Balance Promotion with Content with a Business Blog

If you're going to start a blog for your home based business, plan to use it for something other than just promotion. Lately I have been rather appalled at the lack of good quality content out there in the blogosphere. I realize 'good content' is pretty subjective, but outright promotion sticks out like a sore thumb.

A spam blog is pretty easy to spot. Poorly written copy full of links gives those away. But sometimes the promotion isn't immediately apparent. For example, one woman who is a leader in her niche is someone I admire. Yet her blog posts are all devoted to promoting her weekly webinar. That's all they do. They highlight the things you will get from each webinar and then give you a link to register for it.

Now there's nothing wrong with using a blog post to promote a webinar. But that shouldn't be the entire focus of a blog. The blog should directly give the visitor some useful content along with a few promotional links or plugs. It would be a question of balancing out content with promotion. It's a tricky balance and there is no real one formula that works for everyone. Test, test, and test some more to find the right balance.

Too much promotion will make users click away once they figure out your blog is nothing but a blog used for promotion. On the other hand, give them some quality content and they might stick around for a bit!