How Small Businesses Can Make Blogging an Advantage

August 28, 2014 Blogging Guide

Small business owners generally operate within a business niche. A blog can serve as an effective marketing tool for small businesses to interact with their target audience and update them about the industry events, new product releases and any other useful information that is sought by their customers. The problem is that many small business owners who are new to the blogosphere find it difficult to come up with inspirations and ideas for their blog posts.

Here are some useful blogging tips that can help you get started.

Write Useful How-tos

Small business owners are generally experts in their niche. They can share their expertise with the target audience by creating useful how-tos that solve the problems faced by their clients. For instance, if you’re a life insurance provider, you can write a useful post on how to select the right life insurance plan. Likewise, if you provide laundry services, you can help your readers by creating a post on how to remove stains from clothes.

Solve a Problem

Inform your readers that you care about their problems by crafting posts that discuss problems faced by your readers as well as ways to solve those problems.

Promote Product/Service

While it’s not recommended to use your blog as a hard selling medium, you can cleverly touch upon problems faced by your readers and ways that your product or service can provide a solution to the problem. This type of promotion is effective in generating reader interest without requiring you to praise your offerings excessively.

Share Industry Insight

Establish yourself as an industry expert by offering reviews and analysis of ongoing issues affecting your industry. Discuss the future of your industry and how it can impact the readers’ lives. If there are any significant breakthroughs that have been achieved, don’t forget to mention them in your blog.

Now that you have several ideas to blog about, you must also work to make your content read-worthy:

Be Consistent

No matter how frequently or infrequently you blog, it’s important to stay consistent with the blogging routine. Your audience will relate to the pattern. If you suddenly vanish, you’ll lose a lot of traffic because the readers will find other sources for the information they seek.

Link to Other Authoritative Sources

Make intelligent use of links to point to other authoritative sources. For instance, if you’e blogging about life insurance products, you can quote an important fact and then link to its source. Note the following example:

According to this website, individuals should learn about the insurance options available for them.

Be Responsive

Respond to comments and queries that are left by users on your posts. Tone down the effect of negative comments by responding politely to those users.

Share your Posts

Use social media to promote your posts. This will enable you to gain minor traffic boost and the newfound readers may also become permanently associated with your blog.