Should Your Business’ Blog Profile Industry Leaders?

One method of raising your blog’s profile is to profile other blogs or bloggers. This can be a very successful approach, like it was for blogger Ben Spark on his I’m Not a Famous Blogger site (link below). But what if your blog is for a business? Profiling industry leaders — i.e., your partial or full competitors — might make sense, though profiling their personal or company blogs could be misconstrued as an attack on the slightest wrong word, unless you’re extremely careful. In which case, is it a good idea to cover competitor sites at all?

I’m of two minds on this. On one hand, linking to the blogs/ sites of competitors is actually a good search engine strategy, provided you’re linking to quality sites, and quality, relevant content. Search engines want to provide relevance of content; they don’t care about your business politics. So linking to topically relevant sites scores you points. On the other hand, profiling your competition could have one of two negative results. Firstly, it could backfire on you. As mentioned above, competitors might be leery of you profiling them. Or, you could do such a good profiling job that you send away clients. Neither one is a win.

Still, there’s an opportunity to implicitly show why you’re better, without actually saying so. If you feel the need to profile an industry leader, make sure that you do a series. Keep everything business-like and neutral, if not positive; leave out the personal stuff. Next, make sure that you have some additional compelling content that you can give away — such as an ebook, report or whitepaper — which not only shows authority in your niche but to which you can link to from each profile post. Have this extra content available for download at the same time that you publish the first industry profile post. Give readers a directive at the end of each profile; suggest that they download the report or ebook to learn more, and that they can contact you with relevant questions.

This approach is more likely to bind interested parties to your site rather than sending them away to a competitor.

Ref: Ben Spark/ a I’m Not a Famous Blogger.