I was meeting with a potential client this week, and they asked me the question:

“so, how does a blog help us win more business?”

Now, I could talk through the generalities of how a blog helps you win work, for example:

• Demonstrates to visitors to your blog that you know your stuff
• Helps your website visitors get to know your fee earner’s personality
• Because you add regular content, it helps Google index your site more regularly and often helps the search engine optimization of your site.

For more ideas of how to use your blog to win work, then look at ‘I have a blog but not sure how to use it to win work‘

These are all great benefits of having a blog. However, I believe, that you can take your blog one step further to REALLY shift your blog from a good thing into a work-winning powerhouse.

Step 1: Identify common problems, requests, interests, themes which prospects and clients talk to you about. Before you can really sweat the assets of your blog, you need to consider the following:

• What do clients and prospects typically ask me?
• What problems do clients have that I typically solve?
• What do I often have to educate client’s on?

Once you have brainstormed some answers to these three questions, then blog about them! (For more ideas on how to actually write your blog post see ‘how do I make my blog so that people want to read it‘)

Now you are really ready to sweat the assets of your blog. Let’s take my prospects example of how to do this.

My potential client is a trainer, who managed to save his client £500k by training up their HR department to think and act like recruiters, so saving £500k of agency fees.. Let’s just say, for example, that he wrote a short blog post detailing the problems that his client was facing, i.e. a very large agency recruitment bill, and how, without breaching client confidentiality, they were able to reduce this amount by £500k.

Step 2: Write and distribute the blog post, i.e. ‘How I saved my client £500k in agency fees’, on social media. This is where, after you have written the blog post, you tweet about the post and include it in your LinkedIn status update. For more ideas on how to distribute your blog post, see ‘7 ways to get your blog noticed by the people who really matter‘

Step 3: Start a discussion online about the blog post. This is where you go to the forums that you are active in and pose a question about direct to market recruitment. Asking the members of the group, who are potential prospects rather than your peers, what experience they have had of direct to market recruitment and missing out the middle man, and then sharing a link to your success story.

Step 4: Go through your client list and identify who might be interested in the service you have been blogging about, i.e. upskilling the HR team to think and act like a recruiter. Send a nice friendly, keeping in touch email, to these clients and prospects to share with them your latest blog post. Remember to include in the email something about, you are happy to have a conversation with them about how you could help their HR department reduce recruitment agency fees.

Step 5: Go through your network and list of introducers. Send them a keeping in touch email, and include the link to the blog post you have written. Put a soft line in the email about if they know anyone else in these circumstances, please feel free to introduce them to you.

Step 6: Put the blog into a list of common subject areas that potential clients may ask you about. I.e. have a list of blogs on the theme of direct to market recruitment, and using LinkedIn to do recruitment yourself.  Every month, go through clients, prospects, introducers who you have on a ‘nurture’ or ‘keep regularly in touch list’, and send them out a link to a blog post that you have written which they may find valuable and interesting.

Step 7: When you have several blog posts on a common theme, e.g. using LinkedIn to do your own recruitment, put these together into a guide or white paper. Give this guide away, in return for an email address, for visitors to your website. Offer to send this guide out to prospects or people who have expressed an interest in training their HR team to think like recruiters. Go back through your list of prospects, clients or introducers who have expressed an interest in in-house recruitment and send them your new guide.

How do you sweat the assets in your blog?