Blogging has traditionally been one of the hardest for me to dedicate time. It takes more time and planning than making a quick facebook post. Yet the payoffs are much bigger, as you may have suspected.
Sites that include a blog have 55% more visitors and receive 97% more
inbound links (inbound links are how you get move your company up to the
top of the page when people search for what you do in google). The more
visitors to your website, the more potential clients you have to sell
to! We're still getting our arms around this, but here's a bit of what we learned this week.
5 ways you can juice up your small business blog:
Credit goes to Mark Roberge of Hubspot for his presentation at OMS.
1) Incorporate the keywords you want people to use when searching for you in google, bing or yahoo in the titles of your blog posts. For example, Chicago wedding photographer, Philladelphia Interior Designer or Miami cosmetic dentist.
2) Make sure the url for your blog post includes your blog title. For example: www.thejoyofmarketing.com/5-ways-for-small-business-owners-to-juice-your-blog-posts versus www.thejoyofmarketing.com/blog45. The more descriptive URL helps your page rank in google when people link to your blog post.
3) If you're having trouble choosing a topic, use a key word tool. A key word tool helps you determine the popularity of specific key words about your business (the more popular the harder it is for you to show up on the first page in google searches). Google has a great free tool if you are an adwords user (it's free to set up an adwords account, too).
4) Get creative when it comes to your blog titles by using more obscure key words in your blog titles. So rather than just saying Chicago wedding photographer, you may use a specific city like Schaumburg wedding photographer or someting even more specific that describes your style that someone may search for to find you. The is increases your changes to show up on page one when people search for what you do.
5) At the bottom of each of your blog posts, include a call to action. It can be so simple as sign up for our monthly newsletter, become our fan on facebook, etc. Give readers a way to contact you and stay in touch with you.
Finally, on a side note, I see several of our community members doing a great job on their blogs in letting their personality show through. Props to Light, Love and Laughter Photography and Sweet Water Images (screenshot of their blog above) who are doing a great job in letting the personality of the photographers shine through in their blog posts and not just letting the images speak for themselves.
I'm curious...how often are you blogging? And how is it helping your business?
