Blogging is key to your social media strategy and promoting your small business’s services and products.
While blogging requires time and effort, it reaps great benefits for you, allowing you to engage your visitors and generating leads for your small business.
At last week’s Social Media Connect-Detroit seminar, Nikki Little shared tips and insights for blogging for your small business.
Here are my notes and some of the social conversation from her presentation.
Blogging:
- Showcases expertise and builds your online reputation
- Is most effective social marketing tactic, according to 2013 eMarketer study
- Is storytelling on the Internet, allows you to control how your small business story is told
- Promotes your company and leaders
- Helps you build relationships with others in your field as well as influencers and other bloggers
Identify why you want to blog and what you want to accomplish. Who will read your blog? What topics will you blog about?
https://twitter.com/redcrew/status/520586088466120704
You have multiple options for blogging, including:
Integrate your blog on your site, and make it easy to find. Unless you blog on your own website, other companies (Blogger, Tumblr, Medium, and LinkedIn) own your content.
Pro Tips for Blogging
- Install analytics and measure them for success
- Audit existing content
- Identify voice and tone (good resource: MailChimp Voice and Tone)
- Identify authors-empower employees to contribute to the blog
- Create content guidelines for contributors. Include recommendations for number of words, tone (we, our), images (format and size), video, tell a story, provide specific length (for number of words in post and length of headlines.
- Determine posting frequency. Will you post daily, weekly, twice a week?
- Create a content calendar to plan and schedule your posts
https://twitter.com/heatherhall3/status/520579851359887360
Get Employees Involved
- Empower employees to contribute to blog success. Share blog strategy and content guidelines.
- Create an email template that employees can send to contacts to share news posts
- Provide suggested copy for employees to share posts on their personal social networks
Where to Find Content
- Your customers/clients: what questions are they asking? What do they care about. Talk to your customer support staff.
- Keywords relevant to your company
- Company news/announcements
- Events/philathropic events
- Hot industry trends. Add your perspective
- Customer stories/testimonials
https://twitter.com/redcrew/status/520580901349380096
Important Elements for Your Blog
- Offer frequent and unique content
- Images are powerful. Include photos and video (with captions/transcript)
- Email and RSS subscription options
- Consider commenting and sharing options
- Responsive design: ensure a good user experience for people accessing your content across devices (mobile phones, tablets, desktop)
- Search engine optimization: make sure your content can be found
- Calls to action: what do you expect readers to do?
- Content promotion strategy
https://twitter.com/redcrew/status/520581808145326080
The recipe for a successful blog:
- Post
- Measure
- Analyze
- Rinse
- Repeat
Nikki graciously posted her slides online on Slideshare, where you’ll find more slidedecks from Nikki on blogging for business and social media.
