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.