Blogging Advice From The U.S. Small Business Administration

The United States Small Business Administration provides great resources for what the Administration considers to be "small" businesses (sometimes you can have 500 employees and still be considered a "small" business.

One of those resources consists of a series of blogs covering all sorts of subjects from insurance needs to, well, blogging.  A number of bloggers cover the subjects for the SBA. 

In the case of the below, my eye was caught by a headline offering eight tips for keeping a blog fresh.  http://www.sba.gov/community/blogs/community-blogs/small-business-matters/8-tips-keeping-your-business-blog-current-relThe blog was written by a young lady named Caron Beesley, described by the SBA thus:

Caron Beesley is a small business owner, a writer, and marketing communications consultant. Caron works with the SBA.gov team to promote essential government resources that help entrepreneurs and small business owners start-up, grow and succeed. Follow Caron on Twitter: @caronbeesley

Liking the blog and not worried about copyrights as these are my tax dollars at work I decided to copy portions of the piece and offer them here as a supplement to an earlier blog provided on this site so, without furthur ado:

"Search engines love to provide their customers with relevant, helpful, and up-to-date content and blogs provide this. Blogs are also less formal than static web content and this conversational tone is akin to the way people query search engines and connect with the content they find. 

• An up-to-date and informative blog is also an essential tool in your social media arsenal. If you keep your blog current you’ll never run out of useful tips, insights and relevant information to share with our Facebook and Twitter fans. It’s also a great way to get your audience to engage with your business and each other (via comments), and of course, a great way to drive traffic that you wouldn’t normally get to your website.

How to Keep Your Blog Fresh and Relevant
As a business blogger you don’t need to post five blogs a week; you just need consistency, relevance and a little inspiration.
Here are eight tips for keeping your small business blog current and fresh!

1. Write Within Your Means – You don’t need to write a long blog post (over 500 words) every time.  Keep your posts brief if you need to.  A great way of doing this is to use “fillers” (posting links to other blogs, event pages, YouTube videos, and so on) and frame them with an intro. Don’t do it all the time but it’s certainly a way to keep content fresh without spending too much time researching and writing.

2. Listen to and Get Blog Ideas from your Customers –Your customers, and potential customers, are your target audience and a great source for blog topic ideas. Listen to them. What are their challenges? How can your skills and expertise help them with their pain points? You don’t need to delve into how your product helps them; do that and you run the risk of sounding like a sales pitch. Instead, focus on your area of expertise and write about what is relevant to your customers.

For example, if you run a law business and get hundreds of questions about “How do I write a will?” or a fashion boutique owner who regularly finds yourself offering your customer’s style tips.  Use your blog articles to share your expertise and answer the questions you get every day. In this case the law business could write about “5 Things You Need to Know about Writing your First Will” and the boutique owner might wish to share “6 Tips for Pairing Old and New in your Closet”.

So lend an ear to your customers wherever they are -- on Facebook, on Twitter, in your store, in their homes, wherever you come into contact with them.

3. Look to What Others are Writing About – Inspiration can come from a variety of sources, and don’t feel that you have to reinvent the wheel with your blogs. Take the time to follow and read other blogs that relate to your field. What’s going on in the news? Is there a new industry development that’s worth writing about? Oftentimes you can spin a different angle on a topic that’s already been written about, or even reference that blog and weigh in with your comments (but never copy the article).

4. Showcase People – Why not feature willing customers? What they do, why they use you, real simple stuff. What about your team? Do you have any quirky characters or rock star employees that your customers love – showcase them so that your readers can get to know the people behind the business!

5. Invite Guest Bloggers – Take the burden off yourself every now and again while also opening the door to a new voice. Guest bloggers often cover ground that you can’t or provide a useful insight into another aspect of your industry. Guest bloggers might include a business partner, a vendor, or an industry expert. Be sure to give them plenty of advance notice to write the blog, and be prepared to discuss the angle you want their topic to take. You also want to subtly ensure that your quality is not impacted. Don’t be afraid to edit the guest post, just be sure to share the edits with the blogger as a courtesy – most guest bloggers welcome a second pair of eyes to review and polish up their work.

6. Turn on Comments –Simply put, comments are another way for readers to interact with you and each other. Don’t disable them, and be sure to monitor them for SPAM, etc.

7. Develop an Editorial Calendar – This is an absolute must and can really make the process of writing much easier because you do all the planning in advance. Use a simple spreadsheet to schedule your blogs – quarterly plans are good, but a monthly plan can also work. Remember, you don’t need to post any more than one or two blogs per week but having an editorial calendar can help you formulate your ideas in advance. Your calendar should identify your topic, describe the angle you are going to take, and assign an author and a due date. Be sure to check for any industry or market updates that might impact the angle your blog takes. Then, when you’re ready to write the blog you can hit the ground running.

8. Keep it Focused on Business –The number one golden rule of business blogging: never veer into personal musings on how fast your kids are growing up or what the dog got up to at the park.  Yes, you can add your personal wit and humor to the tone of your blog, but do keep it focused on your business interests and not your personal life."

I hope you enjoyed this piece.  While aimed at a general audience the approaches to blogging applies to a manufacturing concern as much as it does to the smallest retail shop.

Don't Forget To Tell The Customer Why Your Product Should Be The Product They Choose To Purchase

Are you telling your customers why they should choose your product over that of your competitors?

At a more basic level, do you even know what makes your product superior to the product your competitors bring to market?

Decades ago this was state of the art

Most business owners give us a quizzical look when we ask those two questions of them then, as often as not, put on a sheepish grin and admit they’ve never really thought about the answers in very much depth.  Like most of us, they have simply assumed their products are superior to the competitors and, even worse, have, unconsciously, assumed the fact is self-evident to the client.

The two questions are important to consider from time to time because, especially in the modern marketplace, customer needs and desires shift more frequently than you might imagine.  If you are selling basically the same product you sold five or ten years ago you  are probably not meeting the needs of the marketplace in the same way you did then.  That may be better for you or, it may not be.

So, go ahead and seriously answer the two questions posed above.  If the answers you come up with aren’t what you thought they might be, it is time to reassess.  Sometimes reassessment means reworking your marketing approaches.  Sometimes it means actually making adjustments to your product to meet new market demands.  

First, the product.

By way of an example that holds true whether you provide a good or a service and, applies to nearly all industries, imagine you provide processing equipment for the forest products industry.  In this case we will assume a head rig (the primary saw in the mill responsible for initial breakdown of a log into slabs that will become lumber). 

You’ve probably seen old photos of very large trees loaded onto trucks or rail cars for shipment to the sawmill taken in the early days of the sawmill industry in the United States.

Well, the sort of timber seen in the old photos is actually, for the most part, considered to be undesirable in today’s marketplace because most mills can’t handle the stuff these days.  Sawmills able to routinely mill very large logs are few and far between.  In today’s world, what was once the standard is out of date.  



Modern head rigs use thin kerf blades to get more lumber out of each log

The lesson is that equipment, goods and/or services produced for yesterday’s markets will no longer be attractive to the modern buyer.

The same is true of nearly any product in any industry sector.  While the example above is a bit extreme for illustrative purposes, the principle stands; in the modern marketplace no one can afford to fall behind when it come to assuring the equipment, services or other products are those the customer wants.

The big advantage of taking a close look at the marketplace in terms of products offered in competition with yours is the assessment will lead you to gauge the areas your own business excells in.   

Modern marketing, or plain, old-fashioned traditional marketing; the need to present excellent materials with a strong message about your products remain the same.

It doesn’t matter how much money you spend on point of sale materials, catalogues, web sites and other technologies you might use to reach the customer base if those materials do not clearly, and almost instantly upon presentation, tell the customer why you should be the vendor of choice for the product you produce.

An excellent way to get potential customers involved in your marketing materials almost instantly, and positively, is to use headlines to ask questions rather than make statements.

By way of example, some modern sawmill head rigs can recover as much as 30% more value from a saw log than conventional technology can deliver.

A perfectly valid headline for one portion of your marketing materials in light of the above would be, “Recover up to 30% more lumber from each log you mill.”

Very thin saw blades (thin kerf) means more log turned into lumber and less turned into sawdust - an important new advantage in today's marketplace

But what if you say the same thing in the form of a question?

“Would 30% more lumber recovery from each log you mill enhance your profitability?”

The reader, without even thinking about the question thinks, “Well, of course a 30% increase in yield would help profitability.”

By asking a question you’ve caused the reader to make a positive statement in his or her mind about an important attribute of your product even before he or she begins to get into the nuts and bolts of the offering.

The entire task to be performed by your marketing materials is to convince potential customers you are the option of choice when it comes to purchasing product.  To keep your approach to the marketplace fresh you must constantly refresh your own knowledge, not only regarding your competitor’s products but your own as well.  Then, you can use the knowledge you gain through the use of conscious self examination to enhance the desirability of your company’s products in the marketplace.

 

Put Your Best Face Forward

Review your marketing materials.

If everything is stale, you really need to invest the time, energy and money needed to make it new again.  If your competitors are moving ahead can you afford not to?

The decision to update sales materials can be a tough one.  People are busy, budgets are stressed, and the economy is sluggish so you might be tempted to think that old package of sales materials has been “good enough” for a long time and probably will be good enough for another year or two.  “I’ll get to it later,” you might say.  You might even mean it.  But, then, think back to how often you’ve said exactly that in the past. 

Later is always, by definition, later.

Equipment In Action Is Always More Interesting

The problem is, the world you do business in, no matter what business sector you operate in, has seen huge change over the past ten years.  If you’re not keeping up with the times it’s likely your sales won’t either, especially if your competitors are keeping up.

One important note:  If you think your web site or other electronic efforts mean you don’t need to keep up with the times regarding your physical sales materials you should seriously reconsider.  The computer revolution has brought significant change to the art of promotion but, computers have not changed everything.  A well considered package including physical sales tools produced in conjunction with your electronic approaches can blow away a competing sales effort depending only on web sites, Facebook pages and other electronic media; as many still do not use Facebook, blog sites or other opportunities available as the result of the computer revolution.

Does your sales presentation need an update?

Take a look at your sales materials as though you are a potential customer for your own products and ask yourself a few questions:

·        When you give your materials to a customer can that customer, at a glance, “get” your major selling point?  Why should the customer consider your products.  If you haven’t told your best story it is time to revise your products.

·        Do your photos, and other illustrative materials, wherever possible, show action or are they static and uninteresting?

·        Do printed materials comport with the approaches you’ve taken on-line?  Inconsistency means a weakened marketing approach.

·        Have you kept up with the needs of the market and are those needs reflected in your sales presentations?  Even a 50 year old product can be presented as being “state-of-the-art” if it truly is; but you need to tell your customer about it.

·        All things considered, are you proactively telling your customer they have to consider you or risk falling behind in their own business approaches?  If not, you should be.  Leave nothing to the customer’s imagination; it’s up to you, not the customer, to do the work of convincing that customer they haven’t done their due-diligence if they haven’t contacted you before making purchasing decisions.

There is good news for the business looking to upgrade sales presentations.  Trade World Communications has been helping customers with the kinds of things discussed above for more than 30 years.  During that time we have seen:

·        The costs of developing new materials drop by 70 – 80% or more.  Graphics used to consume a huge part of the budget.  Computers have changed all that;

·        The range of options for approaching the marketplace increase by hundreds of percent.  Have you thought, for example, about doing a book featuring your business history and experiences in the trade?  Only ten years ago the costs would have been prohibitive for most;

·        Print costs have dropped exponentially over the costs to be expected even five years ago while print quality has seen enhancements nearly in equal measure.  Today you can print an entire book for two or three dollars a copy and, you can change it at almost any time at almost no cost.

The printed word is still central to a modern marketing effort.  Now is the time to determine whether or not your own materials are up to snuff.

A few years ago Trade World Communications was commissioned to undertake an unusual writing project; we were asked to write press releases for a number of a particular trade magazine’s advertisers.

Why is that unusual?

The magazine had space to run industry press releases, complete with color photos, and no one was sending releases in!

Imagine you are press releasing a log debarding machine... would this photo tell the reader more or...

Think about that for a moment.

A typical trade journal is mailed to a very high percentage of an industrial manufacturer’s potential client list.  The magazines are read by a reasonably high percentage of those getting the magazine, albeit not necessarily when the magazine arrives.  In the forest products industry, for example, magazines arrive throughout the year but, in the summer and fall a contractor is working 24 – 7 during the appropriate weather windows so a magazine may go unread until winter when more time is available.

A typical press release might consume an eighth of a page or so in the magazine with a headline, a photo and a description of a product or service highlighting its advantages.

Depending on the magazine it might cost hundreds of dollars to run an eighth page ad in a typical trade magazine but the press release runs for no cost at all save the manufacturer’s cost to write it and provide the photo.

That means each time a manufacturer fails to write and send a press release that manufacturer is choosing to throw several hundred dollar bills in the trash.

Does that make any sense at all?

A good press release has a fairly simple structure.  To save time and energy I’ll assume the reader is writing the release and will use the pronouns “you” and “your” in the following.

First, a headline.

If you send a release without a headline the magazine will write the headline for you so you should write your own headline to increase the chances your message will be presented as strongly as possible.

An example might be:  Trade World Communications Offers A Press Release Service To Increase Market Reach For Manufacturers.

The headline might be too long for many magazines so they will shorten it and you’ve lost nothing but, if a magazine does replicate the headline you’ve gained.

Next, a photo. 

If possible provide a clear, high resolution photo of the equipment in the spotlight actually in place and, if action can be photographed, show the action.  A picture of a grinder, for example, shooting ground up material into a truck is more dynamic, and, thus, more likely to produce interest than a photo of that same grinder sitting in a parking lot might be.

Would the reader be more likely to react to an action photo?

Third,  tell the story well.

Most press releases, as they actually run, are about 100 – 125 words long but, sometimes, magazines have extra space so they will print something longer if it doesn’t mean more work for them.

To “tell the story,” think about what you look for when you read a new product description in a magazine.  You want to know what the product can do for you.

In the first 100 – 125 words explain the benefit the service will provide the reader.  Don’t write, “We are offering a bigger widget than we had before.”  Instead, write, “My company’s new widget will increase your production by 23%, your down time, compared to the competition by 16%, and, based on field trials, reduces fuel consumption by 18%.  Notice, the numbers are not divisible by five.  Even if your studies show a 25% increase in production, the claim that a 23% increase is possible sounds more like you’ve actually examined the issue.  Using numbers divisible by five gives the impression that you’re just making the numbers up.

In a future blog Trade World Communications will examine additional factors important to optimizing your press release effort but, one last bit of advice:

When you turn in a press release you will almost certainly be contacted by salespeople for the magazines you’ve sent the release to.  They deserve the same respect, and their products deserve the same consideration, you would like your own salespeople to receive when contacting a potential customer.

Especially if you are on a limited budget, but would still like to advertise, ask that your ad not run in the issue the press release runs in but, rather, in the issue following.  Recognition and response to any advertisement increases with multiple views.  By running the ad in the issue succeeding the issue the press release runs in you’ve multiplied potential viewer ships and, potential response.

Build Business With Blogs

You’re a manufacturer providing a product to the industrial marketplace. 

Over time you’ve built up a great customer base and you are aware how vital it is to stay in touch with each and every customer, both because aftermarket sales are important, and to assure that when new equipment is needed, you are the first company contacted.  After all, companies are sold, project engineers change jobs and, a dozen other issues can break the chain of awareness that is so important to maintaining a long term relationship with your customer.  You also want to make sure your website is visited when a potential customer not familiar with your company decides to move ahead with a project requiring a product like yours. 

In the world of modern marketing, a company blog located on your website can help you effectively stay in touch with existing customers as well as reach out to the larger marketplace.  Properly done, existing customers will consider your blog a value added service even as the blog functions to attract new traffic to your web presence.

A blog is a section of a company website updated regularly by whomever you choose to be your blog writer with content generally more informal in nature than the more structured content on the rest of the site.  Blog viewers are generally not only allowed but, encouraged, to interact by commenting on the material posted on the blog.

For some companies, a blog can function as a substitute or virtual website, directing readers to other social media sites or performing other necessary tasks.

Blogs are very low cost; the primary cost is the time and effort needed to post regularly.  A new post should be written and “on the air” at least twice a month.  Readers visiting a page and finding everything to be old and stale are unlikely to come back.  A company is better off not having a blog if a commitment to keeping fresh material posted regularly cannot be made.  Your blog writer, whether a single person or a number of people assigned to keep the blog current, must be instructed to write and post on a schedule to assure the work gets done.

Blogs allow a company to show its human side.  A good way to look at them is to consider the blog to be the salesperson.  The associated website represents the company brochure or catalogue.  

Blogs serve a second function, one important in attracting potential customers who may not be familiar with your company to your web or social media sites. 

When your customers, or potential customers, decide to investigate the marketplace they ask Google, Bing, or some other search engine, to search the web for sites featuring the product or information they are seeking.  Imagine, in the case of this site, you enter in the term, “build business.”

The web search engine filters the billions of options on the web looking for the words build and business or similar terms that may be appropriate.

Google’s programmers have developed ever more sophisticated search engines, able to discriminate, better than ever before, between appropriate content and chaff.  If you are not posting new blog content regularly or the content is old and out of date, the search engine is likely to ignore your offering but, if you are writing lively blog content on a regular basis the search engine will move your site up on the list, enhancing the odds your target audience will browse to your site.

Because your potential customers are entering search terms specific to you it is important your blog writer have a list of appropriate terms likely to be typed in by a potential customer and then use those terms when writing the blog but, don’t go overboard.  A Google publication titled Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide points out that while optimization is important, “Focusing too hard on specific tweaks to gain ranking in the organic results of search engines may not deliver the desired results. Search engine optimization is about putting your site's best foot forward when it comes to visibility in search engines, but your ultimate consumers are your users, not search engines.”

In today’s world a well written blog is a must, acting as your on-line salesperson and, keeping you in touch with your existing customer base.

Start blogging!

Business Newsletters Are Not Out Of Style

If Your Company Does Not Have A Newsletter You May Be Missing Out

 Here's what the professionals have to say about business newsletters:

Perdue University Cooperative Extension: 

“Newsletters can serve a number of purposes.  They can create or increase awareness, provide basic information, or create a sense of stability and commitment for a project.”

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University:

“Twelve focus groups were held with 94 producers in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia to discuss their preferred learning methods and what that means for Cooperative Extension program development and delivery….Fifty-two percent of the producers preferred newsletters as a learning method.”

Mississippi State University researchers regarding the owners of family forests:

“Top methods for informing landowners were consistent across the four state region and included:  newsletters (49%), pamphlets/brochures (44%), and letters (31%).”

In A World Of Large Corporations Newsletters Allow Smaller Firms To Be Competitive

Newsletters allow you to stay in contact with your best potential customer, the customer who’s appreciated you in the past.  They can also function as a friendly, non-threatening “brochure” when sent to customers or clients you may not have dealt with in the past but, would like to open up a relationship with.

Blogs and other forms of social media are important to the modern approach to advertisings but sometimes, "everything old is new again."