When I teach my clients how to come up with content ideas for their small business blogs I always emphasize: Your business blog should be mainly about your business, but you can also publish an occasional post unrelated to your business.
Writing about your area of expertise should come easy and naturally because you’re writing about stuff you know lots about. Even so, you can get stuck for ideas so I suggest you write article ideas down as soon as you come up with them. Use Post-it notes, napkins or open a Word document, whatever works for you.
One thing you should always remember: write as if you’re telling a story to a friend, so use a casual tone, without big words, as a matter of fact, try to throw in non-business words like “stuff” and “cool.” You’re not writing your blog to impress your peers, but to establish yourself as a likable person who is also an expert in the field of (insert your expertise here).
The trick in making a small business blog successful is writing about your field of expertise but adding your own personal touch to the stories. I emphasize the word stories as compared to articles or blog posts.
Telling stories about your clients’ problems and how you solve them will not only bring out the you in your writing but will also make it easier for you to come up with content. Simply listen to your clients’ needs, problems, complaints, etc. and you’ll have an unlimited source of content ideas.
People love to relate to stories. If you can find a way to package your knowledge into interesting stories you will have no trouble getting your audience to get to know, like and trust you. And what better way to start a client-provider relationship!
Comments
4 responses to “Content Ideas for Your Small Business Blog”
Boris,
We are thinking of starting a blog for our own website. We are not sure if our customers would actually read the blog. Do you recommend asking customers if they want to subscribe to it via e-mail? Is that too intrusive?
Hi Adam, thanks for stopping by.
Since they are your customers you have permission to contact them about new products, services, etc. This includes your new blog, so I’d recommend sending an email to announce it to your clients.
What you don’t want to do is assume they would be interested in subscribing to the blog, so you need to leave that to them. To help you get more customers to subscribe to your blog consider running a contest or giving a discount, e.g. 10% off if they upgrade their service to the next level, or simply an item such as an iPod, or, if you’re really stuck for ideas, a pre-paid VISA card.
There are two ways how you can deliver the blog posts by email:
a) use a service such as FeedBurner, or
b) your email service provider may have an RSS-to-email option. For example, iContact and MadMimi are two I currently recommend.
As a side note, to get the most Google juice read this article on how to search engine optimize each blog post.
Google Alerts are a great tool for coming up with blog topics. You can set them up to email you brief summaries and links to the top news stories on your topic of interest. This can allow you to include pertinent current events in your blog posts and discuss the impact they have on your customers and industry.
Thanks for the read :)
Regards
Richie
Hosted PBX