What’s a business blog, anyway?

Ideally, your small business blog is the beginning of a two-way conversation with your readers because it’s interactive by nature. You, the blogger, post fresh information on a regular basis. Your readers subscribe via an email form or by RSS feed, and they’re notified of every new article you post. But they can do more than just view your content. Your readers have the ability to comment or ask questions.

How can a blog help your business?

1. A blog is an excellent customer education platform.
2. Readers subscribe because they want to hear what you have to say. It’s the beginning of a relationship, where your prospect says “tell me more.”
3. A well-written, regularly updated blog is a credibility builder because it positions you as an expert on your topic.
4. Your blog can/should be a resource, where visitors will come to your blog because you are the source of information they need.
5. Search engines love regularly updated content. Each blog post represents an opportunity to publish relevant information that your audience is searching for. You just can’t get that from a static website.

A blog doesn’t have to be limited to words on a page. In fact, it’s better if you mix it up a bit by posting short audios, videos, photos, and slide shows. Written blog posts don’t need to be full-length, journalistic articles either. The only rule if you’re writing to a business audience, is that you remember who your audience is.

• What will help them?
• What will they find interesting?
• What will they respond to?

Our favorite blogging software is WordPress. It comes in two flavors:

• the free WordPress.com, where you can set up a blog quickly on their server, and
• the self-hosted WordPress site, where we install it on your hosting account.

We favor the second option because it gives you more control and greater customization options. Those customization options include amazing theme choices, choc-full of helpful nuances for small businesses to increase their chance for successful marketing online.

All of our Simple Hosting accounts come with a properly configured, safety-optimized WordPress installation. Purchase during the month of March, and we’ll also throw in the premium business blogging theme of *your choice from the Standard Themes collection at the iThemes – Theme Store

That’s a $79.95 value!

Don’t delay! Our subscribers know these offers don’t come around often. Take advantage of building your successful business website NOW. Sign up today to receive your *free premium theme when you purchase our Simple Hosting package!

Would you like more information on how to build a better business website? Sign up for our informational email series that walks you through exactly what you need to know about complete website functionality.

*Offer limited to premium themes from the Standard Collection at the iThemes – Theme Store, and does not include Builder.

Your readers come to expect something from you, but it’s very easy to get off-task and forget where you’re going. Develop a blog strategy to help you stay on target. It’s not wrong to add some humorous posts or even some cynicism or thoughtful words occasionally, but keep a clear eye on your goals. A business blog isn’t a journal, but it is a casual communication starter that should encourage your readers’ interest in something they wanted to know more about regarding your industry or niche.

Pick topics that talk about your product lines or best practices to help you stay on point. Teach your readers how do do something that will benefit them, and make it easy.  A series, for instance, can walk a visitor through a process one step at a time.

Have fun sharing your blog with your storefront customers, too. Add your blog URL to your business cards and countertop media like brochures or fliers. Create an environment through a business blog that speaks to the very reason they walked into your store. That online effort will build additional interest in your products and services. Suggest they leave comments and give them ways to sign up for freebies. You’ll be  targeting a list of pre-screened potential  purchasers will build up in no time.

What is your business blog about? Do you suggest your blog to clients and customers? We love to hear from you, let us know about it!

Related Post:

Great Copywriting is Necessary for All Businesses

Link building includes a variety of activities, including commenting on other blogs, writing articles that point back to your blog, posting links to specific blog posts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a vast assortment of social networking sites, getting involved on forums associated with your industry, submitting your site to blog directories and local business directories, even setting up feeder Web pages that point back to your main site.

Each of these activities were used to build readership on this blog. On a side note, I’ve not done enough of them to propel this site to the top of the search engines. But here’s a shocker: our blog’s traffic continues to grow and my business continues to grow even without being at the top. When I ask customers how they found me, it’s usually through this blog. They may not have found it directly through the search engines, but wound up here through links from my link building efforts.

As you can see, link building is far too large of a topic to cover in one blog post. It’s not a do-it-once type of endeavor, but something that is done systematically, and the results are cumulative over time. With that in mind, I’d like to suggest specific link building efforts that you can undertake each week. This week we’ll start with the most basic.

Your assignment: Leave a comment on three separate blogs that are relevant to your industry.

When you comment, keep in mind that you want to add value to what’s already been said. “Hey, great post” isn’t going to cut it. For instance, a useful comment on this post would be if you told me and my readers something about your experience with link building. Has a particular form of link building worked well for you and resulted in greater traffic? Is there a local business directory that has resulted in new business for you?

Be sure to leave your blog or Web site URL in the field provided for it. Use your name, even if it’s only your first name, but please don’t come across as a spammer by using a keyword phrase as your name. Many bloggers, myself included, automatically de-link the commenters Web site URL if they use keywords instead of a name.

So leave a comment here or on any other post on Express Marketing Memo, then go out and find two more blogs and do the same. Repeat this exercise at regular intervals and you’ll quickly build some quality links to your blog or Web site.

Recommended Off-Site Reading: Comment Etiquette for Do Follow Blogs

How is this a 30-minute marketing activity? To begin with, you don’t need to worry about writing the next Pulitzer Prize. It doesn’t have to be perfect and it certainly doesn’t have to be lengthy. It doesn’t even have to be written! In addition to written blog posts, you can record a video blog post with nearly any digital camera and upload it to Youtube, record a five minute, free audiovisual screen cast using JingProject.com, or simply upload photos with a few captions that tell a story. Choose the medium that suits you best, which will likely also be the one you can accomplish quickly.

What Should You Write or Talk About?

My clients ask me questions all the time. I’m guessing that yours do too. Before I began blogging, I spent quite a bit of time explaining the same thing over and over to different people. One of my goals for this blog from the beginning was for it to become an educational resource for my clients. Now when a question comes up that’s already been addressed, I direct them to a blog post on the topic. When I get a new question, that’s grounds for a new post. My clients benefit, as do regular readers, not yet clients.

Sure, I’m a copywriter … so what? Every service industry has questions that need to be answered. So, what do your customers ask you about? What questions do you hear again and again? What frustrates you that your customers don’t ask about? Give your customers an educational resource where they can get their questions answered and watch it turn into a soft sales tool. Commit to at least 30 minutes per week. You won’t regret it.

What aspect of blogging, video blogging or screen casting would you like to hear more about? Are you already using a blog to educate and inform your customers and prospects? How long have you been at it and have you seen results? Make sure to leave your name (not keywords) and a link to your blog with your comment, below.

Most blogs offer an RSS subscription icon. It may be in the sidebar (as on this one), and in most browsers, it’s also available on the address bar. RSS feeds provide the content of each new blog post each time the blog is updated. Google Reader makes the process extremely simple and efficient. Learn how to get started with Google Reader here.

Or watch this video by Ed Dale (created for this year’s 30 Day Challenge) to learn how to set up your Google Reader for maximum efficiency:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I use his list view method to quickly scan titles, read the posts that interest me, and click through to blogs where I want to leave a comment. The information gleaned from this work flow provides plenty of content ideas in short order for our blogs and helps me to identify sites where I can leave a relevant comment, thereby building quality back links to our blogs. It’s a win-win, easily and wisely limited to a 30-minute time slot and always worth the time spent.

A recent post on Remarkablogger provided inspiration and encouragement. He lists ten ways to crank out “killer” blog posts in ten minutes or less. Obviously, that’s not something I’m accustomed to, but it did provide the inspiration to get moving today. Ten minutes? I can do that!

Suggestion #1 is to pick three blogs you respect and introduce your readers to them. Ok, one down … Remarkablogger. Michael Martine provides helpful, insightful posts on blogging, and has a knack for getting his readers involved in the comments.

Kimberly Bock of Learning SEO Basics has just redesigned her blog. As her name suggests, look to her for the basics in SEO education. She spells it out in layman’s language because she cares that you understand exactly what she’s talking about. Her post on how to write title tags is a good example of what you’ll find on her blog.

Junta42 blog is all about content marketing. It’s another favorite, one I rarely miss. A recent post looked at Monster.com’s content strategy, which is directly related to their position as a trusted solutions provider for the jobs market. The lesson in this post can and should be applied to every business: “It’s too risky NOT to publish valuable content marketing information to your customers and prospects.”

In the interest of keeping this short and sweet, that’s it for today. Now it’s your turn. What are you going to quickly write about today?

Photo Credit: taquiman on flicker

Related Posts:

Finding Time to Blog
Thinking of Starting a Business Blog?
Blog Planning with Sticky Notes
What Makes Blogging Worth It For You?

Image by ckaroli on Flickr.

My battle cry this past year to any small business person willing to listen, has been to add a blog to their online marketing arsenal. The reasons are simple … an active, on-target blog increases your online visibility. It gives you an easy way to connect with your readers on an ongoing basis. And it’s a learning tool (if you’re a kinesthetic learner like me).

But what if you simply have no time to write? Let’s face it … if your business is growing, you’re already very busy! If your business is down in this economy, you’re likely just as busy trying to turn things around. So how do you find time to blog when you’re already working at full throttle?

The simple answer is that sometimes you don’t. We all have to work within the ebb and flow of our daily commitments.

We’re in that very busy business growth stage here. In fact, we’re finally making that important transition from self-employment to business ownership. It IS a transition, because you don’t simply wake up one morning with all the plans and networks in place.

My husband and I have opened a new business, Zero To Sixty Marketing LLC. We’re building on our combined strengths of marketing, copywriting, SEO, Web site development, and knowledge of and involvement in the hobby industry.

Zero To Sixty Marketing is a full-service virtual marketing firm, supported by a talented team of independent graphic artists, copywriters, marketing specialists, and web site development experts. We opened for business in late August and have been running at full throttle ever since. New projects have included a major trade Web site redesign, building an assortment of niche blogs that support that same site, entry into the magazine publishing business (more on this later), lots of new SEO copywriting assignments, even partnering with a consumer product manufacturer to bring a very useful item to the marketplace.

To bring this back around to the subject of finding time to blog – it’s obviously been an issue. My last post was near the end of September. I’ve given myself some leeway, because it’s just not possible to prioritize everything at once. But, if you want to kill a blog … just stop writing. Since, blogging has meant the difference between success and failure for Express It Write, it’s time to make time for this important activity.

For now, my time will be spent between this blog and our new Zero To Sixty Marketing blog. Expect to see some articles from our team and some guest posts from time to time. Expect greater frequency as well. We won’t be returning to five posts per week, but one or two per week sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?

The advice to “start blogging now” is really quite consistent with a carefully thought-out and competently executed business blogging strategy. The experience gained from launching, designing, and posting to a simple “starter” blog is a critical component in the obligatory “data gathering” phase of developing an informed business blogging strategy.

He goes on to say that you can’t effectively plan your overall blogging strategy until you’ve had some relevant direct experience. I agree.

And while you’re at it, have some fun with it. Experiment with a couple of different blog platforms. I’m partial to WordPress, but you may prefer Typepad or Blogger or one of the other options available through your Web host.

Don’t get too hung up on design at this point. Instead, focus on your message. What is it that you want to communicate to your audience? Learn how to draw your audience in to a conversation.

Read the rest of Andy’s post here.

Photo Credit: Mike Licht on Flickr (Creative Commons)

Photo Credit: andydr on Flickr

I’m frequently asked if blogging makes any difference to the small business owner – if it’s worth the time commitment. My experience is that YES, it’s definitely worth it on a couple of different levels. For one thing, it’s a growth experience for the blogger. It forces you to constantly try to get inside the head of your audience … what will you find valuable and interesting? What have I just learned that I can share with you? Who just wrote an insightful post that would benefit my readers? These are good questions for any business owner to ponder!

On a completely different level, blogging is good for business because it increases your online presence. Search engines still love blogs because they’re continually updated with fresh, hopefully relevant content. They’re fun to promote. We’ll go into detail on that in a future post, but for now, I’ll just say that it’s a joy to find truly interesting writing. When you leave a comment on an interesting post, you’ve created a backlink to your site. Yes, there’s more to it than that, but in a nutshell and for the sake of brevity that’s the basic idea.

It took about three months of consistent writing, commenting, and cross-linking with my other blogs to notice business-building results from my efforts. This blog has already helped me gain copywriting assignments and web site development projects, in addition to serving as a resource for my customers.

The other side of that coin is that blogging isn’t for everyone. It’s time consuming. Once-a-month posting won’t get the job done. You need to have something to say, be willing to reach out to other bloggers, and enjoy writing.

OK bloggers … I need your help. Do you blog for business or pleasure? What results are you seeing from your blogging efforts? How long did it take to see those results? Do you feel it’s worth the time commitment?