Small Business Blogging Tips - 8 Steps to Perfect Posts
Posted on 20th March 2018
Blogging is brilliant! it’s an easy, effective way for any small business to build trust, develop a brand, educate customers, generate leads and drive high quality, relevant traffic to their sites (check out our post on the benefits of blogging)
At it’seeze Ryedale, we encourage all our clients to blog, but many choose not to. Some say they don’t have time, whereas others don’t know what to write about, or don’t have confidence in their writing skills.
Does that sound familiar?
Although blogging can be difficult, it’s well worth the effort. Start publishing your own engaging, interesting, and effective posts today with help from these 8 top tips:
1. Write for your audience
Before you start writing any blog, it’s essential that you know your audience. Think about who you are writing for, what they would like to read about, and the things that would be interesting, useful and relevant to them.
For instance, when writing this post, we’re aiming it primarily at small to medium business owners who know that blogging is a useful marketing strategy but aren’t sure how to go about it.
2. A winning blog headline
The first challenge is encouraging your audience to read your small business blog, and this starts with a great headline. A compelling title should be clear, succinct, and needs to tell the reader exactly what they’re going to get from the post.
In this post, we’ve used a list format (people love lists), and light alliteration (perfect posts), to grab attention and make it clear what we’re writing about
3. Grab attention with a great intro
Readers have short attention spans – you have to grab them in the intro. Let them know why the topic is valuable, engage with the audience and let them know exactly what they are going to be reading about. You need to give them a reason to read on.
In this post, we’ve reinforced the benefits of blogging for small businesses (with a nice link to an additional resource), set out the target audience, then told them what they’re going to get.
4. Make it interesting – tell don’t sell
Many businesses fill their blog with promotional material, product info, and offers. Others wax lyrical about their expertise. In reality, this is likely to turn readers off. The goal here is to provide readers with valuable content – giving them some useful information, help or insight into a topic that’s relevant to them.
Provide readers with something interesting or useful, and you’re building trust in your brand, and positioning your business as an expert in your field.
5. Formatting your small business blog – go bite-size!
Nothing turns off readers like a big wall of text. Format blogs to make them approachable and easy to read. In practice, this means splitting the blog into sections and sub headers, using short sentences and short paragraphs for readability.
A good rule of thumb is 3 sentences maximum per paragraph. In addition, never write more than 3 paragraphs without some kind of break in the text – whether that’s some bullet points, a sub header, an image, or a table.
6. A strong call to action
Although the main body content of the post shouldn’t be overtly promotional, you should always end a post with a friendly call to action. Make it relevant to the blog content, and keep it fairly soft-sell.
An offer of further information, or the promotion of some relevant product or service with contact details is enough.
7. SEO and promotion
Blogging can be a really effective way of driving traffic to your site, as long as you optimise and promote it. This starts with the SEO. Ensure that you’ve used relevant keywords in your title, sub headings, and throughout the text (in this post, we’ve chosen small business blogging) – but don’t go overboard.
Next, you need to get it out there. Push your blog on social media channels, share it with your contacts, put a link to it in your e-newsletter and post it to relevant groups online. This will help to generate valuable ‘social proof’ and attract quality traffic to your site.
8. Perfect small business blogging platforms from it’seeze
Want to boost your small business with a fantastic blog? It couldn’t be simpler with a fantastic, custom-designed responsive website from it’seeze Web Design Ryedale!
With a custom-built it’seeze site, uploading a blog post takes mere minutes thanks to our simple, intuitive, and hassle-free content management system.
Want to know more about how blogging can benefit you? Looking for a new website to drive your small business forward?
Set up your free, no obligation meeting with Rob Davies from it’seeze Ryedale today by calling 01653 690 982, or by emailing rob.davies@itseeze.co.uk.
Tagged as: Online Marketing, SEO
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