Blogging is a great way to connect with your customers and prospects. Blogging gives you the opportunity to educate readers and, if you use the proper stories, connect with them on an emotional level. Connecting on an emotional level is key to developing the know, like and trust factor necessary to convert prospects into customers and retain the customers you currently have.
Many business owners get so overwhelmed with the thought of creating content they never start. You may be thinking, “I can not start a blog (or vlog); I simply do not have the time. What should I even write or talk about?” It is not nearly as hard as you think.
Consider how you can fit content creation into your schedule. There is not a “magic” number that guarantees success. Only do what you can reasonably add to your work schedule. A monthly post or video is better than no content at all and at the end of a year you have 12 pieces of content that can continually introduce you to your growing audience.
Topics are much simpler to come up with than you can imagine. Think about the questions people ask you regularly about your business. You can probably list 20 or 30 in 15 minutes without much effort. If you post every other week, answering those questions will fill your first year.
Google is great to quickly research topics. Since I help small businesses with planning and marketing, I searched “business strategy questions” and the first article in the results was titled 40 Strategic Questions to Ask to Evaluate Company Direction. This article was pretty much simply a list of 40 questions with a one-sentence elaboration for each and the questions were written to appeal to much larger companies than I work with, however they had several questions I can use to create blog posts.
This is question number three from the article: How effectively does your organization form and make profitable use of partnerships? I can easily write 400-800 words or speak for a few minutes on video about the benefits of strategic partnerships. I could do another post about how to evaluate if a specific strategic partnership is a good fit for your business. I just searched “haircut questions” and got plenty of results so I am sure you can find great topics no matter what your business specialty.
If you keep at your schedule of 12, 26, 52, 104 or even 365 posts per year, your content begins to add up. This is my 100th blog. I published my first blog June 3, 2014, three months after I started my business. In the beginning I had plenty of content creation time because I did not have any clients, so I posted once a week. As my client base grew my posting schedule became very erratic for a year. I then chose an every-other-week schedule and have kept that consistently over the past two years.
The best part of blogging/vlogging is that you get to keep reusing and repurposing the content once it is created. I rotate all my blog posts as social media posts every day. I now have enough posts that I do not repeat any for more than three months. By linking to my blogs from social media, I continually attract new readers. I also link to my blog posts in my newsletters, so my subscribers can access them easily.
I am now getting ready to create videos from my blog posts. (If you vlog you can repurpose by creating transcripts and posting them as written blogs.) I confess, not every one of my 100 posts are relevant to my business as it has evolved, so I am revisiting each post to determine if it still lines up with my business offerings. I expect 50-60 will make the list by the time I finish.
My plan is to take three days in August or September to sit in front of the video camera and talk about the topic in each of those blog posts. I will then have 50-60 short videos that I can start posting every other week which will give me video content for the next two years.
A blog (or vlog) is an essential place to send prospects and customers where they can see your evergreen content on a medium you control. Create your topic list and schedule the time on your calendar to get started.
Until next time…
Have a great day,
Susanne
If you feel you are spinning your marketing wheels, join me for a Marketing strategy session.
Many business owners get so overwhelmed with the thought of creating content they never start. You may be thinking, “I can not start a blog (or vlog); I simply do not have the time. What should I even write or talk about?” It is not nearly as hard as you think.
Consider how you can fit content creation into your schedule. There is not a “magic” number that guarantees success. Only do what you can reasonably add to your work schedule. A monthly post or video is better than no content at all and at the end of a year you have 12 pieces of content that can continually introduce you to your growing audience.
Topics are much simpler to come up with than you can imagine. Think about the questions people ask you regularly about your business. You can probably list 20 or 30 in 15 minutes without much effort. If you post every other week, answering those questions will fill your first year.
Google is great to quickly research topics. Since I help small businesses with planning and marketing, I searched “business strategy questions” and the first article in the results was titled 40 Strategic Questions to Ask to Evaluate Company Direction. This article was pretty much simply a list of 40 questions with a one-sentence elaboration for each and the questions were written to appeal to much larger companies than I work with, however they had several questions I can use to create blog posts.
This is question number three from the article: How effectively does your organization form and make profitable use of partnerships? I can easily write 400-800 words or speak for a few minutes on video about the benefits of strategic partnerships. I could do another post about how to evaluate if a specific strategic partnership is a good fit for your business. I just searched “haircut questions” and got plenty of results so I am sure you can find great topics no matter what your business specialty.
If you keep at your schedule of 12, 26, 52, 104 or even 365 posts per year, your content begins to add up. This is my 100th blog. I published my first blog June 3, 2014, three months after I started my business. In the beginning I had plenty of content creation time because I did not have any clients, so I posted once a week. As my client base grew my posting schedule became very erratic for a year. I then chose an every-other-week schedule and have kept that consistently over the past two years.
The best part of blogging/vlogging is that you get to keep reusing and repurposing the content once it is created. I rotate all my blog posts as social media posts every day. I now have enough posts that I do not repeat any for more than three months. By linking to my blogs from social media, I continually attract new readers. I also link to my blog posts in my newsletters, so my subscribers can access them easily.
I am now getting ready to create videos from my blog posts. (If you vlog you can repurpose by creating transcripts and posting them as written blogs.) I confess, not every one of my 100 posts are relevant to my business as it has evolved, so I am revisiting each post to determine if it still lines up with my business offerings. I expect 50-60 will make the list by the time I finish.
My plan is to take three days in August or September to sit in front of the video camera and talk about the topic in each of those blog posts. I will then have 50-60 short videos that I can start posting every other week which will give me video content for the next two years.
A blog (or vlog) is an essential place to send prospects and customers where they can see your evergreen content on a medium you control. Create your topic list and schedule the time on your calendar to get started.
Until next time…
Have a great day,
Susanne
If you feel you are spinning your marketing wheels, join me for a Marketing strategy session.
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