Writing blogs for your small business is a fun and free marketing tool for owners that can gain exposure for your company. Blogs can be easy to write if you know the basics, but if you don’t follow some simple structure and guidelines, you can end up with a jumbled article that no one wants to read. Once you get the hang of writing blogs for your small business, you’ll attract more potential customers and create better conversions. Follow these simple instructions and start building a better blog today!
Make Your Topics Useful and Informative
When people search the web for a topic, it’s usually so they can learn something useful that they can apply to their own lives. For example, if you own a paint company, you would want to steer your blog topics towards DIY projects, how-to’s, tips, and advice on the best kinds of paints for certain jobs. People will be looking for this type of advice versus topics like ‘the history of paint’. Get creative with your small business’s blogs and provide enough information to satisfy your readers’ interest.
Use Good Structure
Intro Paragraph
When you were writing essays in high school, you were taught to always include an introductory paragraph, the main body of the essay, and a conclusion paragraph. These are important parts of writing blogs for small business owners as well, and you should include them in everything you write. The intro paragraph will give your readers a taste of what is to come and should provoke interest that prompts them to read more. Remember that paragraphs, just like sentences, should not run on forever and lose a reader. Keep them fairly short, to about five sentences per paragraph.
The Main Body & Bulleted or Numbered Lists
Your main body paragraphs should each contain their own heading so that readers can easily skim over your small business’s blog article and find sections that are important to them. You can always include subheadings if you need to further break down a subject into properly sized paragraphs that make for easy reading. Don’t forget about the use of bulleted or numbered lists. Readers love when points are easily listed out for them and they don’t have to search through a paragraph to find what they are looking for. Use bulleted lists when stating supplies that are needed, ingredients for a recipe, symptoms of a condition, steps for a DIY project, or other times when it seems like a good fit for your small business’s blog.
Conclusion & Call-to-Action
The conclusion paragraph should sum up what was stated throughout the article and give an affirmative piece of advice or final statement. You’ll also always want to include a ‘call-to-action’ that promotes the reader to literally take action. The action may be to visit a home website, contact a company to learn more about a product, purchase a product or service, donate to a cause, or something that you want to achieve with the reader.
Length
While there really is no exact formula for what length a small business owners blog article should be, keep in mind that people don’t want to read a novel on the subject. They are looking for fairly quick advice and information that can be read in about 10 minutes or less. Typical small business blog articles usually range anywhere from 500-1000 words, but can push the envelope further if the subject calls for it. You can keep your blogs within a good length range by avoiding ‘fluff’. ‘Fluff’ is anything that is overly descriptive and doesn’t lend to informing the reader about the subject at hand.
Write with a Tone for Your Target Audience
Knowing your target audience is key for small business owners to write blogs that will catch and keep the readers’ attention. Connect with the target audience through a tone that they will relate to and keep this tone throughout related blogs. For example, if you are writing a fashion blog that is aimed at college-age women, you will want to use short, punchy sentences that include today’s slang and industry language. For this type of audience, it’s completely acceptable to infuse humor and use trendy terms like “fashionista”, “LOL”, “make ‘em jelly”, “get the deets”, and “YOLO”. However, if you’re writing a blog for a nutritional supplement company, you would definitely want to avoid slang and use a professional, assertive, and informative tone.
Do Your Research
For informative blogs, it is important to thoroughly research your subject using high-authority and reputable sources. That doesn’t mean get your information from Wikipedia, as Wikipedia is written by the public and can contain misinformation. You may even want to cite your sources at the end of your blog. Readers especially look for citations when reading about scientific studies and research that will lead them to form an opinion on a subject. Sources such as PubMed are a great place to start when looking for unbiased, clinical research that will support your topic. Government and university websites are also good sources.
Optimize for Keywords
When finding keywords to use within your small business’s blog, brainstorm phrases or terms that people might search for when looking up your blog topic. Integrating a specific keyword phrase or two into your blog will help you rank higher when people are searching for that specific term. Using a tool like Google Analytics will help you narrow down which terms you will want to use to drive more website traffic and which you will be more likely to rank for. After determining your keywords, sprinkle them throughout your blog article in a natural way. For primary keywords, place the term about once every 100 words.
Add Interlinks
Adding links within your blog that lead to your website or other blogs your small business has written are an important marketing tool that increase your company’s exposure. When writing blogs that will be placed on websites other than your own, interlinks lead back to your own website, increasing traffic and potential conversions. Always make sure your linking words are relevant to what you are linking to.
While all these notes on blogs may seem overwhelming at first for small business owners, once you get the hang of them, writing excellent blogs will almost come naturally to you. You’ll be able to crank them out quicker and you may even find partners and websites who will want you to write guest blog posts for them. Blog articles are a great tool for marketing, and they are free to produce when you write them yourself.
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