Tag: Blogging
Online promotion is a key marketing method for small businesses. If you’re promoting a new offer, product or service, how can you market it online? One of the key benefits of the Internet is that it creates an even platform – allowing smaller businesses to promote themselves at a relatively low cost. But you still need to understand what is available, and how to best promote yourself using these online tools.
So imagine you have a new offer – promoting 50% of a particular product – what can you do to push this promotion online?
- Create special offer page
- Explain what the offer is
- What are the benefits?
- What are exactly are you offering – what can your customers expect to receive?
- What is the cost? (free, percentage off, pounds off etc)
- How to order?
- Include form on the page to register
Then promote this page using various online platforms:
- If you are using Google AdWords or any other form of pay per click advertising, create a special campaign with dedicated adverts pointing to your promotion web page.
- Create a press release about your offer
- Upload it to online newswires
- Might be worth paying £45 or so to put it on a paid newswire
- Email it to industry journalists and publications (both online and physical)
- Promote on all social media sites
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Create a blog post about it
- Link to the main landing page
- Create an article about it
- The benefits of your offer and how it can help your customers
- Create an email about it and blast it out to your email marketing list
- For previous prospects that maybe didn’t convert in the past, try writing a personalised sales letter to the contact and posting it (old school, but still a good-un!). Explain what the offer is and include a link to the page for people to register for it, and a paper form which they can fax/scan/email back.
- Add it to your email signature
- Maybe consider buying some banner ads on relevant event marketing websites
- When you sell one, try and get a customer testimonial which you can add to the promotional page (and other marketing materials)
- See if you can get existing customers to spread the word to their customers/partners etc
So you see, that with a bit of time and effort there really are very effective methods you can use to promote your latest offer.
If you need any help with any of these areas (creating landing pages, Google AdWords, press releases, blogging or article writing), get in touch with us today. We’re passionate about creating optimised content and have helped many of our customers get fantastic results using such methods.
Call 023 8083 7271 or email us on info@SMEketing.com
June 24, 2010
Blogs are now extremely commonplace and are part of a large majorty of websites. You may understand the business benefits of a blog, but what do you do if you’d like your organisation to start blogging, but senior management aren’t so sure.
This has happened to a few of our clients, and over time we’ve put together a pretty strong case for a blog. The below is a summary of the business case we would present to someone who is a bit hesitant about blogs:
Why Should You Start Blogging?
- It will allow you to engage in an open dialogue and exchange of ideas with customers and potential customers
- It will establish trust and build relationship with prospects
- It shows you as an expert and builds authority
- It will provide added value to the people that visit your site
- It will show that you’re up to date on current trends within the industry
- By giving away advice and education it will engender gratitude and loyalty from your followers – which will either be existing customers, or prospects
- It will have a huge beneficial impact on the search rankings of your website
- Building relevant traffic
- Increase ranks in major search engines
- It will give you greater brand visibility and can be used as a PR tool
- It gives a more personal face to the business – if you pride yourself on the quality of your employees, why not show them off via the blog
What are the Drawbacks?
- Managing and maintaining a blog takes an investment of time.
How Should You Manage Your Blog?
- Ideally a new post should be published at least once a week without fail.
- To help spread out the responsibility, you could have a different department being responsible for creating a blog post each week. This also helps to make the blog more well rounded; you don’t want it to appear like it’s constantly managed by a ‘marketing droid’, but by real employees with real relevant skills. It will also give an added depth to the blog. For example, if you are an IT firm, some posts could be quite techie which will please the IT/techie customers and prospects reading, others will be more support based which may be of interest to the end users of solutions, others will be sales which will be of interest to the decision makers and people responsible for purchasing your solutions. There needs to be different type posts from different people to target every type of reader and for the blog to be well rounded
- You should have one person overseeing the blog, who can provide subjects ideas for each post and an outline of how the post can be written
- There should be no strict guidelines to post length – some can be short and to the point, others can be more in depth
- It’s a good idea to create a library of pre-prepared posts that can be published at anytime, allowing a level of flexibility
- You need one person who will be responsible for the maintenance and management of the blog – this will include monitoring and responding to all comments, as well as promoting each blog post using various marketing methods
- You can use free blogging platforms such as Wordpress, and ideally have it hosted on your own domain
Another surefire way to convince management that a blog is the way forward is to do a bit of competitor research. If your key competitors are blogging, then you definitely should be too. And if they’re not, you can be the pioneer, leading the way and getting a nice headstart on them.
If you need help setting up a blog, or want someone to write optimised blog posts for you on a regular basis, please get in touch with us on 023 8083 7271 or info@SMEketing.com.
February 25, 2010
A fantastic way of keeping your blog fresh, up to date and interesting is to use guest bloggers.
Guest blogging is where you invite someone to create a blog post for your blog. There are many benefits to both blog owner and guest blogger:
Benefits of Guest Blogging for the Guest Blogger:
- Free publicity for your business
- High quality link back to your website
- Benefit of reaching a new audience
- Improves your reputation
- Future recipriocation
Benefits of Guest Blogging for the Blog Owner:
- Enables a fresh point of view and style of writing to your blog
- New opinion from a respected industry member
- A day off from writing blog posts yourself!
So SMEketing are kick starting the guest blogging here and now with this offer: if you are a small business that has experienced success with online marketing such as social media, SEO, online advertising, or success in more traditional marketing, such as events and print advertising, get in touch. We would love to hear from you and print your story on our blog.
If you’re interested, send us an email at info@SMEketing.com.
We look forward to hearing from you soon!
January 27, 2010
A lot of the posts here on the SMEketing Small Business Blog are regarding social media – Twitter, Facebook, blogging etc. That’s not just because it’s a service we offer – it’s because the way people use the Internet, and more importantly, consumer behaviour, is changing.
It used to always be about interruption marketing – adverts interrupting your favourite TV show, every other page in a magazine being an advert, adverts on the radio offering car insurance and local double glazing, pop ups jumping up from websites running around the page whilst you try to find the X to close it down…. you get what I mean. Marketing was all about interruption – getting in the consumers way. Did we ask for Coronation Street to be split into two halves with 3 minutes of adverts in the middle? No we didn’t. Luckily nowadays, we don’t have to put up with it anymore. We can fast forward through adverts on TV, install spam blockers and pop up blockers to get rid of those pop ups and spam emails. No longer do we have no choice over having to endure irrelevant marketing rot.
So marketers need to change the way they promote their products and services. One popular stream of thought is all about content – providing content to consumers when they want, where they want. If a young lady is online, if searching in Google for ‘red ladies bikes’ then you need to make sure that your bike website gets found in Google for that search term. That young lady may also go on Twitter, and say that ‘I’m looking for a new bike – it’s got to be red, can anyone recommend a shop?’ – again, you need to make sure you are there to answer that tweet.
Additionally, people now use the Internet to research purchases. They don’t go to Comet and ask the spotty teenager behind the till for advice, they go online and look at reviews from people who are just like them, who have bought the same printer, used it and have now formed an opinion; an opinion which they post online which is available for the whole world to see. Even my Granny, who doesn’t even have the Internet knows that online is the best place to get product advice – when she wanted a new DVD player earlier this year she called me up and asked me to go online and check the reviews of the one she wanted! The power of a positive review in Amazon is amazing – in the same way that a bad review can be disastrous. So businesses need to also monitor social media; know what is being said about products you sell, your industry, and more importantly – you!
These are just a couple of examples, but eConsultancy have some social media statistics to really bring home the fact that your small business NEEDS to be participating in social media marketing – if you’re not, you’re in danger of become an irrelevant dinosaur:
- Social networks and blogs are the 4th most popular online activities online, including beating personal email. 67% of global users visit member communities and 10% of all time spent on the Internet is on social media sites.
- If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth most populated place in the world. This means it easily beats the likes of Brazil, Russia and Japan in terms of size.*
- 80% of companies use, (or are planning to use), LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees during the course of this year. The site has just celebrated reaching its 45-millionth membership.
- Around 64% of marketers are using social media for 5 hours or more each week during campaigns, with 39% using it for 10 or more hours per week.
- It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. Terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users. The internet took four years to reach 50 million people… In less than nine months, Facebook added 100 million users.
- Wikipedia currently has more than 13 million articles in more than 260 different languages. The site attracts over 60 million unique users a month and it’s often hotly debated that the information it contains is more reliable than any printed Encyclopedia.
- The most recent figure of blogs being indexed by Technorati currently stands at 133 million. The same report into the Blogosphere also revealed that on average, 900,000 blog posts are created within a single 24-hour period.
- It’s been suggested that YouTube is likely to serve over 75 billion video streams to around 375 million unique visitors during this year.
- The top three people on Twitter (Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres and Britney Spears) have more combined followers than the entire population of Austria.*
- According to Socialnomics, if you were paid $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia, you would earn $156.23 per hour.
- The online bookmarking service, Delicious, has more than five million users and over 150 million unique bookmarked URLs.
- Since April this year, Twitter has been receiving around 20 million unique visitors to the site each month, according to some analytical sources.
- Formed in 2004, Flickr now hosts more than 3.6 billion user images.
- Universal McCann reports that 77% of all active internet users regularly read blogs.
*Thanks to SEW for the b/g inspiration.
So social media is here to stay. If you don’t have a blog on your site, aren’t using Twitter, and don’t have a Facebook Business Page then please come and talk to us at SMEketing. For the month of November, we are offering you the chance to have a Facebook Business Page created for just £60 – get one before the offer runs out!
November 20, 2009
This post is the second part of “Using Blogs for Small Business SEO”. Last week we established that blogging helps keep your website fresh. Google and the other search engines love fresh, new, unique and compelling content; uploading a blog post once a week (or more), gives the search engines exactly what they want.
So what’s the second reason blogs are brilliant for small business search engine optimisation? Keywords. If you are writing a blog post about your products or services, you will naturally include a number of keywords which are the terms prospects use to search with.
Not only will your blog posts contain your all important keywords, but they’ll also probably include a host of variations on these keywords – plurals and synonyms are almost as important as the original keyword in the first place. An addition to your keywords, you’ll be using keyphrases – these are often known as the ‘long tail’. These are longer phrases that people may use to locate what they are searching for on the web. An example of this search would be: “how can I clean paintbrushes without damaging them?”, this is a typical example of a longer search query that a searcher may enter into Google. If you have written a well rounded blog post on your easy to clean paint brushes, there is a good chance that you will match this long tail search term, and your blog post will rank high in the search engine results.
A well written blog post will be focused, with keywords naturally occurring in the title, headers and body section. There are many schools of thought on keyword use, but all agree that in order to rank for your desired keyphrases, you need to include them in certain aspects of your website copy. The recommended ratio of keyword to text is about 5-10%. Don’t go over 10% as this may appear like you are ‘keyword stuffing’; a very old technique which only serves to get your site penalised by the search engines.
Because your blog post will be focused on a specific area, this, combined with the fact that it is new and unique content, means that Google and the other search engines will rank your blog post higher in the search results for the keyterms used in that post than possibly static pages of your competitors. Getting people to your site via your blog is a great way to drive an increase in relevant traffic, and if you provide high quality content with strong call to actions, people will contact you/make a purchase/or whatever other result you are looking for.
If you’re still unsure whether a blog is right for your small business, call us on 023 8083 7271, and we’ll be more than happy to try and convince you! Or, if you know that a blog will help your small business website (which it will), get in touch and we can help create it for you.
Let us know of any other reasons why you think a blog makes a great tool for any small business – leave your comments below, we love reading them!
October 29, 2009
The first thing I ever tell my small business clients, no matter what marketing service they are using from SMEketing is “Get yourself a blog!”. Blogs are probably one of the easiest, cheapest and most effective marketing tools out there for small businesses today.
They have so many benefits, especially in terms of search engine optimisation (SEO). This weeks post will focus on just one of the benefits (come back next week for the next benefit):
Benefit Number 1: Google LOVES Fresh Content
Google, and the other search engines love fresh content; same as humans, we don’t want to read out of date content, and neither do the search engines (not that they actually ‘read’ the content, but they don’t want to present old content to searchers). Because of this, Google will prioritise fresh content over old content in their results. So imagine you have recently created a blog post all about the benefits of your product – such as your particular brand of easy clean paint brushes. When someone searches for ‘easy to clean paint brushes’ in Google, there’s a good chance that your blog post on your super easy to clean paint brushes will show up high in the search results. Your result is likely to be higher than some of your competitors who just have a product page featuring their brushes, that they’ve not updated in six or more months. In terms of search engine optimisation, you must remember that search engines don’t rank websites, they rank pages – and they love brand spanking new pages! Having a site with regularly updated content and regular new pages also means that overall your site gets more ‘trust’ from the search engines. So some of the benefit from the new content will roll over to other pages as well, even if they haven’t been updated in a while.
Another benefit of adding fresh content to your site on a regular basis is that the search engine bots will crawl your site on a more regular basis – meaning that any crucial updates you’ve made to your site/content will be refreshed in the search engine results a lot quicker. Have you ever wondered what the ‘cached’ link means when you look at search results in Google? Clicking on this will show you the last time Google crawled that web page – so you can see exactly what Google is seeing. If you have updated your website with some new product pages, Google will not know about it until the next time it comes to crawl your site. So if you hardly ever update your site, Google will be in the habbit of only crawling your site on a monthly (or so) basis. This means that none of your new product pages will appear in the search engines results during this month – not until Google crawls your site again. However, if you constantly add new content to your site, Google will get into the habbit of crawling your site a lot more often – the ideal crawl amount is daily, but realistically, weekly will do. Having your site crawled on a regular basis, means your brand new product pages will show up in the search engine results a lot quicker.
So we’ve established that the search engines love fresh new content. However, it can be difficult to continually add new content to your site - you don’t to be adding pointless pages to your site just for the sake of it – this is where blogs come in. Each time you add a new blog post, that creates new content and a new page on your site. Ensuring that you update your blog at least once a week means that the search engines will start to crawl your site on a regular basis and will start to prioritise your new pages (and pages in your site in general) in their results.
Come back next week for ‘Benefit Number 2′.
In the meantime, if you want any assistance creating a blog for your small business, please come and talk to us here at SMEketing. Not only can we create blogs for you, we can also write and optimise your blog posts! Click here to contact us.
October 20, 2009
You can’t miss the doom and gloom of the current economic climate. All businesses, large and small, must carefully spend their marketing budget. Gone are the days of frivolous spending. So I wanted to outline five cost effective ways of spending your small business marketing budget. With online marketing become more and more vital as part of a small business marketing plan, there are many ways which small businesses can promote their business and help drive leads.
1. Blogging: Setting up a blog can be completely free! Yes, we love anything free. But like most freebies, in order for it to be effective you need to plan it well and invest your time into it. Using free blog providers like Wordpress and Google Blogger are great ways of getting involved in the blogging world, without costing you a penny. There are so many different benefits of blogging, one of the biggest benefits is to your websites ranking in the search engines (aka Search Engine Optimisation - SEO): Google loves new and unique content. Blogging is a great way to constantly add new content to your site. Plus your posts will be tagged and full of relevant keyword. Blog well and others in your industry may link to you, increasing the number of valuable inbound links. For more on the benefits of blogging, read this post: Blogging – just for teenagers, or good for your small business?
2. Twitter: Again, another freebie! Twitter is great for promoting what you do and learning about latest industry trends. By joining the conversation and providing useful information, you will soon generate a loyal base of followers. Use Twitter to answer questions relevant to your industry, learn about new goings on, promote your product, events and news (but don’t be pushy). For more information on using Twitter to promote your small business, read these blog posts: Twitter: Small Business Success Stories – Will yours be one of them? and Guide to Getting Your Small Business Started on Twitter
3. Email Marketing: Email marketing can cost as little as 1p per recipient and £5 per mailshot (well, those are the rates for using a self managed SMEketing Email Marketing solution, but we like to think these are pretty competitive!). If you don’t have time to maintain a close working relationship with your customer base, email marketing is a great, cost effective way of keeping them updated with your latest news, products and offers. Email marketing can also be used as a lead generation tool. Send out well targeted mailshots to relevant recipients and you will find visits to your web site go up, and conversion rates increase. For more information on the benefits of email marketing read this blog post: Email Marketing for Small Businesses
4. Google AdWords: These unfortunately are not free (we wish!), but you completely control your budget. If you only have £10 a day to spend, that’s fine! Make sure you get the most from your budget by using relevant keywords, focused adverts with a strong call to action, and a well thought-through landing page. Google AdWords can be a great way of driving relevant traffic to your site, and the results are completely measurable. If something isn’t working, you know straight away. This is why AdWords are one of the most cost effective advertising mediums out there. Add Conversion Tracking to your adverts and you’ll be able to see exactly what ad’s are providing the highest conversion rate once visitors are on your site. Once you know that, you can direct your budget to keywords and adverts that are giving you the highest Return on Investment (ROI).
5. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): You know I said Google AdWords weren’t free, well there is a way that you can get Google to promote your site FOR FREE! How? Improve your website’s ranking for relevant keywords, and Google will display your site in their search results – free of charge! But again, this is something that will take an investment in your time. Make sure your website is well designed – good navigation, lots of keyword rich content, no broken links, good use of anchor text in your links, etc… Once that is done, you need to boost the number of high quality inbound links. Go to Yahoo and type “linkdomain:yourcompany.com -site:yourcompany.com” to see the number of your inbound links. Do the same for your competitors and see how you compare. Next create a plan to increase the number of incoming links – sign up to relevant directories, promote your blog, create great content on your site that people want to link to. Links should be from high quality sites – link farms are NOT GOOD! The page giving you a link should have few other outgoing links on the same page, and the anchor text should be optimised to promote what you do, not necessarily your business name. An example of a good link to SMEketing would be: “SMEketing is a fantastic source for small business marketing advice and services.” The anchor text here tells Google that the link (www.SMEketing.com) is relevant to “small business marketing”. If the anchor text fell on the business name, it would just tell Google that “SMEketing” is relevant to www.SMEketing.com – which to be fair, it probably had figured out anyway!
Read here for more SEO tips: Top 10 SEO Mistakes Your Small Business Should Avoid
If you want to learn more about any of the above marketing strategies, please get in touch. At SMEketing we’re experienced in all these marketing mediums and have seen first hand the benefits when small businesses employ such tactics.
July 1, 2009
I’ve been very busy this week – visiting clients and prospects throught the South of England. I’ve been to Guildford, Portsmouth, Southampton and Eastleigh! So I’ve not had a chance to write a proper blog post. The aim of this blog is to provide educational content, to help small businesses understand the various marketing strategies they can use to help make their small business a success.
During my visits to clients and prospects this week, the importance of educating oneself has being hugely reinforced. Unfortunately, more than one person I’ve spoken to this week has told me about an unfortunate experience when outsourcing a marketing function to an marketing agency or consultant (not SMEketing though!!!). This is why it’s so important to educate yourself in the basics of what you want to outsource. If you want to employ a marketing agency or a marketing consultant to manage your search engine optimisation (SEO), Google Adword (PPC), or design a website, you must educate yourself on the foundation prinicples of these marketing activities. Only then are you in a position where you can question the marketing agency; for example, if you don’t know what is involved in creating and managing a small business website, how do you know if you’re being spun a yarn?
Another example is SEO; just type “SEO basics” into Google and millions of entries come up. Even 30 minutes spent browsing these articles is time well spent. That way, when you talk to your marketing agency, you will understand the jargon (although a good agency will not try to confuse you by using terms and jargon that you won’t understand). You’ll also know if the agency or marketing consultant is implementing unethical tactics – something which is vitally important, especially when dealing with SEO.
So this is the lesson for the week – educate, educate, educate. I’m not suggesting you go out and buy loads of books on various marketing strategies or spend hours crawling the internet for information. But by arming yourself with a basic level of knowledge, when you’re talking to an ‘expert’, you’ll be in a better position to decide if they are really an ‘expert’ at all. Outsourcing marketing activies can can be a vital part of your small business strategy, but it can become very expensive if you’re dealing with an agency or consultant who is willing to take your money and run because you don’t know better!
June 19, 2009
Okay, so I hope I’ve managed to convince you of the marketing benefits of getting your small business on Twitter. Now, as promised here is SMEketing’s guide to getting started. It’s extremely simple; however it does come with a warning though – Twitter can be seriously addictive!
Create an account and set up your profile:
The key things here are:
- Your username: which will show as twitter.com/username
- Your bio: to summarise what you do so people know whether or not they will be interested in following you. Do not leave this blank! I rarely follow anyone who doesn’t have a bio
- Your picture: as a rule, if you’re on Twitter as a small business use your corporate logo (this may have to be modified to fit in the small box Twitter provide. If you cannot do this yourself, then get in touch and for a very small fee SMEketing can do this for you. Unless you’re an existing customer, then we’ll provide this service free of charge until the end of June 2009 – get in touch with your SMEketer to receive this freebie). If you do use a logo as your picture, make sure you put your actual name on your profile. For example, our Twitter name is SMEketing, but under our profile the name listed is Victoria Walmsley (me) as I am the one who manages SMEketing’s Twitter account. Twitter, like all social media marketing, is about being transparent. People want to know exactly who they are dealing with
- Your background: this is a good article on branding yourself with a Twitter background
Start following people with similar interests/industries/geographical area are you:
This is important – as a general (ish) rule, when you follow someone, there’s a good chance they’ll follow you back. So you need to follow people who may be interested in your services. Use Twellow and JustTweetIt to find people to follow. You should also look for existing customers and suppliers. Basically anyone who you’d like to network with. This is where personal bio’s come in handy – they’ll help you decide quickly if that person/business is of interest to you. It’s no point following loads of people in New York City if your small business has a customer catchment area in Southampton, Hampshire UK.
Start Tweeting!
Now that you are following people you will be able to see their tweets and so you can now get involved with the conversations. If you see someone tweeting a question, or talking about a subject that you’re a specialist in – get stuck in! Remember though, Twitter is not a direct sales tool – people will quickly remove you from their follow lists if you try the hard sale. Twitter is about conversation and networking. Giving out free advice, tips and relevant links/info to your network will soon help boost your Twitter profile, and in turn, your small business brand.
Make sure you don’t spam tweet. There is nothing worse than logging into your Twitter account, only to find a dozen tweets, all from the same person, all following a similar thread. Tweets such as “Fully manages PPC solutions from SMEketing: http:www.tinyurl.oom/123″ , followed by “Rebranding? Logo design for small businesses: http:www.tinyurl.com/124″ = those kind of tweets, listed in quick succession will irritate people very quickly and you will soon find the number of followers you have dropping (fyi – due to the limited character content, when posting URLs, go to http://bit.ly/ first to shorten it).
You will soon find that you are interacting with a select group of people more than others. This is great – Twitter is about building relationships. So your next move is to take it to the next level – ask for their MSN details/email address/phone number etc, and see if you can arrange to meet up. Anyone who can provide you with new business, or new business referrals are worth their weight in Twitter gold!
Okay, so I don’t want this blog post to get too long – Twitter is a huge topic and I could bang on about it all day.
My last and final Twitter tips are the tools you can use to manage your account. I won’t go into too much depth here – the best thing is to just get stuck in and use them. If you do want more advice as to how to manage your Twitter account to receive maximum return on your (time) investment, get in touch with SMEketing and we’ll happy talk you through it.
- TweetDeck: Use this to give you an overview of what’s happening on Twitter – view all the updates, replies, direct messages, and set up specific keyword related searches to see who’s talking about your interests
- Hashtags: Hashtags (#) enable you to track and follow conversations on Twitter. If SMEketing were to run an event called ‘SMEketer Southampton’ we’d maybe use #SMESo’ton as a hashtag at the end of each tweet that was related to that event.
- MrTweet: Another tool to help you find relevant people to follow
- Twitter Search: If you’re not searching for your keywords via TweetDeck, use Twitter Search
There are hundreds of Twitter tools out there – for more information on these and others, just type ‘Twitter Tools’ into Google and you’ll find 75,500,000 results to look through!!
And finally, now that you’re up and running on Twitter – dont’ forget to follow us at @SMEketing: twitter/SMEketing. Tweet you later!
April 23, 2009
I was sitting at my laptop last weekend brainstorming ideas for our small business marketing blog when I got a call from a friend of mine to see what I was up to.
When I told her that I was brainstorming ideas for my blog on a sunny Hampshire Saturday afternoon she thought I had gone mad!! She pretty much told that they are a waste of time, that they are for teenagers or for people that love to complain about the world. So it quickly came apparent to me that the subject of SMEketing’s first blog post should be about why every small business should be maintaining a blog.
So here it is…. 5 Reasons To Blog!
1 – Blogs are AMAZING for search engine optimisation purposes. You can use them to build links into your main site, search engine spyders crawl your blog and follow your links into your site so you get crawled more often. They are great for you site’s stats as you can use them to generate traffic via social bookmarking (and build more backlinks), if your content is interesting people will spend longer on your site so the search engines think you have valuable information and this will help improve search rankings.
2 – You can control your brand reputation through your blog so don’t be afraid to approve negative comments. It is better to have the negative comments about your business in your blog over anywhere on the net that you might not find out about until it has damaged your business. Often you can use the negative comments and turn it into a positive situation with a well planned and structured response.
3 – Share the love! Add social share icons into your blogs so your clients, employees and potential customers can share your information, services and products with the world!
4 – Blogging for small businesses is a brilliant opportunity for your employees to take an active role in promoting the company. Blogging should be done with a passion so sharing the responsibility keeps it fresh and ensures you don’t get burnt out. Share the task with a range of your employees and colleagues so they can deliver a new perspective and have time to be creative and capture their point!
5 – Remember that people buy your products and services, so give them a window into your operations so they get a feel for your style. This can help increase your chances of getting that next deal or closing the one already on the table.
I wish I could go more than 5 reasons, the rest will have to wait for another time. If you have any other reasons why you think blogging is great for small businesses, leave a comment below.
March 29, 2009
