Blogging for small businesses has its advantages. The key to success is to set a primary goal or purpose, be consistent, have realistic expectations, and track your progress. Many times I’ve had clients get discouraged because they don’t see the traffic they had hoped for from their blogging efforts. Expectations are very high in the beginning and after creating and publishing several blogs, nothing significant happens. What a letdown for sure. Whether you have started your blogging yet or not, take time to get focused on why you are blogging and create a plan of attack. Now, let’s get started with my guide to blogging for small businesses.
Table of Contents
Know Your Purpose For Blogging
Even if you already have numerous blog posts on your website, it’s not too late to set a primary goal for your blogging efforts. Having a main purpose helps you to create a roadmap you can follow for creating content. Here are some possible blogging goals:
- Drive traffic to your website. Everyone wants this right? Well, it’s not realistic to think that just because you create several great blog posts you’re going to get lots of visitors. In the beginning, you have to work extra hard to drive traffic to your site and blogging alone just won’t cut it.
- Sharing content across multiple social media platforms. It’s super easy to connect a blog to your social media for automatic sharing for a more hands-off approach. Or you can manually share your blog using the URL of the post. This also makes it easy for others to share your content.
- Portray your authority for your profession. This is where you can shine and display all that you know about your field and expertise. If I looked at your blog right now, what would your titles tell me about you, your business, your expertise, or your industry? Show your visitors that you’re an expert at what you do.
- Customer service for answering common questions. If you’re in any kind of business, you get many of the same questions from existing and potential clients. A blog is a great place to explain how to do things. You can then use these to provide detailed answers, which have the benefit of offering great customer service.
Be Consistent With Your Blogging
There are many areas of blogging where consistency has its benefits. Here are a few that I think are most important.
- Posting frequency. You might want to be consistent with how often you post. I think the biggest takeaway here is to not procrastinate or lose interest. Personally, publishing a blog post once a week is the most I can commit to. But for you, this might be more or less often. It depends on how easy writing comes to you and how much time you have to dedicate to it. I would say that unless you’re getting all the business and traffic you can handle, once a month would be the minimum. Whatever you decide, stick with it for a few months at least.
- Branded featured image. You’ll want to always create a featured image for your posts. Use a free image editing service like Canva.com for instance and create a branded image. Assume that your post will at some point be shared on social media. Even if the only thing someone sees is the image, you’ll want the viewer to know where to find you if they want more information.
- Call to action. Always have a call to action at the end of the blog post. What is the logical next step that you want them to take? Should you invite them to send you a message, leave a comment, make an appointment, take an assessment, or something else?
Have Realistic Expectations
Unless you’ve created some viral content, don’t expect people to be flocking to your website because you’re blogging. This is a race where slow and steady wins. If you get some great traffic quickly, then congratulations. For most of us, it’s not going to pan out like that and that’s OK because we have realistic expectations. Plus, maybe high website traffic isn’t your goal. If you’re starting to meet the goal that you defined in step one, then you are being successful.
Tracking Your Blogging Progress
Tracking the progress of your blogging can come in many forms. If your goal is more website traffic, then you can use Google Search Console (Add Your Website To Google Search Console) or Google Analytics, or some other analytics service to see how your traffic is fluctuating. For social media, you can look at your feed and see the number of shares your posts have across your different social media platforms. If it’s industry authority, it might be a little harder to track unless you’re soliciting feedback from potential clients or inviting comments. If it’s customer service, you will notice that you’re able to send blog post links to clients and save time.
Blogging For Small Businesses
I hope that you found this information and insight on blogging for small businesses useful. Are there any possible goals that I missed? What’s your blogging goal and how often do you post? Answer in the comments below and leave a link to your blog.