Branding for Small Business

When I teach my clients how to come up with ideas for their business blogs I always emphasize: Your business blog should be mainly about your business, but you can also publish an occasional post unrelated to your business.

Writing about your area of expertise should come easy and naturally because you’re writing about stuff you know lots about. Even so, you can get stuck for ideas so I suggest you write article ideas down as soon as you come up with them. Use Post-it notes, napkins or open a Word document, whatever works for you.

One thing you should always remember: write as if you’re telling a story to a friend, so use a casual tone, without big words, as a matter of fact, try to throw in non-business words like “stuff” and “cool.” You’re not writing your blog to impress your peers, but to establish yourself as a likable person who is also an expert in the field of (insert your expertise here).

The trick in making a business blog successful is writing about your field of expertise but adding your own personal touch to the stories. I emphasize the word stories as compared to articles or blog posts.

Telling stories about your clients’ problems and how you solve them will not only bring out the you in your writing but will also make it easier for you to come up with content: simply listen to your clients’ needs, problems, complaints, etc. and you’ll have an unlimited source of content ideas.

People love to relate to stories. If you can find a way to package your knowledge into interesting stories you will have no trouble getting your audience to get to know, like and trust you. And what better way to start a client-provider relationship!

I must admit I was a reluctant blogger. I knew if I started a blog I would have to publish on it regularly, and being already busy with publishing my award-winning ezine and working with clients, I thought I’d never be able to keep up.

Good thing I found the time!

Now I not only love it, but I recommend it to all my business contacts and especially my clients. As an Email Marketing Coach I love email marketing, which still delivers a great rate of return on investment, but I’m the first to say: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket! If you’re a solo professional, or small business owner, you must publish an email newsletter, have an auto-responder, write on your blog, have a Facebook profile, do live business networking, etc.

Here are just three reasons why I love blogging:

1. It allows me to reach a much wider audience than by just publishing an email newsletter. Blogs have built-in features that basically “push” my content to search engines and blog directories. This would be hard, if not impossible, to accomplish by a “web 1.0″ web site. My blog site now allows me to reach out to my audience in 3 different ways: using RSS, RSS feed delivered by email, and via ezine subscription. This enables my audience to get my articles the way they prefer.

2. Deciding to build my new web site using WordPress, enabled me to create what I call a blog site: a combination of a static, web 1.0 web site, with the power and versatility of the Web 2.0 blog. My blog site is now search engine optimized, and every time I hit “Publish”, soon after, Google, Yahoo! and dozens of other services get “pinged” and my content gets indexed immediately.

3. Having a blog has also enabled me to attract the right type of prospects. Before starting a blog, my whole web presence was a 1-page “squeeze page.” It served its purpose well — it created a lot of subscribers to my e-newsletter — but after a while I realized that I wanted to attract a different type of prospect, one who’d like to get to know me a little bit before considering hiring me. A visitor to my blog site can now read my articles which build my credibility, so I don’t have to “sell” my self, my content does it for me.

Finally, blogging makes it really easy and fun to connect with other great professionals in the wider blogosphere.

Here are five people I’d like to see write a quick blog post on this topic:

Charmaine Idzerda
Sandy McMullen
Dr. Kiya L. Immergluck
Grace Yvonne Attard
Cheryl Scoffield

I invite YOU, the reader, too, to share here by commenting or on your own blog! Please send me the link if you post on your own blog. BTW, this whole thing started on TypePad.com – get the “official” guidelines.

Thank you Patsi Krakoff, for inspiring me to write this entry.

There’s an interesting discussion on the BlogSquad’s blog about how domains are handled by TypePad vs. WordPress.

A TypePad link to Denise’s blogpost “Tom Antion Reveals The Secrets of HIS Success to The Blog Squad” is http://www.buildabetterblog.com/2008/08/tom-antion-reve.html

On a WordPress blog this would be

http://www.buildabetterblog.com/2008/08/tom-antion-reveals-the-secrets-of-his-success-to-the-blog-squad.html

Now, which link has more keywords?

tom-antion-reve.html <-- this truncated post title
or
tom-antion-reveals-the-secrets-of-his-success-to-the-blog-squad.html <-- the full title

And, btw, you can edit these links, if you wish, to get rid of extra words such as "to, and, the" etc.

Another example, from my own blogsite
http://www.yourezinecoach.com/2008/how-to-make-money-with-email-marketing-send-email-promotions.html is also the permalink to this blog post.

On TypePad permalinks are in the form of: http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/145459/32319900

Ask yourself this: do I want to build links to TypePad and building their Google Page Rank, or my own domain?

I don’t like dealing in absolutes, so I won’t say WP is better than TP, but in this particular area it shines.

What do you think?

P.S.
By commenting on this blogpost, I accidentally discovered another weak spot in TypePad, and it has to do with displaying long links in posts. Take a look at how long URLs are displayed here, in my post, then compare the same in TypePad.