A guide to blogging for small business owners.

1. For Small Business
BLOGGING
Jonathan F. Williams

2. Blogging For Small Business
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Connecting St. Louis
Introduction
If you're a small business with a website, you will likely have a blog or, at some point, you were told
that you needed to have a blog on your website. However, you might not have been told why you
need a blog. What is the purpose of the blog? How does a blog, which takes up so much time to
maintain, bene t you?
Now, blogging is time-consuming. You may have tried it but didn't see any immediate results. You
may have given up on it, or at least put it on the back burner. Without a direct correlation to sales, it
might be viewed as having a lower importance and not an effective use of your time.
For many businesses, you’re right. The way you've utilized your blog until now isn't an effective use
of your time, because you aren't using it correctly or have wrong expectations.
A blog can have a signi cant effect, even on small businesses, if used correctly. And in fact, they can
potentially be better for small businesses that are locally focused because the content can be
tailored so well to your audience.
So, with that introduction. Here are nine things you need to remember as you're blogging for your
small business.
1) Write for your customer, not for
your business.
Number one, and probably the most important out of this, is that you need to write for your
customer, not your business. This means that all the content you create needs to be tailored to your
customer and not made for another person like you.

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You know your business so well that you have a particular way of talking about it. However, a lot of
times that isn't necessarily how your customer talks about it, or the things you care about aren't
necessarily what your customer cares about. A blog is meant for your customer and the customer will
only read it if it has content that is relevant to them. Make sure as you're thinking of topics you
don't talk about features that you feel are relevant or why you think your company is excellent.
Talk about features and things that are great for your customer base and why they should choose to
use your business or your product.
2) Use your blog as an SEO tool.
SEO is short for “search engine optimization,” and that just means how easy people can nd your
content when using a search engine.
On Connecting St. Louis, we have a whole course dedicated to how you can get your website up and
going using a very practical, down-to-earth method for search engine optimization. One of those
things is blogging. And this goes back to the previous point about writing for your customer.
You need to write for your customer and write to cater to what people are searching for on the
internet. So if you haven't already, take that course, run through it to get ideas on how you can
write for your customer. Your blog can be an SEO tool for your website.
A blog is meant to house new content used to capture people searching for information and drive
them to your website. It’s a way of having fresh new content tailored to people’s questions or
solving problems that people have. The end goal is that once they are on your site, you have
mechanisms to encourage people to learn more about your products and services.

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As you’re keeping in mind the SEO aspect and keeping in mind what your customer wants to know,
make sure that you highlight what you know in your blogs. You want to show you're an expert in the
eld. Ensure that you are showing that you are knowledgeable in whatever eld or industry you
work in and that your business would be one that people want to hire based on your knowledge.
Provide value by showing that you know your stuff, give them critical insights that other businesses
would typically have but force their customers to pay for it. People appreciate getting something for
free, and people enjoy getting valuable information. When you provide them with that, you build
trust, which can turn into business later.
4) Follow your content calendar and
brand guide.
Make sure as you're blogging, you're following your content calendar, your brand guidelines, and
your business and branding that you have developed.
Don't blog about random topics that have nothing to do with anything which will not build your
business. A blog should demonstrate and build up a knowledge base that people can nd and utilize.
But, for it to be relevant, it has to be pertinent to your business. Writing about something that you
think is interesting to people, but isn't related to your business isn't going to help you in the long
run. Because if you drive random traf c to your website from random people that aren't going to use
your business, you're wasting your time.
So make sure you're writing relevant content for your website that drives the right traf c to your
website.
3) Write about what you know.

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On the other side of that coin, don't be afraid to deviate from your content calendar if you have
relevant content that just isn't what you had planned to create. So this is when a news story or a
trend pops up overnight and you can be part of that conversation with a very well-timed blog.
If It isn't part of your content calendar, but it still builds up your brand, don't be afraid to try to jump
on that trend and be part of that conversation by making that well-timed commentary.
5) Don’t be afraid to deviate from
your content calendar.
6) Pick a posting frequency and
stick to it.
So this is where that development of the content calendar comes into play.
You want to make sure you have a frequency for posting content on your social media platforms. So,
therefore, you need to have a frequency for creating blog content.
Remember, like most content strategies, blogging is an endurance sport, not a sprint. If you're not
seeing results after two to three months, keep at it. Make sure you are constantly evaluating and
reevaluating that the content you're producing is content your customer wants, and that it is
relevant to what people are looking for. But don't give up, keep doing it. This is an endurance race.
Build up a bulk of content and use that frequency.

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7) Make sure you have tracking and
measurement tools in place.
You're going to want to have Google Analytics or something similar on your site to track what posts
are the best performing and give you an idea of when your content starts picking up traf c. You
need to know what content is performing well and when that interest starts peaking because when
you see that, you might be able to build more content that's similar and is relevant. This may also
give you a heads up of when people’s interest in topics or items shift and what your business may
need to try to sell or how you're even branding and selling yourself to meet what people's interests
are.
8) Incorporate blogging into your
social and email plan.
You may already know that when you write a blog post, you need to send it out on social media.
What you also need to do is incorporate it into your email plan. You should highlight your blogs, and
make sure they're being sent out to your audience. And this is a way, especially in the beginning, to
make sure you can get some additional eyeballs on your content. Because posting a blog by itself,
just for an SEO strategy, is not how you do it. It needs to work together with your matrix of content
to make sure you're continually feeding one aspect into the other to be able to push out content to
your ideal audiences.
So make sure you include blogging in your social media plan.

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9) You need to know your goals
before you start.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this, you've probably already heard you need a blog before you
ever started reading this document.
But if you’ve already started to blog, what you probably didn't do is set out goals for why you are
blogging. You need to know these goals and have set up the KPIs, key performance indicators,
beforehand. So when you're tired of blogging and you think it's not working you will know what
you're working towards, how that's going to happen, and how to get there.
So here are some resources that can be bene cial to you for blogging:
https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/
https://problogger.com/
https://copyblogger.com/