneurial Life. That’s unique and definitely something their audience should like.
It’s another example of a company doing great things with a business blog.