Blogging is part of starting a small business these days. Currently, part of your business’s ability to succeed relies heavily on your social media prowess. Regardless of how great your product is, you need to be able to promote it online. Here are a few blogging essentials that will take you from just having a great idea to the top of the social media ladder.
Get Ready for Mobile
Take the biggest social media site out there: Facebook has over 1.32 billion monthly active users around the globe as of June 2014, according to Statista. This number may not be surprising, but what is particularly notable is that one billion of those users utilize mobile devices to access the site. In other words, you need to optimized for mobile and present a strong image. Using a site like Designhill to design a logo that looks good on both mobile and desktop formats is a good way to start preparing. Logo design at Designhill is the type of investment that allows flexibility and unique visions to be achieved. That’s what you’ll want to earn attention in the age of social media.
Shareable Content
You need to make sure that your content is shareable, and that means making it attractive enough to have readers share links with their friends on social networking sites. Tweak Your Biz suggests adding plugins to your blog so you can insert social media buttons into your webpage, which makes content easily shareable.
A Good Layout
You need to ensure that your blog’s layout is solid. The best way to test this is to visit your blog from different computers and browsers. Blog layouts with sidebars, uncommon fonts, and other issues that don’t always translate well into different viewing mediums aren’t reliable. The key to a good layout is that it presents your content in the clearest, most effective way possible while remaining consistent across multiple browsers and platforms.
Queued Posts
You can’t be at your computer every second of every day to update your blog, and that’s where queued posts come in handy. You can prepare your content in advance, and then schedule your blog to update automatically at specific intervals.
Multiple Contributors
Don’t limit your blog content to only your own words. If you can get multiple people to contribute, then do so if they can write. Having a guest blogger to write a post is great, but change up the content. Sometimes posts made by the same writers can get redundant, so offer the torch to someone else once in a while. This can range from someone on your staff to another professional in the field who’s interested in helping you out.
Promoting Your Posts
Once you make a post, it’s time to promote it. One of the key points of marketing is having a targeted, narrow audience, and the same goes for blog posts. You could post a link to your latest post far and wide, on every social networking site that exists, in every language possible, and it still wouldn’t generate traffic if the topic isn’t something that interests people. Rather than wasting energy trying to get the word out in an unfocused way, Business 2 Community suggests sharing your blog post with sites that focus on specific topics, such as LinkedIn. In other words, if you’re writing a post about staff management practices in your small business, then LinkedIn would be a great venue. If your business deals with eCommerce, then trying to share it around different message boards focusing on the industry is a good way to draw attention.
Tracking Analytics
You need to understand where your traffic is coming from and how it’s getting there. Analytics allow you to review these statistics, and even if you’re not an expert when it comes to the more complicated figures, you can at least understand that a post someone reblogged of yours is generating traffic to your website. You can also tell how long someone stays on your landing page before either going elsewhere, or clicking on another page. This all provides useful information about the behavior of visitors to your website.
Establishing Voice
One of the most important parts of blogging is to cultivate a distinctive voice. Just like a writer who’s penning a weekly column, you need to be able to establish a particular tone while blogging. Putting a certain personality to the blogger identity is a great way to help your reader connect with the content being presented to them.
As a small business owner, you simply need to blog. Make no mistake that blogging is an essential part of professional life in this day and age, and you’ll need to create some kind of content that engages your customers as both buyers of a product as well as readers. However, by getting the basics down and connecting excellent customer service to excellent writing skills, you’ll be well on your way to ensuring that your content is worthy of your customers’ standards.
