Blogging for Small Business Owners – Get on the “Diet”

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If you’re a small business and not blogging aggressively, you are missing a huge opportunity to capture search engine rankings from your competition”

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While many businesses are shifting their marketing efforts to Twitter and Facebook, blogging is still an extremely important and relatively easy way of producing content that gets your site ranked in search engines.

Pushing out fresh content on a blog not only boosts your SEO, but it can give your brand a personality that can sets your business apart from the competition. Despite the benefits it provides, blogging can get to pretty time consuming if you’re already running a small business.

While outsourcing your content to a copywriter or a service like Text Broker can often save time, it can be very expensive. We encourage small business owners to keep blogging in-house if they can. The reality is – you should . eep it in house, because no one knows your business like you do (hopefully, anyway).

[quote]If you’re an expert in your industry, chances are you can easily write great blogs quickly.”[/quote]

So the question is: How am I supposed to work blogging into my busy schedule? We look at it his way. Blogging is like a diet; you have to stick to it for a long time if you want it to work. If you blog for two weeks, you should get a little jolt in traffic, but that will quickly disappear when you stop.

This doesn’t mean you have to write a new blog everyday (most people we work with don’t). You just need a steady stream of content posting to your blog. Check out these tips that we find help small business owners stay on the Blogging Diet.

• Pick a day or two out of the month, and write out as many blog posts as you can. Writing out a few weeks worth of content in one sitting will ensure you’ll have a steady stream of blogs coming out and won’t have to constantly be distracted from running your business.
• Write about what you know, and try to come up with as many topics as you can. Instead of writing a huge post about one broad subject; break it out into as many as you can. Make sure you balance quantity with quality.
• If you’re focusing on keywords in your blogs, choose a few and keep a list of them with you while you write. Using keywords is important, but it can make writing difficult sometimes. Often, when I’m writing SEO optimized content, if I’m overwhelmed with keywords it’s hard to write. Stick with a few, and try to use them as much as you can. Focus on informative writing that sounds natural.

Keep these tips in mind when you blog and your should be seeing results in no time.