Social Media Advice: How To Write a Blog For Small Business
(Sub-lesson 1: Write titles that use keywords your audience will use to find you when searching…like the headline above ;-)
Some advice I shared with some folks after my lecture/rant at UCLA that might be helpful to the rest of the class concerns “blogging for a company”. The question was “what do we blog about?”, and it’s a good question.
There’s a number of different functions that blogs can serve (communicating with your supply chain, investor relations, product tips and tricks, etc…and these could all be separate blogs). From a PR or marketing standpoint, here’s some suggestions:
- identify (“listen to”) the bloggers that currently influence a) the mainstream media that talks about our industry and b) the “end users” of your product. You can do this by searching Technorati, Delicious, and Google Blog Search. Punch some keywords about your business into Filtrbox (a women’s shoemaker might use “jimmy choo” “nordstrom” “women’s shoes” “shoe department”) and read through the results. If a particular keyword or phrase isn’t giving you good sources, switch it up. Google Alerts is also a good starting point.
- Read those blogs (and search results) for 30-90 days.
- Bookmark interesting posts for future reference.
- After a couple months, summarize in a 1 page memo the principal topics of concern and the top 10 most “important” or authoritative outlets
- Put yourself in the top 10 blogger’s shoes and write a blog that they would want to read
- Start leaving insightful comments on their blogs. Use your full name and link back to your own blog in the name/email/url field of blog comments. At this stage, you only need to disclose your own company if you’re saying something provocative or opinionated. Play it safe and just say positive things about everyone, including competitors.
- You only need to write a couple of blog posts a week, and they can be VERY short; 1 or two paragraphs is plenty,
- Link often to the people you want to influence.
After you do this stuff for a while, you’ll become a part of the community that you want to infuence. If you’re not a sociopath, it will be apparent to you how to build and spend social capital in a way that positively affects your company’s business.
(This is by no means comprehensive, just a starting point ;-)
