Why Your Blog Should Be a Classroom, Not a Sales Floor

Those graduation photos that you’ve been seeing on social media for the past few weeks – and the above photo of some friends and me after graduating from Brick Memorial High School many moons ago – should serve as a reminder of how critical education is to not only students, but society in general.

All of the problems on the face of the earth have one thing in common.

Education is part of the solution.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a large-scale social, political, financial, technical, environmental or health-related problem. It could be something as simple as choosing the right plumber or laundry detergent.

The more we know, the better prepared we are to find a solution.

And the more confident we are in our ability to make smart decisions.

That’s one big reason why a company blog presents business owners and marketers with such an amazing opportunity.

Forget about the impact on search, website traffic and lead generation for a second. Think about the value of educating and helping your clients.

Each blog post enables you to educate people and take them one step closer to solving a problem.

Maybe it doesn’t make sense to provide a 500-word answer to a very specific client question on your website, but this is exactly what we should be doing with our blog posts.

Educate your audience and answer their questions in a language they’ll understand. Use your blog to create an online database of educational information.

Empower people with the knowledge and confidence to find solutions to their problems. When people are armed with knowledge and confidence, the sales process becomes shorter and your price becomes easier to justify.

People read blogs because they want insight, not marketing ploys and sales pitches.

Instead of hoping people are stupid enough to fall for your lame sales pitch, respect and enhance their intelligence by providing them with information they can use to make their lives better.

This education shouldn’t consist of endless explanations about product features and benefits. It should focus on actually helping someone solve a problem.

In other words, enlighten people with information they feel is important, not what you feel is important.

In most cases, your product is just a means to an end. That “end” is what people really care about. Blog content that educates will help them get there.

To those who think you shouldn’t provide free educational information in a blog, I would humbly suggest that you get over yourself.

“That’s what people pay us for. I’m not giving it away.”

Well, someone else will. And the information you’re hoarding is probably easy to find online – for free.

Even if you have a killer product and a killer business process, you don’t have the market cornered on information and insights that help people find solutions to their problems.

If you don’t use your blog content to educate your clients and establish your expertise, you make it more difficult for people to see the value of your killer product and process.

Which means they’ll be less likely to pay for it.

They’ll be more likely to do business with the competitor who helped them instead of trying to squeeze money out of them for information that was readily available someplace else.

We remember those who help us.

I don’t know about you, but I remember the teachers and professors who had the biggest impact on my life and taught me how to solve problems.

Mrs. Graham in eighth grade. Mr. Kuhn and Mr. Kasyan in high school. Dr. Gullifor and Dr. Kasch in college.

I also remember people who wrote blogs that taught me something. I’ve hired and collaborated with some of them, too.

If you blog consistently and commit to educating instead of selling, readers will remember you when it’s time to invest in a solution to a problem.

Why? Because you’ve positioned yourself as an authority. Instead of just saying “you can trust me,” you’ve earned their trust. You’ve justified the value of doing business with your company, and price has become more of an incidental detail than a potential sticking point.

Like marketing, education solves problems. If you convert your blog from a sales floor to a classroom, your business and your product will be viewed as the solution.