Original blog posts have become de rigueur in content marketing strategy.  And, while many small business owners know they should be writing a blog, they often don’t know where to start.

Why write blogs?

One of the most important things to realize is that your blog is an inexpensive, yet highly effective, marketing tool.

Blogs help small businesses achieve several important marketing goals at one time:

• Building robust website content
• Appearing higher in search results
• Establishing their expertise in the community and marketplace
• Helping customers get to know them
• Developing a loyal customer base
• Engaging customers and potential buyers
• Attracting social media followers

Plan Blog Topics and Keywords

Map out your topics 3-6 months at a time, keeping in mind that everything you post should have a strategic purpose that directly relates to your business and marketing goals. There should be a regular interval between each post, as well as a deadline for every article. Make sure you identify who in your business will be writing each post and that they stick to the schedule. Your article plan should include an article title; keywords that you want to appear in the title, subheads and body; and a brief description of what you want the article to accomplish.

Basic Blog Format

If you look at blogs as a very subtle soft-sell marketing method, rather than a press release or a news article, you can start to envision where you want to go with the copy.  What types of challenges/problems/wants/needs do your customers have and what do you do to help those customers? Educate your customers, and then provide tips and solutions for them.

I usually shoot for an ideal range of 500-800 words per post. I like to use subheads because they help with SEO, as well as make the copy “skimmable”. Other ways to help readers skim your text is by using bullets, numbers and lists.

Provide Links in the Text

It’s important to include some text links back to your website to help with the post’s SEO rank. I am not a big fan of overdoing text links. I think it’s a turnoff and, anyway, most people view articles with too many links as overt selling. The whole point of doing blogs is to NOT be too obvious. That being said, if you have a good opportunity to link to more information on a certain topic, especially if it’s another post you wrote, include the link.

Don’t Plagiarize

Your blog needs to be ORIGINAL. It should be in your words, written in your tone, in language that you use and that your customers understand. Statistics and supporting quotes should be cited.

Your entire site’s search rankings can be seriously penalized if Google detects too much duplication on even one page on your site. That means, if Google deems that your site contains too much duplication of any other online page, even one on your own site, your site will start appearing lower in search results. And believe me, Google CAN and WILL know. To protect yourself from plagiarism, invest in Copyscape, an inexpensive and very easy to use tool that can check each article for duplication/plagiarism.  There is no hard and fast rule about how much duplication is OK. In my opinion, your duplication rate should be less than 10% of the text for any one source.

Be Relevant

Your blog posts need to provide relevant, valuable information that people are searching for online. Google and other search engines are always looking for ways to provide more value to their users and customers. The more valuable your information (i.e., the more people that are searching for it), the more Google will reward you with higher search results.

For more information on content marketing and tips to write effective copy, visit my blog or contact me. Look at all those links!  I just broke my own rule.