Business Blogging

Tips for Starting a Small Business Blog

SEO

The business blog is a powerful but underused tool for connecting with customers for small businesses. They can be used to establish you as an expert, drive Internet traffic to your website and improve your SEO, help you grow an audience and inform potential customers on what you and your business have to offer.

Jim Blasingame, a contributor for Forbes magazine, says that blogs are powerful for three reasons:

1. Small business owners are experts on what they sell, how it’s used, the industry, etc.
2. Customers want access to what experts know.
3. Increasingly, customers expect a closer connection to experts.

You can use a business blog as a platform for demonstrating your expertise in your field and showing customers how they can use that expertise to their benefit. But getting started can be difficult. What do you write about? How often should you post? How long should posts be? How much time and effort will it take?

What you write depends on your business.

The trick is to figure out what sort of information your customers are looking for. This can include helpful tips and tricks, strategies for dealing with problems, industry news and events, personal experiences, and promotions of new products and services. For example, a hardware store might write a how-to post about choosing the best paint colors for a home renovation project. If you want to really boost interest, you could then share this post on social media platforms that your customers are already using, such as Pinterest.

How often you post depends on your schedule.

It doesn’t matter if you blog once a week or once a month, as long as you’re consistent about posting. Interested readers will begin to see the pattern and look for your posts. If you stop posting for a few weeks, your readers might lose interest and look for the same information somewhere else. So set a schedule and stick to it! Make sure it’s a schedule you can maintain without sacrificing quality. If you know you’re going to be especially busy, plan ahead and write an extra blog post to share during that busy period.

The length of the post matters less than the content.

We recommend that business blog posts are between 300 and 600 words, but want to emphasize that the quality of the content matters more than the length. Your content needs to be interesting or potential customers won’t keep reading. Your blog posts will be most successful when they’re relevant, educational, thoughtful, inspiring or generally helpful.

The time and effort you put in is up to you.

If you’re thinking about starting a business blog, remember that it is a commitment. It is like a treadmill—you’ll only benefit from it and get better at it with regular use. It takes 50 posts for Google to index a new blog, which means that only two or three posts won’t get much traffic from search engines. Plus, the more time and effort you put into writing your blog posts, the better you will get at writing them.

If you’re ready to up your online marketing and add a blog to your company website, contact us today!