A few months ago, I roughed out the text because I was getting quite a few questions about small business blogging from fellow small business owners. This is by no means a definitive guide, but someone suggested this morning that I post it to my own blog, so here it is:

 

Why do you want to start small business blogging?

First, be clear on your goals. I hope you are small business blogging for three reasons:

1. Search engine optimization
2. Thought leadership
3. Relating to customers

 

What will your small business blog be about?

Second, decide what your focus will be. What the heck are you going to blog about? What can you talk about that other people might not be? What topic gets you excited and would be easy for you to write about? For example, my friend with an Indian restaurant wants to blog. Possible “themes” for her blog are: vegetarianism, Indian culture, running a small family-owned business, having an ethnic restaurant in a redneck town, cooking, Indian food, recipes, being a single mom running a restaurant, food allergies, etc.

 

Another example is my local florist. I’m trying to get her to start small business blogging because she’s very online marketing savvy when it comes to pay-per-click, but less so for SEO. I’m also trying to get her to blog because she’s so knowledgeable and well-respected and she could be even more so. I’d love to see her write a blog as the florist expert, offering advice like when to start choosing the flowers for your wedding, seasonal suggestions for wedding flowers, plants as corporate gifts, catering advice, maybe she talks about her favorite catering venues. She could talk about the price of flowers as impacted by gas prices, how to keep flowers fresh, etc. I see it as “advice” oriented.

 

Or consider my small business blog: Although I’m primarily a Seattle copywriter, my real passion is marketing, and my beliefs about being customer-centric. (Stated at the top of my blog: helping people talk to customers not at them.) My goal with my small business blogging is to get people thinking a little differently about marketing, while still using keywords that are helping my blog get found for copywriting. In the future, I’ll be doing more consulting and speaking, so my keywords will shift, but the blog’s theme will stay the same. So on the other hand, my goal is also to get people thinking about me in a certain way.

 

Your small business blog title

Third: Decide on the title of your blog. Make sure it reflects your blog’s focus, but also your keywords if you’re small business blogging for SEO. For example, when I started a blog for an email marketing agency, I chose “Email Marketing ROI” for the title, so the URL included those words. (It now has a different name.) And that was the theme of the blog: improving email marketing ROI by providing useful information.

 

Set a small business blogging schedule

Fourth, set a schedule for small business blogging and adhere to it. Blog at least two times a week, but if you want search engine results, do it more often. I have a Task in Outlook that pops up a reminder for me every Tuesday and Thursday. In that task list is a running list of topic ideas (more on that later). If you have produced an email newsletter or another publication, you know you have a production calendar to stick with. Think of your blog the same way.

 

Round up the bloggers

Fifth, consider having more than one person at your company blog. It doesn’t have to be the CEO or the marketer writing the blog. In fact, the best blog content might come from someone who works with customers every day, or on the shop floor. The first person would have insight into customer concerns, and the other into production. Both would produce great blog content that an executive or marketer might not think of.

 

Be clear on your keywords

Sixth: If you’re blogging for SEO purposes, determine your keywords. Use a free keyword research tool like SEO Book (http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/) or Google Adwords (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal), or maybe you already know your keywords you want to win? Then look at how competitive the search landscape is for the terms you want to use. Remember, more specific keywords won’t be used by as many people, but they’ll get you found by the smaller group of people who are a more targeted audience for you. The less often you plan on blogging, the fewer keywords you’ll be able to use enough to compete. But come with 4 or so keyword phrases. Long-tail keyword searches seem to do well in blogs. Keep this list in mind every time you blog and use your keywords, in a post title and in the post itself. I usually write a blog post, then go back and sprinkle in a keyword or tool. And I admit it, I don’t focus on the SEO part enough sometimes because I get caught up in the topic. J

 

Do you want editorial control?

Seventh, think about editorial control: If more than one person will be small business blogging, do you want administrative control so content is reviewed before it goes live? Will someone be proofreading blog content before it gets posted?

 

Developing your voice

Eight: When you first start, you don’t necessarily have to post those initial blogs. Just write them in a Word document first, or even on paper. You’ll want to write a few to get your voice, a sense of how you want to come across. But do be yourself, do be natural and a real person.

 

Coming up with topics

Now the “hard” part (not really): small business blogging!! The biggest hurdle for people seems to be topics. What will we blog about? If after reading this you still don’t know what you’ll blog about, let me know…

 

Keep a running list of topic ideas. Then when it’s time to blog, use one of the ideas (then make sure you delete it from your list!). If you have a recurring task in Outlook, like I do, you keep your list there. Then when Outlook pings you, you’ve got your idea list right in front of you. But once you start blogging, you’ll start seeing topics all around you. I use one of the topics on my list maybe every 3^rd or 4^th time because something will have happened that prompts a blog post in the mean time.

 

Look for ideas in the newspaper, trade magazines, in other blog posts. I even get ideas from the radio and from conversations.

 

I haven’t done this yet, but try and use photos sometimes. Not cheesy ones though, don’t include photos just for the sake of photos. Or clip art, ugh! But real photos of real people, like your staff or your customers. Videos too…

 

I saw a blog that copied and pasted in press releases verbatim. I wouldn’t recommend this because search engines hate duplicated content. It’s better to blog on the press release and link to it. And if your company creates press releases and posts them online (and you should!), write a summary of the press release in your blog and link to it.

 

Link to other sources. If you read a blog that makes a good point, write your own blog post with your take on it, and link to the original blog. Ditto for online news articles, video clips, etc. You can link to anything. Consider subscribing to a couple of email newsletters or other blogs just to get your own thought processes going. Your reactions to what you read are also valid blog content.

 

Link to studies and reports that are released. Some bloggers are the filter for their readers, helping their readers find important information without having to look for it.

 

Talk about what’s going on with your business: Are you going to be at a tradeshow? Will there be live music at your tavern? Are you moving?

 

Be creative in thinking about what content will be interesting. Like my business is a copywriting agency, but I don’t tell people how to be copywriters. I try to help people be better marketers. If you owned a coffee shop, you wouldn’t necessarily blog on your coffee shop, that would get boring fast, but you could blog on the coffee industry perhaps, because you could still use your keywords.

 

Include customer testimonials with an introduction, maybe “We received a great email from Susan Smith about her new vacuum, and just have to share it with you…”

 

Never forget that small business blogging is about being real. You could even include a recipe! Say you had a staff potluck and Joe’s potato salad was a huge hit. Talk about the party and include Joe’s recipe.

 

Please don’t post just to post. I have a friend that does that because his only concern is SEO, and that means he’s putting a lot of useless stuff out on the Internet. L I want subscribers to my blog, and if I did that, just posted blogs based on keywords, subscribers wouldn’t stay very long because I wouldn’t be providing useful information!

 

That’s my start on blogging basics. Please, please let me know if it was helpful or not by commenting!!

Last week I blogged on blogs as marketing tools...again. And I got a great comment from reader Jan:

"Don't get me wrong I love blogging but you still need to drive people to your blog similar to a web site. Your client needs to have a thriving blog with lots of visitors before they could all find her info and hop on over to try the sweets. How have you built your audience?"

Jan was responding to a blog about my friend Harpreet and how she could use blogs as marketing tools to marketing her Indian restaurant Pnjab Sweets. Jan's right. People have to go to the blog to read about Diwali and be enticed to buy sweets.

Blogs can have different purposes: SEO, thought leadership, replacing a Web site, etc. In Harpreet's case, I'd encourage her to do two things with her blog: use keywords for searches she'd like to win, and engage with her audience. She has so much she can talk about: Indian culture, food and holidays; running a small, family-owned business; being a vegetarian; how her restaurant makes everything from scratch...even how rarely she gets to wear her fine Indian clothes. She's also gorgeous and the sweets made by her Indian restaurant are picturesque, meaning her blog can be visually appealing too.

Here's what I'd suggest to Harpreet, to answer Jan's question:

• Determine which keywords she could win and use those regularly in her blogs
• Include the link to her blog in her ads and in articles that get written about her Kent restaurant (she's a popular subject!)
• Include a link to her blog in her email signature
• Put it on her business cards and all the gorgeous packaging her restaurant has
• Link to it prominently from her Web site

Using blogs as marketing tools is more organic than pay-per-click advertising, that's for sure. It takes time to biuld an audience and to get indexed in the search engines (the latter goes faster than with a regular Web site, however!). But done consistently and correctly, blogs as marketing tools make a lot of sense for a small Indian restaurant like Punjab Sweets.

One time I was so late in sending a thank you note to a relative that I ended up never sending one. That was over 20 years ago, and I still feel bad about it. But it got so awkward, you know? It became a matter of what was worse, sending the note ages after it was appropriate, or ignoring the situation.

That's how I feel about my blog right now! It has been sooooooo long since I blogged! It's hard to get back to it! But I am back, for a quick note from the Seattle copywriter.

Although I get so busy I don't keep up the way I should, I push blogs as marketing tools for good reason. They work. My blog is one reason I've been so busy with copywriting and web writing. Clients have been finding We Know Words because using blogs as marketing tools is equivalent to being an SEO copywriter: you blog with keywords, you get found.

I'm happy to say I convinced client ClickMail Marketing to begin blogging on email marketing. Hurray! You can find their blog at www.clickmailmarketing.com/whitelist. And, yes, I help with it. So I can tell you it's a useful blog on email marketing, one you should check out.

Other marketing tools I've helped them with that I can recommend are the whitepaper on driving ROI after your email gets to the inbox, download it at http://www.clickmailmarketing.com/whitepaper.html. And we've started publishing the ClickMail Marketer for advice on email marketing. See a sample issue at http://www.clickmailmarketing.com/newsletter.html.

Remember, email marketing makes sense for any size business, and I strongly recommend small business email marketing. But as easy as it is, there are lots of parts to it, so big business or small, make sure you educate yourself on email to make sure you're doing it right. These tools from ClickMail will help.

And of course if you need a Seattle copywriter to help out with the content, you know whom to call, er, email. :-)

Although I'm "just" a Seattle copywriter, I've always found in the 8 years I've been doing We Know Words that I have to know about much more than copywriting. My clients typically aren't as up to speed on what's happening in the world of marketing, from email marketing to Web writing to using blogs as marketing tools.
That's OK by me, because it gives me an excuse to keep up with marketing trends...and then I get to be the expert for my clients, helping them figure out not just what to say (the copywriting), but when, how, to whom and more (the consulting).

How does a marketer keep up with new developments in marketing though when you are busy doing your day-to-day job and you don't have someone like me (who is delighted to keep learning!) around to keep you current?

Even more importantly, how do we make sure we have marketers entering the field who know email marketing, blogging, social media, Web 2.0, Twitter, etc.? Because it doesn't seem to be taught in college. Heck, even copywriting is something anyone can claim to do! Hang out your sign as an online copywriter and have at it. No one can ask for credentials, because there aren't any!

Which makes me very happy to be on the Advisory Board for the University of Washington marketing certificate programs. UW Extension is looking forward, trying to determine what marketers need to know. And now we have a new program that starts this fall: the Advanced Interactive Marketing program. 

You can read about the program at http://www.extension.washington.edu/ext/certificates/aim/aim_gen.asp, but to sum it up, here's how a marketer can benefit from this marketing program:

If you already know how to harness the technology, this program will teach you how to choose one marketing tool over another based on sound business principles. If you're still completely oblivious about how best to put email marketing, blogging, SEO, web analytics and more to work, then here's your chance for an overview that won't help you master all these online marketing tools, but will help you know enough to make sound marketing decisions.

A program like this is great for people already working in marketing, and I'm so glad they started it! But we still need to be teaching interactive marketing at the college level too. I wonder how long until that happens?

 

Big news for this Seattle copywriter! I have an article in today's issue of MarketingProfs.com, my favorite marketing publication:

http://www.marketingprofs.com/webnews/8/news8-5-08_0.asp?adref=mpt188

Seriously, this is my favorite email newsletter, and one I recommend all the time to fellow marketers, copywriters and marcom people. The quality of the articles is always high, whether the authors are addressing email marketing, blogs as marketing tools, SEO or small business marketing.

The article is also on one of my favorite marketing topics: The Sin of Assumption. Read it and let me know what you think!!

I was just on a web page looking up the root of a word and I saw an ad for weight loss. No surprise there. But the ad must have been for surgery because the image in the ad was of internal organs. I assume the stomach, I don’t know the human innards very well. And my reaction? Gross! What in the world are they selling!

 

Well, they’re not selling what the customer is buying! They are selling weight loss surgery, but the customer is buying weight loss. The best image to have there is one of a skinny person, silly advertiser! Sure, you use surgery to achieve the weight loss, so that’s what you’re selling. But that makes for a bad ad no matter how good your online copywriter.

 

Think about it…

 

You are selling mattresses but your customer is buying a good night’s sleep.

 

You are selling small business blogging software but your customer is buying search engine optimization.

 

You are selling sports cars but your customer is buying status.

 

Before you do any copywriting, blogging, small business email marketing, anything, make sure you get out of your head and into your customer’s: What is she really truly buying from you? Sell that!

 

Right now, answer the question: What is your customer really buying?

 

And about that word I was researching? Sure enough the words smite and smitten are related. This Seattle copywriter thinks that’s pretty funny!

If you want to grow your in-house email list, use blogs as marketing tools. Huh?

 

Hold on, let me explain…

 

Think from the end: People sign up for your email newsletter or email marketing when they are at your Web site, right? So one way to grow your email list is to drive more traffic to your site.

 

People go to search engines like Google and Yahoo because they have a problem to solve. You want them to find your Web site when searching, right?

 

That’s why I suggest you use blogs as marketing tools. Done right, a blog helps with search engine optimization so you get found online when people are searching for solutions to a problem. That’s because search engines like fresh, up-to-date content, which blogs are assumed to have, so search engines rank blog content faster than static web sites. And because blogs are by their very nature more targeted in subject matter, making them naturally keyword rich

 

Blogs as marketing tools are not ends in themselves though. You use your blog to drive people to your Web site: They search online, they find your blogs, they then find your Web site by clicking on a link in the blog. Once they are at your site, you sell them on the idea of signing up to get emails from you. That’s how you build your in-house email list using blogs as marketing tools.

 

Then your email marketing is for continuing and building the relationship. Ideally once they are at the site, they sign up for your email newsletter or email promotions. They are opening the door to hearing from you by doing so, giving you permission to market to them.

 

Think of it as a three-step process involving a series of yeses:

1. Yes, it looks like this blog is relevant, I will click on this search result
2. Yes, I like what I see in the blog, I will click on a link to this web site to learn more
3. Yes, I like what I see at this web site so I want to sign up for emails and hear from this company again in the futu

The customer has found you and engaged with you, and you’ve grown your in-house email list. All because you blogged.

 

And this use of blogs as marketing tools works no matter the size of your business. In fact, it might just be the most effective way to go about small business blogging and small business email marketing!