Tagged: Business
5 Steps to a Business Blog
- by Alyson Shane
One of the best ways to make your business stand out online is by blogging regularly. It helps establish you as a thought leader in your industry, gives you a way to share things relevant to your audience or client base, provides valuable SEO content, and gives you tons of information to add to a newsletter (if you don't have one, see why you should here.)
However, for someone who has never blogged before it can be a daunting task to tackle head-on, which is why I've broken things down into five easy steps. Let's get started!
1. Define your blogging goals
Ask yourself: what do I expect to get out of blogging for my business? If you can't answer that question, take a look at a few common blogging goals below:
- Establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Ideally people will read your blog and see that you know what you're talking about, which in turn makes them trust your business.
- Create unique share-able content for social media. If all you do is share information about sales and products then people will stop paying attention pretty quickly, because people want to feel like you're doing more than just selling a product or service at them.
- Improve your Search Engine Optimization rankings. Instead of ranking for keywords relevant to your business. products or services, you can rank for the topics that your audience or customers are interested in as well.
The biggest thing to keep in mind when setting your blogging goals is how they align with the kind of content your audience and customers want to read. By posting interesting, relevant content you'll guarantee a growing group of dedicated readers.
2. Do your research
Before you hit 'publish' on your first post, take some time to see what your competitors are blogging about. The topics they discuss, their tone (formal or informal), and the style of posts (video, text-based, infographic, etc) give you a better understanding of what your audience expects, and if you should be blogging at all.
Once you've identified a few competitor'd blogs, spend some time looking into things like post frequency, which topics they discuss, who writes them, and how much engagement they receive.
3. Choose a blogging platform
The software you choose will depend on a variety of factors, such as how much time you want to spend setting up your blog, how customized you want it to be, how much functionality you want, and whether you want to integrate it into your existing website (spoiler alert: you do. Don't drive traffic away from your main website if you can help it!)
The best thing to do is to have your entire site hosted on a blogging platform such as WordPress, Tumblr, Medium, SquareSpace, or Blogger. With the exception of Medium you can change the design (or theme) for your blog to any of the offered themed, or you can tweak the existing templates, if you're savvy like that. This allows you to have all of your business' info in one place.
I would also recommend using your own domain name instead of the free URL generated by the platforms (eg: the WordPress site will read "www.yoursitehere.com" instead of "www.yoursitehere.wordpress.com." Paying for a domain is cheap (mine is $7/mth) and is incredibly more pforessional-looking, so if you're serious about your website and your blog, make sure that you buy a domain and point it to the hosted site.
The upside to hosted solutions is that you don't have to maintain the website itself, though it does limit your customization.
4. Decide which topics to cover
If you've spent some time defining your goals and doing your research, then you should have a pretty good idea as to what kinds of topics to cover for your business blog.
Still stuck? Follow these steps for some additional inspiration:
- Think broadly about your topics. Don't worry about specific post titles - think about the kinds of topics that would interest people involved in your industry. Eg: if you work in content marketing, write about topics like social media.
- Break these larger, broader ideas down into subcategories. For social media this could look like: link building, SEO tips, making the most of different social platforms, etc.
- Once you have these subcategories you can start doing research into keywords and popular topics. One of the best ways to do this is to use GoogleAdwords Keyword Planner, which will give you up to 800 related keyword phrases for each of your subcategories.
A word of warning: don't blog about things that you don't understand! If you think you want to blog about a particular topic, do your research first. Read extensively about your desired topics and then start writing.
5. Plan, plan, plan!
One of the most important steps is to plan out a posting schedule. An abandoned, empty blog is worse than no blog at all, so based on your competitor's blogs, figure out how often you should be posting new content (daily, weekly, etc) and if this is something that you can manage on your own. If not, consider getting an employee to handle researching and publishing your content for you, or hiring a ghostwriter who will write on your behalf.
Once you know who will be writing and how often, outline your blogging goals in a specific manner so you know what milestones you want to achieve and when. Some examples include 10,000 visitors per month, a 6% conversation rate from readers to customers, or to increase search visibility from 15 keywords to 75 keywords. Ultimately, these goals are up to you.
Make sure to also outline a process for coming up with topic ideas and turning those topics into written, edited and published content. You don't need to include exact dates and times per-se, but something like "publish a blog post every Friday" can be sufficient.
The process of creating this sort of content plan is called creating an Event Calendar, which is a key factor in making sure that you always have fresh, interesting content to post on your blog and share across social media.
You're done!
By this point you've thought about what sort of blog you need to have, how you're going to host it, what sorts of topics you're going to discuss, and who will be writing your content for you.
While these aren't always easy steps to implement, they are crucial to make sure to you start blogging the right way, and that your blog doesn't fizzle up and die after a few posts. By planning in advance and doing your research, and can make sure that your blog will bring you the results that you want for years to come.
Do you have any tips for starting a business blog? I'd love to hear them!
5 Questions to Ask Yourself About Your Marketing
- by Alyson Shane
The other day while out with my friend Kenton we got to discussing the freelance market, and how more and more businesses are turning to freelance content marketers to help them with their marketing needs.
One of my big takeaways from that conversation was that many business owners don't know when to start "letting go" of certain aspects of their business. As in, they spend way too much time doing (or neglecting) important things that they could simply outsource, even when it becomes detrimental to their business.
With that in mind, I figured I'd put together a short list of questions to ask yourself if you're a business owner who might be trying to shoulder too much of their business burden:
1. When did I last update my website?
While tools for building websites aren't in short supply, maintaining one which is accurate, up-to-date, compelling, mobile-friendly, and SEO-optimized requires more than just a landing page with a picture. A great website needs to do more than just look good - it needs to drive conversions like calls, emails, leads and customers, which includes ongoing investment in SEO content, structure and metadata.
Follow-up Questions:
- Do I want to spend time worrying about updating my website?
- Do I stress about creating engaging content?
- Am I strong enough writer to create content quickly and efficiently?
2. Do I want to keep up with SEO?
Staying up-to-date with the constant changes in Search Engine Optimization is among the most complex aspects of online marketing. It requires keeping tabs on which search engines people are using the most and ensuring that your website and web presence perform well on search-engine results pages after these updates.
Follow-up Questions:
- Does looking at SEO information make me go cross-eyed?
- Am I more interested in running my business than managing where it shows up on Google?
- Am I willing to spend the time to keep up-to-date with new SEO changes?
3. Am I getting results from my search engine advertising?
Techniques like Google AdWords can be one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways of generating new prospects, but if you've ever tried it you know that it requires much more than signing up, setting a text ad and waiting for the customers to roll in.
You need effective, compelling text that drives searchers to an optimized, relevant landing page, and a knowledge of your target audience so you're spending your money on driving visitors who are likely to buy from you. Understanding how to do this requires daily maintenance and analysis.
Follow-up Questions:
- Do I have the time to dedicate to analyzing and refining my campaigns to yield better results?
- Do I know what Google Pigeon is? Do I care?
4. Is my social media fan base my target audience?
You've signed up for a Facebook page and you've got a handful of 'Likes' - but what does that mean, exactly? Are you concerned in vanity numbers (aka, how many 'Likes' you have) or are you looking deeper at what sorts of people have shown an interest in your page?
How often are you looking at things like how many of your fans and followers are even in your immediate service area? How regularly are you updating your sites with relevant, interesting content that engages followers on your social media platforms? How are you leveraging paid advertising opportunities on these sites?
The key to successful content marketing is creating content that generates word-of-mouth and site traffic which boosts your website's SEO.
Follow-up Questions:
- Do I really know how to reach out to my target audience?
- Am I engaging with the right people?
5. Do I know my marketing ROI?
Anyone can pull together charts and graphs which show likes, follows and visitors to your site, but when you look at these numbers and figures, do you know how to make sense of the information there? Do you know how to translate this information into steps that will help your business grow?
Follow-up Questions:
- Do I want to look at daily, weekly, and monthly analytics to pull information from them and then apply them across all all of my marketing efforts?
- Does trying to make sense of my marketing efforts seem like more work than I want to do?
Do you recognize any of these signs as ones that indicate that you might need to start outsourcing your marketing? If not, do you think it's valuable to outsource your marketing? I'd love to know!
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Is Bitchiness the Key to Success?
- by Alyson Shane
I've been listening to an audiobook of Amy Poehler's new book Yes, Please on my phone over the past little while.
Most of what I know of her is of her character on Parks and Recreation and at first I had trouble reconciling Lesley Knope's ridiculously-cheerful character with Poehler's aggressive statements and observations about success, such as "sometimes I worry that not enough people hate me".
Throughout her book, she paints a clear picture that she got to where she is by busting her ass and not taking shit from people.
What struck me about this is that the scenes she uses to illustrate these points - such as screaming at some jerk on an airplane who was harassing her - are commonly identified as being "bitchy behaviours." Even though she spends all of her time working to promote herself and further her career, she still has to deal with people who refer to her as A Bitch.
As a businessperson I totally identify with this - I haven't accomplished what I have by sitting back and waiting for it to come to me. I've blogged for years, maintain an active online presence, jump at the option to speak publicly and share my knowledge, and make a living hustling to get my name out there. Sure, it's paying off, but it's taken time and dedication and I've definitely been called names once or twice during that time -largely when I've stood up for myself.
So as I've been listening to the audio book I've found myself wondering "obviously a no-BS attitude is the key to being successful, but does that actually classify as 'bitchy behaviour'?"
I don't think so, and here's why:
Being "a bitch" actually doesn't mean refusing to take shit from people and being ambitious as hell, it means being mean and deliberately nasty, which we should all strive not to do regardless of our career aspirations.
However, unfortunately women are often classified as being "bitches" when they exhibit ambitious behaviour or stand up for themselves because of larger (unfortunately in many cases still extremely pervasive) gender inequality issues that exist within our society.
Too often, our society uses negative language to discredit successful women and to downplay their efforts. By calling an assertive woman a bitch, we're stripping her of any power that she might have because it implies that the only reason that she got to where she is in her life was through underhanded and nasty tactics. She doesn't actually deserve your respect, attention, or admiration because she's just a bitchy woman, nothing special.
I've seen men do this far too often, and -perhaps more worrying- I've seen women do it as well. Women are taught to be jealous of other women's successes, and name-calling is one tactic that we employ to justify our feelings of jealousy or insecurity.
So how can we be successful without being "bitches"?
I think the secret is to start trying to reclassifying what is actually "bitchy" (nastiness, underhanded behaviour, etc) and what is just plain old ambition and drive, and to start focusing more on the ways in which women work together to be successful.
Women need to say nice things about other women.
A great local example is the Women's Enterprise Centre of Manitoba. There are heaps of super-talented ladies involved with helping one another working there, and nobody is going around saying things like "this totally successful bitch taught a class the other day."
Instead, they say things like "I met this amazing woman the other day. She was driven and focused and really knew what she was talking about. She doesn't take shit from anyone!"
These are the kinds of stories that we should be telling about women in business, and when women like Amy Poehler publish memoirs like Yes, Please, which encourage women to stand up for themselves and not be doormats who wait for their careers to be handed to them, we should applaud her efforts, not call her a "bitch" and downplay her drive.
