5 Advanced Tips for Blogging for Small Business

In my last blog post, I offered up 5 simple tips for blogging for small business.  Pretty easy enough stuff, right?  So how about we take this thing up a notch and go over 5 advanced tips for blogging for small business?

We know we have the time, the ideas, the drive and desire to do this thing.  Great!  Did you write your first blog post? Even better! Not sure what to do now? No problem, let’s work on this.

I’m going to cover 5 advanced tips for small business blogs that will surely help you out.

Tip #1 – Do a little keyword research

The Google Keyword Planner is a useful and simple tool to figure out the keywords you may want to write about.  While you think it’s a golden idea to write about a keyword that has a massive search volume you’re actually better off writing about keywords that pose a question.  This means your blog can answer that question!  Good keywords to look for may include: “how to”, “what is”, “how do I”.

Tip #2 – Make sure you set up the blog post following SEO best practices

Follow the best practices just like you would for any other page of your site! Effectively set your title tag, H1 tag, URL string and include the keywords within the content (just don’t “stuff” them in there, find a purpose to use them).  A trick to helping things would be to use the keyword you want more prominence with within the first 100 words of the blog post.

Tip #3 – Share your blog post through your social networks

Ok, you wrote the blog and you posted it on your site.  Awesome.  What now?  How will you generate some buzz around it?  Simple enough.  Share a link to that page via your social profiles like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.  Encourage your employees to share a link to the post.  You could even include a link in a newsletter!  Just make sure to be proactive in getting people to the page.  Let it be shared organically from that point on.

Tip #4 – Watch your analytics and see what’s performing

Want to know some simple enough ways to know if your blogs are getting viewed?  In Google Analytics, go to the “Behavior” section and drill down to “Landing Pages”.  In there you’ll be able to find the blog URL(s) and see how many visits it had, new visits and even engagement and conversions (we’ll cover this in a later post).  You can also use a URL shortener to create a custom URL and maybe include that within your Tweets to track how many people clicked that link from that specific medium.  These can give you insights into topics that people want to read and share.

Tip #5 – Don’t ever stop writing!

This is probably the most important tip I can give.  Sure, in my industry it’s easy to say keep writing, it’s probably fairly easy to get it done.  We know and understand that value.  The thing is it takes time to see the fruits of this labor.  One blog will not generate the leads.  It takes a long time to build that content and trust.  And that means you’re opening doors to new ways to reach you, more pages to be indexed and ranked for on your site.  If today passes and you don’t verbalize your knowledge of your industry your company won’t shut down.  You don’t think “that’s it, we’re done because we didn’t talk to anyone today”.  Ridiculous, right?  Keep that same thinking with the blog.

My key takeaway is to keep writing, keep sharing, keep giving the world your knowledge.  Blogging for small business isn’t an overnight success.  In due time you will start to see the action you were hoping it would have!