We are so excited to bring you a guest post this week from Beth Wand of BW Concepts. Beth specializes in planning and creating blogging content along with social media strategy and management for her clients. In this post, she will share with us some ideas about how to structure our own business blogs and why a business blog is important.

Hello! My name is Beth and I am the BW of BW Concepts. I create unique and creative content for my clients that helps build their online presence through a distinctive visual and written strategy. Is starting a business blog on your to do list but you’re just not sure where to start? It can feel like an overwhelming process! I have some ideas that can help you get your blog off the ground.

First, Why Blog?

As Hammersmith Support has shared a few times in a few ways, blogging has a huge return on investment. Not only does fresh content boost your SEO, but free content is a huge value add for clients. In addition, macro content from blogs can be diced up in to bite-sized micro content for social media posts, creating a cohesive look and sound to your business.

Where to Start?

When it comes to your business blog, creating a calendar of topics is the perfect place to start. Things to map out:

  • What are your busy times of year? When is it slow?
  • Do you offer any promotions, specials, or deals at any time? If so, when?
  • Are there any holidays that directly affect your business? Or are there any holidays that tie in nicely with your business?

Use these answers as topics, or as places to fill in topics. If your product is a big hit at Christmas, you’ll want to post more often in the weeks leading up to Christmas. If you have vacation time planned in the summer, then plan your posts accordingly. This is also a great time to identify when your slow times are and plug in topics that might entice new customers at a normally down time.

Brainstorming Topics

Once you have the topics that correspond to the calendar, brainstorm a list of topics that are more tailored to your business. If you’re stumped, answer these questions:

  • What question do your potential clients or clients always ask you?
  • What do you wish people knew about your business?
  • How did you get started? What is your business’ story?
  • What is your “why”?
  • What problem does your product solve?
  • Who are your employees and what are their stories?

Once you have answers to these questions, start looking for topics. Answer the questions your clients always ask. Tell them why you started your business and what your favorite part is about it. Take those same topics and plug them into your calendar from above.

Get Writing

Not sure where to start on a topic? Who cares! Just start writing. So many times I have a topic, but I’m not 100% sure how all of the information is going to lay out. So I start with whatever section makes sense to me. Then I build from there. Sometimes I have to pivot and rework what I’ve already written, but often I end up leaving it as is and being able to create the rest of the post from that one section.

Things to remember:

  • Break it up. Use headers to visually break up the words on the page and give context to your post.
  • Know your audience. Be sure to write your posts for the person who is reading them. If you’re explaining your product to potential clients, be sure and start from the beginning and write like no one knows what your business is. Details details details.
  • Keep posts to about 350 words. If it’s longer, you’ll likely lose readers. Too short leaves them feeling ripped off.
  • Use images and name them appropriately. Readers love a good image and using the right naming system will help with SEO.
  • Edit your work. Read, reread, and ask a friend to take a quick look for grammatical errors too.

Want to know more? Click and follow Beth on social media and on her business blog as well:

beth@bw-concepts.com

www.bw-concepts.com

@bw_concepts1

Blogs have one of the highest ROI’s when it comes to your business. Why is that? There are several reasons, all of which we’ll detail below…but if you need to be convinced to keep reading, consider this; on average, companies with blogs produce 67% more leads a month than those that don’t. Read on to find out more.

Blogs = Links

Blogging gives an opportunity to post both internal links to other parts of your website, along with links to outside sites. This is important for a few reasons. First, internal linking gets visitors to stay on your site longer to explore as well as introduce more information to them. External links provide validity to your posts and most importantly, both types of links boost SEO. Google Ranking factors evaluate and reward posts with credible and accurate links.

The other side of linking is that every blog posted is a link. That link is shared on all social media platforms, LinkedIn, etc. If you post once a week for a year, that’s 52 links to your site floating around waiting to be discovered!

Blogs Boost SEO

Speaking of Google Rankings, blogs help to fill a few of the factors that Google evaluates. Google takes the freshness of websites content so seriously that the date of the last major content update appears in the search results. Note the word major! That’s another Ranking factor; magnitude. The amount changed for the content makes a big difference too.

Customer Value

Setting aside all the technical reasons why blogging is a good thing for your site, blogs are a big win with current and potential customers. Why? Because providing free information for them is a value add for your business / product. In a world where everything comes with a price, having free content for visitors to learn about your company, product, industry or even just gives tips and tricks for every day life is a win. It builds not only value, but trust with your visitors.

Feed Social Media

If the concept of keeping up with your social media content, blog content, website updates, etc is overwhelming, think of it this way; you don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to your content. We talked about micro verses macro content and how each concept can feed the other. Think about using your social media posts to create one large, detailed post. Or start with your large, detailed blog post and break it down into smaller bites for your social media. The two areas do not have to be independent thoughts. In fact, having your social media topics and your blog topics all tie together makes your message more memorable because it’s exposed in more than once place. It’s repeating, without beating your visitors over the head.