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- Having old, outdated “coming soon” pages.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.
