Summary
One question that I see people struggle with when writing content for their small business blog is “what should I write?”. That’s an excellent question which is often poorly answered and results in blogs being too general and lacking in any real ‘guts’. A well defined blog solves problems for a specific group of people that not only creates loyal followers, but attracts their friends too.
In this article I’ve outlined 5 tips to get your blog content ‘on-target’ and attracting your ideal customers. Once your business blog is attracting the right audience, then effectively marketing to these people will be a piece of cake.
Small business owners are my target audience
If you look at my first attempts at writing posts for this blog then you’ll see that I was focusing heavily on advanced internet marketing tactics and strategies. But as time went by I decided to provide internet marketing services to small businesses.
I realized that talking heavily about advanced internet marketing tactics would not be helpful to small business owners. In fact the information would be overwhelming. I needed to take the focus away from internet marketing, and create more content around increasing business profits and solving business problems.
Here’s the 5 Tips
So returning to the original question “what do I write in my small business blog?” – this is what I suggest:
- Start off by brainstorming ideas in your market
- Do some keyword research
- Determine which niche gives you the best return for your efforts
- Thoroughly understand your target customers in that niche
- Write content the solves problems for the people in that niche
The result of this process is that you will build strong relationships with people in a tightly defined niche and will be in ‘pole position’ to provide valuable solutions to them (i.e. sell your products and services).
Conclusion
It’s critical to your success online to target a specific group of people. A shot gun approach won’t work because the internet is so full of smart and competitive people. Your best chance of achieving success is to narrow the field to a clearly defined group and then to help them solve their problems.
One last important point - don’t wait until you’ve developed a perfect plan. Nothing is ever perfect, and if you wait for perfection then you will never start. Create a good plan to the best of your ability and then start implementing immediately. Once you are moving then you can continually adjust your strategy until things are really working for you.
I would love to hear your thoughts, and if you have any comments then please share them in the section below.
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{ 11 comments }
Wynne,
I appreciate your articles & blogs. I found you via a comment you left on web pro news and followed it here. My question to you is about bulk e-mail. I am just starting to use a bulk e-mail service and my account has already been suspended. I haven't even sent out external emails yet. They said it happened because my list looked like it was purchased or scrapped. Now my question is this. How do I know what I can or cannot get away with when it comes to these e-mail services?
I am a bit of a chance taker I know a 99% of the people I am sending emails to, can use my service( not selling acacia berry's or Viagra). My conversations with the e-mail service provider leads me to believe I might get a call from the police if I send out non permission emails.
You have to be super careful with your content when you are email marketing. You HAVE to give a LOT of value for free when emailing potential prospects. The shot-gun approach is a definite no-no. You need to be ultra specific with who you are targeting and also you need to tailor your messages specifically for their needs. And before you even considering pitching them you need to be adding value to them in advance, and then when you do pitch them make sure it is a soft pitch, whilst still adding value in the email content.
A good rule of thumb is to send 3 pieces of good content (with a little pitch adding at the end of each), and then 1 pitch email (which is a soft pitch, with some good content in the email as well).
Essentially, you need to be building a long term relationship with the people you are emailing. If you piss them off then they will complain to your email service provider, which in turn gets your account banned.
A good counter measure is to ensure that you are continually scrubbing your own email list. Look for recipients that haven't even opened your last 5 or so messages. Delete them off your list. Keep your list lean and mean. The people that remain on your list will make you money for sure. Don't worry about the ones you lose.
The approach that I have described here is a long term approach but it can make you good money if you are willing to put in the hard yards. Most don't want to do the work which is why they resort to BS lazy tactics.
I have seen that for blog post in small business, the best people to take ideas from are your clients, these are all the sorts of people who are likely to ask those questions which others would benefit from as well, so can be a great source of inspiration for ideas on posts.
In small business, your niche can vary so as your blog post subjects, so each market have different ideas based on your niche of small business.
Hey Mike,
great point, yes taking your clients biggest questions is definitely a great way to develop a worthy list of material to put on your website. The material that helps your target audience the most is the stuff that needs to posted first.
However, I would definitely still do some keyword research and to find the most profitable keywords to include in the titles, the headings, the links into and out of the pages. That gives some nice natural rankings. After all, a bit of keyword research only needs to be done once or so every month to keep on track. And can be referred to time and again when writing content.
Thanks for the comment Mike.
Great article. Developing content for a small business blog really isn't as hard as some people may think. Most businesses are a goldmine of content ideas – they may not realize that everyday things they do are actually interesting to others.
another tip for developing content for blogs – check out web traffic – keywords people use to find your site are a good indication of interesting topic ideas… and articles based on those keywords help build on those keywords with SEO even more!
Great tip with checking out your web traffic stats on google analytics for instance. Taking that idea a little further I like to sign up each site of mine to google webmaster tools. In there it gives you the actual keywords that you rank for, which is kinda handy.
Thanks for your comment.
Good tips. I have also used guest bloggers to help me create more content and expand my community.
Excellent tips and actually quite simple to do. Why don't we all do this?
Hey Reno,
Thanks for your comment. Yes getting guest bloggers is definitely something that I need to do too.
Found the piece truly informative! I am new to blogging so I find it hard figuring out what works… Thanks a lot!
Hi there, thanks – I really do hope this helps. It’s a bit daunting starting out, and having a clear vision of where you are wanting to take your blog really really helps.
Thanks again for your comment.
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