7 Tips for Blogging Success: A SmallBiz Insight

A Small Business Digital Media Presentation of Vermont Small Business Marketing Associates

@VSBmarketing | www.VSBMA.com

Should you have a blog?

The decision to create and maintain a blog for small business can be difficult.

What should you write?

How often should you write?

How much time do you have to dedicate to writing?

What is the return on that investment of time?

If it’s good enough for an e-newsletter, it’s good enough for a blog.

Most small businesses will launch an e-newsletter and never considering starting a blog.

The e-newsletter just seems less time consuming and more appropriate than blogging.

For small businesses, however, an e-newsletter and blog can and should go hand-in-hand.

1

Blog forSearch Engine Optimization.

The purpose of a blog is to keep fresh, relevant content on your website that is available to search engines.

When search engines have content to view that is relevant to your business, your target audience will be more likely to find your website.

Make your e-newsletter content more searchable.

Most e-newsletters are either published in a PDF and posted to a website or distributed through an e-newsletter platform, such as Constant Contact or Mail Chimp.

These methods do not distribute your article contents to search engines.

By publishing content to your blog, it will be searchable instead of lost in the digital landscape.

Use a blog to organize the e-newsletter process.

Think of your blog as a phase of your editorial calendar – a place to develop and organize the articles that will go into your e-newsletter.

Write a blog post once a week.

At the end of the month, compile your blog posts into your e-newsletter.

When you have prepared the blog posts weekly, the process of producing the e-newsletter will be faster and easier.

2

Make your website the home for your blog and stay in the SEO loop.

When you create a blog, it is best for Search Engine Optimization for the blog home to be within your website.

The idea of a blog is to promote visits to your website, where people are more likely to click around and learn more about your business.

If you use a third-party blog developer, such as Word Press, and link to it from your website, click-throughs from a search engine to your blog will direct to the third-party site and your website will be out of the loop.

3

Images help with retention.

Create an image to go with each blog post as you write them.

Name the image with a keyword relevant to the blog post so the name is searchable.

Include the images within the e-newsletter to keep readers visually engaged.

4

Use your business keywords as tags.

When publishing your blog, be sure to use your business keywords as tags.

Add tags to the blog that are relevant to your blog post topic and your business.

Try to avoid over-tagging or using tags that are not topic relevant.

5

Get the word out and use hashtags.

After you publish a blog post, get the word out via your social networks.

Copy the link to the blog post, make a short link, and share it in Facebook, Google+ or Twitter, for example.

When you share the link, add hashtags that are the same as the tags you added to the blog post.

6

Give your e-newsletter something unique.

When you publish your e-newsletter, compile the blog posts you made and add an Editor’s note along with some unique content that has not been previously published in your blog.

For example, you can add more thoughts to one of the blog posts you have already published, or your can add a giveaway, contest or survey.

Share a link to the e-newsletter in your social networks along with a selection of the relevant hashtags that you used when publishing each blog post.

7

Visit VSBMA’s Small Business Digital Marketing How-To Center

at www.VSBMA.com for more social media and content marketing Tips ’n Tricks.