Those were just 3 of the reasons I was given as to why small businesses don’t blog last week.
I was presenting to a local business networking group and it was a great day. A group of small businesses all focused on one thing – building their businesses in the best way they could.
I was there to talk about blogging, and the three points in the title of this email came up time and time again.
- They KNOW they should blog, but they don’t have the time
- They KNOW blogging will build credibility and search engine positions, but they can’t think of things to blog about
- They KNOW that people say blogging is good, but they can’t quite get their heads round why.
After a quick demonstration of how a blog post can be indexed and on the front page of Google within 15 minutes (phew! It worked!), and some searches to show how well blog posts do in the search engines, they were well on the way to getting the answer to the last point.
That’s the easy part Proving blogging can work for pretty much every business isn’t rocket science after all.
After a quick session on title writing and writing for your readers as well as search engines (a little secret I shared saw more than one light go on), we tried to address the first two concerns.
How do you make more time? Well simply put, you can’t. What you can do is MAKE the time for blogging. Like anything else, at first it will take longer and be more difficult, but after a while it becomes second nature. Something that took an hour or more in the beginning will take ten minutes or so once you’re used to it.
As for things to write about, there are infinite possibilities! I covered 21 Things You Can Blog About Today – and there are more ideas in The 30 Day Blogging Challenge.
The thing that enlightened most attendees was the fact that your blog shouldn’t be all ‘me me me’ – yes it’s nice to share news of your new clients, your best products and your latest achievements, but then your blog just becomes a news repository, not a promotional tool.
A well written blog generates:
- Credibility
- Loyalty
- Community
- and obviously leads and sales
I know it’s not an easy step for a lot of people, as it’s a different way of ‘advertising’ to that which has been used previously.
But it works, and it works well – is it worth investing a few hours of your time this week to kickstart your blog?
