Writing 101 For Small Business Owners

Online B2C and B2B sales have increased significantly in the past ten years. To tap into this trend, you need a good website with a blog. In writing 101 for small business owners, we’ll go over some general guidelines to help you get results.

The Difference Between Marketing And Sales

Marketing is meant to increase brand awareness and advertise a product or service. Efforts should be designed to gain exposure in the marketplace, gain favorable attention and generate leads. Sales is about converting leads into prospects or clients. Marketing is the main reason most businesses have a website.

How Shoppers Finds Things Online

I wrote about how the shopper’s journey starts at the search bar here. It’s important to understand this because Google is the Global Digital Yellow Pages. The main difference from physical directories is that Google goes through the pages for you and lists results in order of relevance based on various criteria. That’s why it’s important to have a good blog.

How Relevance Is Determined

Many factors affect your position in search results, but the most important factor is quality content that is related to search queries. The Holy Grail is to come up on page one for queries related to your business. Quality content means posting articles on your blog that are related to your products and services or, of interest to your client base.

Writing 101 For Small Business Owners

Before you start writing a blog post, ask yourself why you’re choosing that topic. What result do you wish to achieve. Any post should do at least one of these things: - have value in SEO terms (be found online for the product or service you offer) - sell a product of service (link to sales pages) - be informative to your audience (build trust, establish expertise etc.) Keep in mind that posting too many articles with sales links will appear as spam. It’s best to have a mix.

Writing 101 For Small Business - Choosing A Topic

What are the top competitors in your business blogging about? That’s a starting point to get ideas. Think of your audience. What customers do you want to attract? You’re a small business owner, what interests you? Whatever you choose to write about, your content has to be original. That doesn’t mean you can’t write about the same things others do, but it has to be your content. Over time, you will see which of your posts are most popular, which ones get the most page hits etc. You can then expand on the better ones and make them cornerstone content. You should blog on a regular basis. Establish a routine and stick to it. How often should you blog? That depends on who you are, what you do and what your competitors do. There’s no one answer that is right for everyone. There’s also your budget to consider.

Promote Your Blog With Social Media

You should promote the articles on your blog with your social media accounts. There’s a difference between Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus and you shouldn’t post the exact same content on each platform. Users expect different content and automatic posting can appear to be spam. Analytic tools can tell you which time of the day gets you the most engagement.

WrapUp - Writing 101 For Small Business

Your digital marketing effort should include a business blog. Write for people, not search engines. If done properly, links to your website and blog will come up when people do a search for your product or service on Google. That’s the marketing end. Facilitating sales of products and services on your website is where the sales process begins.