Small business owners have perhaps the most to gain from business blogging. Start a small business owners blog can reasonably bring in leads each month after about two years of consistent effort with posts and promotion.
The money matters of a small business owners blog make sense. You can invest hundreds or maybe thousands in money or time writing and publishing posts, but with a few clients the return is easily profitable. And the business blog posts will continue working for your blog for as long as your in business.
Here are 5 keys to a fantastic small business owners blogs.
1. Consistency
People like consistency with everything in life. Change is usually not welcome and big, sweeping change is usually met with criticism. People also like reliability and that’s what this point is more about for small business owner blogs.
A blogger can get away with posting on occasion with no real schedule, but the posts have to be amazing. It’s better to hedge your bets and plan on posting consistently. For most clients at GBW that means 1-2 times each week. Posts are usually scheduled earlier in the week and around the same time on the regular publishing days.
A schedule encourages regular traffic from regular readers along with sharing from those readers.
2. Different
The first question we ask new client is:
What makes you and your company different?
Another way to ask the question is asking what clients tell the business owner that they appreciate about the company. You get some good information from those questions.
We take this information and make sure those elements are part of the business blog. It’s important to make your company and the blog different from everything else out there. If you’re just repeating things people will ignore you.
3. Engaging
There are some great blog posts out there with great stats and information, but without personality they lack real traffic. It’s important to include some kind of personality in the posts. You want to be as engaging as possible because a personality fuels emotion from readers. That emotion leads to shares on social media. Emotion leads to comments.
It all leads to more exposure for your company, which brings in new leads.
4. Varied
This goes a little bit against the first point, but hold with me here.
It’s good to find a formula that works. There is a new 80/20 rule with business blogging. Say you create five posts each week for your small business owners blog.
Four of those posts should follow a formula that works. They could be list posts.
The fifth, though, should be something completely different. Your regular readers will tolerate just one odd post each week and they might even like it. The new post will also potentially attract new readers. You can always scrap the format if it doesn’t work and of course adopt any new format that is a winner.
5. Detailed
Details are important for small business. You’re talking to potential clients. Think about the questions they ask when they’re grilling you in the early stages of their vetting process. You likely answer with detail. Use the same detailed approach for your blog posts.
Conclusion
Take these tips and start your own small business owners blog. The payback will take a few years, but what doesn’t in the small business world. You know others won’t invest the time to create a useful blog so the opportunity is yours. Take the questions your customers are asking and answer them on the blog. You’ll find your audience and new customers.
Do you have any questions about small business blogging?
Leave a comment below and we’ll answer it here on the GBW Blog.