Heidi HO! Welcome. Thanks for coming. You might want to grab myRSS feed. I also welcome calls at 614-312-1941 about just about anything.
Small business blogging can work, if you follow established best practices. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel with every single blog idea that flits across your subconsciousness. You don’t have to be creative.
“If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.” -David Ogilvy
What you have to do is follow what works. Do what we already know what to do and cover your bases beyond that. Meaning this: you know what messages work in your business, they work online and offline. You have to communicate frequently first, and then rrefine your message. People expect instant results, and that’s possible, but not without really top shelf communication.
So, if you’re not getting incredible results from your blog & social media, maybe you’re making one of these mistakes:
Not having info customers are looking for.
Not having enough information (show more leg)
Having information about YOU and not about what the CUSTOMER gets.
Having no contact/normal & formal business information for the customer.
Having no social proof that you do a good job (memberships & testimoinals)
Having old, outdated “coming soon” pages.
Having too many placeholders
Having too many different kinds of offers (nobody wants to deal with jacks of all trades, seem like a specialist).
Having a messy site.
Not having enough stuff about your company.
Putting blogs that are all about buying now, without informing the customers.
Putting posts out there that don’t help people understand more about what your business.
Not responding to comments.
Not loving links.
Not including metadescriptions with every post.
Not including some post structure.
Not including a business address on your RSS feed.
Making customers fill in a form if they want to talk and not giving them control (Really, really arrogant).
Not mentioning what you sell & why you blog.
Having 1000 categories with one post each.
Having six bajilion tags (kill tags)
Having dates all over the place on your blog.
Not backing up claims.
Having too many links.
There are more mistakes you can make, but take heart: it’s easy to do everything right, the path is well lit and easily viewed.
A lot of blogs fail because they spread their efforts too thin amongst to many different priorities. By going in many directions, nothing gets traction, no search results happen. By “specializing” in being a “medium sized, big, small business,” all of their efforts are difused.
And because of that, nothing wins.
So, let’s get local with our business. Let’s SCREAM to google that we are about a region, a specific discipline. Dare I say an Authority?
How does it work?
You make a series of specific, short, targeted blog posts that contain your keywords in them. You make a checklist of keywords and regions. For example, if you’re a Coffee Shop in Worthington, OH…you’d do a few things:
Figure out a bunch of synonyms or brands for coffee shop.
coffee house
java
cafe
Starbucks
Figure out some hyper local neighborhoods. For Worthington Coffee shop, you might pick high street, olde worthington & Crosswoods.
Make a basic Excel spreadsheet like this:
Then, it’s simple. Make the phrases. Make more as you think of them, and ensure that your content works. You can also go as far with it as you can. Cappucino review, tips and hints also works pretty well.
This is something to do that requires no research and little skill. It’s brute force SEO, and you’re banking on the notion that other folks are awake at the wheel.
This strategy–or a variant of it, is used by us with Fbar Tax Attorney Phil Hodgen. We basically killed the hell out of the keywords we found, drilling down on everything so we had the most content with the most variants. Did it work? Hell yeah, in the first month of use, the site was pulling over 2,000 pageviews a month on 40ish well done articles. Those were highly targeted leads, that allowed Phil to pull in over 8x what he paid us for the work.
We did go grab a few back links, but there was nothing really sexy about our methodology, it was the grinder’s way to do SEO. More content, more valuable content with an eye on the keywords we were using. The posts still pull 1500-1800 hits a month, and we haven’t touched the site in weeks and weeks, except for some odd automated plugin work.
It’s not sexy, it’s not ‘keyword stuffing,’ it’s a basic technique that isn’t even best practice for seo. It’s simply better practice for SEO than most people use.
Doing this in your local area will get you a little traffic. Doing everything right will get you a LOT of traffic.
Whose advice would you more value: a world class heart surgeon that talked about diet, or a family practice doctor who talked about diet.
I’ll betcha you’re going to say the World Class Heart Surgeon.
People want to deal with experts, not dabblers.
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