Hey y’all!  Hope everyone is getting ready for a festive Fourth of July!  Since tomorrow is the holiday, and not tonight, we’ll go ahead and have #Blogchat tonight (Sunday) at its regularly scheduled time of 8pm Central.

And our topic will focus on creating content for business blogs, and how ‘helpful’ our content should be.  Someone asked a question during last week’s #Blogchat about how you promote yourself via your blog, especially if you are a consultant or working for yourself.  My quick answer was ‘Give away the WHY, sell the HOW’, but I thought that would be a good topic to expand upon tonight.  I think there are two schools of thought here:

1 – Create content that establishes the need for hiring me (Why), and then use the content to get business (Where you teach the how).

2 – Create content that gives away the How, and hope that the content is so amazingly useful that it leads to positive word of mouth, and that leads to referrals.

I think you also need to consider what type of customer/client you want, when you position your content.  For example, if I wanted someone to hire me to setup their business blog, I would probably create more content devoted to WHY they need a blog to build their business.  On the other hand, if I wanted to connect with clients that are already blogging that need help building engagement, I would probably create more content around the HOW, because I want to establish my expertise in building engagement and community.

I think this will be a very interesting discussion as those of us that use our blogs to drive business often struggle with the proper balance in our content.  How much do we promote, versus teach?

So please do join us tonight for #Blogchat at 8pm Central!

Oh! And I promised a very small surprise, didn’t I?  As many of you remember, we were using WTHashtag to create transcripts after each #Blogchat up till a few months ago, when WTHasthag had to stop offering that functionality due to a change in Twitter’s TOS.  But, before it shut down, I was able to convert over a year’s worth of #Blogchats into PDF transcripts!  I’ll be sharing a few of these every week for the next several weeks, so you can use these as additional study materials.  Here’s this week’s transcripts:

7-26-09 – Topic: How to Get Sales and Business Leads From Your Blog (Co-Hosted by Amy Africa) – #Blogchat07-26-09TranscriptWAmyAfrica

7-12-09 – Topic: Finding the ROI of your Blogging and Social Media Efforts (Co-Hosted by KD Paine) – #Blogchat07-12-09TranscriptWKDPaine

7-19-09 – Topic: How Non-Profits Can Use Social Media (Co-Hosted by the Red Cross’ Wendy Harman) – #Blogchat07-19-09TranscriptWWendyHarman

Just click on the link for each, and then you can view them, and download if you like.  Enjoy!