Do you have a blog for your small business? You should consider it. Blogging enables you to build credibility, expertise and thought leadership in and around your business. It is also a great way to showcase information about your product or service in a way that provides you flexibility to add information on-line without having to make changes to your primary website. Given all of these advantages the biggest challenges in blogging typically revolve around generating ideas to write about and the time to create posts. Yesterday I attended a session put on by the Social Media Club of Columbus on the business of blogging. The session featured Matt Russo, ChatterJet.com, Lori Crock, Written Impact, BlogCoaches and Sharon Santino, Leaderpromos. The speakers shared their thoughts on how to best implement blogging into a business's marketing mix. Here are some takeaways I wanted to share that may increase your interest in blogging for your business.
The Strategy of Business Blogging
Like most things in business there are strategic business reasons to blog. In addition to the points I mentioned above blogging can increase your business's relevance, authority, increase your ranking in search engines and your leverage. However, what your get out of blogging will be different for every business as the outcome will be determined by your business goals. While most would point to traffic and comments as a success metric in a blog that is not always the case. Depending on your business you may not need large traffic numbers to show success. Using Leaderpromos as an example they do B to B sales. Typically people come to them later in the sales cycle so it is more important to them to attract specific, engaged audience that need their products so large number of non-business readers are not that critical to the success of their site. In other cases there is a value to large numbers, it just depends on your customers and what your are trying to accomplish with your blog.
Content is King
Content is king in blogging. Content that speaks to your readers is going to increase activity on your blog. Writing about something that you have a passion about will improve the quality of the content. This is perfect for most small business owners in that the thing they are passionate about, their product/business, is what they are writing about in their blog. Having said this the best way for businesses to generate content is to understand what their customers/readers are talking about and respond to these issues. Solving problems makes great blog posts. Most of the posts on this site are generated around questions small business owners tell me they are struggling with in their business.
Activity and Visability
In order to increase activity and visibility to your blog the best way is to connect to communities that are dealing with issues you are dealing with. For example, if you are a food blogger then food communities and blogs are best to connect with as opposed to just randomly posting and hoping the people will notice. Social media promotion to get the word out on platforms that your audience frequents is important. Connecting to other bloggers in your space can often lead increased visability and possibly to guest posts that will expose you to another audience. Submitting posts to social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon or Digg can extend your reach across the web. If you have a strong post that you feel will fit to the content of a large publisher you can submit the post to them and they might use it on their site. For example, in that I deal with small business owners sending links to posts and offering it to publications like Inc. or Entrepreneur might get me published there. Also, good use of keywords in your posts can attract traffic via search engines. To that point, be sure to write content that is valuable to the reader not the search engines. If the placement of the keywords makes sense that is fine but don't write stupid stuff just to stuff keywords into the post.
Just Do It!
Finally, like I say with all social media activities in your business you have to do it. Nothing frustrates me more than going to a blog and seeing nothing has been posted in the last year. There is time to blog and there are plenty of things for you to blog about. Build some consistency and schedule yourself to blog. There is no hard an fast rule to how many times a week you need to blog. Don't burn yourself out trying to blog everyday just do what makes sense. If you aren't a writer then consider video posts (vlogging). Videos are powerful ways to get your message across and draw attention. Many people use photos and minimal words in their posts especially photographers. This is common on platforms such as Tumblr. Find what you are comfortable with and blog. 95% of blogs fail within two years...Don't be a statistic.
Let me know your thoughts on best practices for small business blogging. Please leave a comment or go to our Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/Ideas2Deals, to be part of the conversation.
