One thing I hear small business owners say to me a lot is: ‘I don’t have time to do my website.’
I get that. You’re trying to wear many different hats, and the last thing on your to-do list is write content for your website, or make sure that the right information is easily available there.
But quite often, I find myself remarking: ‘why is their book now button at the very bottom of their homepage?’ or ‘why do I have to navigate through 5 different webpages before I can find their pricing?’
Those are both UX (‘user experience’) questions – for another blog post – and they’re fairly easy to identify and sort out.
The question for small business owners is this: how do you market your products and services to people without feeling like you’re selling to them?
I’m not saying that you should never promote any deals or offers, as there is definitely a time and place for that. Customers will want to know about things that have urgency, like ‘our special offer for XYZ closes tomorrow,’ or ‘we have one slot available in the next few months – don’t miss out!’
Those offers depend on their timebound urgency, but the problem is that once they’ve expired in a day, a week or a month, that piece of content is finished. You can’t squeeze any more business out of it.
So if you’ve written a blog post about that offer, and people start to find that online, it’s not serving any purpose. As soon as the customer sees that the deal has ended, they’re more than likely to simply leave (i.e. bounce) off that webpage and continue looking at your competitors’ websites.
An easy solution
There is an easy solution to this, and it lies on the very same blog that you should have on your website to promote deals and special offers.
It requires some planning, and time writing it up and optimising for SERPS (search engine results pages), but the reason this form of content is so integral to your longer term marketing, is that once it’s been indexed by Google and is appearing on search results, you’ll benefit from website traffic for months, if not years, afterwards.
That will help you move away from those flash in the pan, short time deals which you might find yourself on the content treadmill for; and towards a more sustainable form of content marketing. Because let’s face it, we’re all exhausted from trying to come up with new ideas for Instagram posts aren’t we?!
Why writing blog posts is great for your small business:
Blog content is free!
When you write and upload a blog post to your website, there’s no cost attached to it, because it’s come from inside your head. You’re already paying for your website hosting, and your site is sitting there waiting for fresh content 24 hours a day. So why not utilise that?
An active blog section on a website says to me that you are current, you are passionate about what you do, and you’re an expert in your field.
The only cost to you is time: time to plan and write the blog, upload it to your website, and submit it for indexing on Google Search Console.
Blog content is evergreen
It’s like I alluded to earlier: once you’ve written and uploaded your blog post, it’s there, getting web traffic, literally forever. You might find that even in several years’ time, you’re still seeing healthy web traffic to that blog. And you can update it whenever you want, to keep it current.
Google (and other search engines like Bing, and Yahoo) are primarily interested in showing people helpful, authentic content that is as relevant as possible. That’s why you might see blogs appear higher up on search results than some larger competitors.
A good example of that are travel blogs, where personally-written blogs about visiting a certain city are shown above larger travel companies where the person might not have actually been. Why? Because the personally-written blogs will detail how exactly to get around, what restaurants are good, and some lesser-known facts about visiting – just like a blog on one of my other websites, Puglia-Holidays.com, where I write about the Magic of Visiting Matera.
The more people that find that blog post useful (which Google tracks by a low bounce rate, and high time spent on page), the more it should show it to people looking for content about Matera on the internet. And because I’ve included affiliate links to places to stay, I could be earning commission for years to come without lifting another finger.
Compare that to social media lifespans, which for Facebook and Instagram might be up to week, and for X, just a few hours.
A blog can help position you as a subject expert
As the person in charge of your business, you are the one person who knows the most about what it is that you do. Whether that’s the best way to replace someone’s roof, completing a self-assessment tax return, or fixing certain models of car – that’s the reason you set up your business and what drives you forward each day!
The idea with long form blog content is to provide people starting to search online with some free content that hooks them in. It might not solve their problem entirely or immediately, but it gives them a good jumping off point, and then they can always contact you to help them further.
And why should they do that? Because by writing that blog post, you’re showing people that you know all about a subject, and that helps build trust in you and your brand.
If you come across on your blog post as knowledgeable, friendly and trustworthy, then your potential customer is more likely to come back to your website as a source of information, or take an action like signing up to your mailing list, or sending an enquiry.
Blog content helps your ‘top of funnel’ marketing
I can already hear you thinking, ‘hang on…what is top of funnel marketing?!’ It refers to your sales funnel, and your customer journey. You may never have even thought about the process by which you get a customer. But really all it is is the theory behind that process.
The sales funnel is wide at the top (imagine an actual funnel), and this is where your potential customers see you for the first time. Activities are broad: they might include seeing a social media post, seeing an advert for your business, or seeing a webpage on your website.
The reality is that most people won’t simply find your business on Google, and then send you an enquiry. Most likely, they’ve watched from the bylines to see what it is you do, maybe followed you on social media, signed up for your newsletter, done some online research to compare you to other companies (via your prices and reviews). They’re just getting a sense of your business and whether they’d trust you.
As they move down the funnel (which is steadily getting narrower from top to bottom), some of these drop off as they decide to shop elsewhere, but the ones that remain are taking more and more actions. At the very bottom of the funnel, they turn into a lead, and a handful then turn into paid clients or customers.
The idea for most businesses is to increase the number of people at the top of your funnel, to increase the possibility that more will end up as leads and clients. If you only had 5 people at the top of your funnel, the chances are that none of them would make it down to the bottom. But what if you had 100 people, or 1,000 people, at the top of your funnel? Just by the laws of probability, you’d end up seeing 5, 10, 20 or more leads and enquiries.
So that’s the principle behind top of funnel marketing. Your blog posts (along with other elements of your marketing mix like advertising and social media) attract more and more web traffic to the top of your sales funnel, thereby increasing the pool of potential leads. It’s essentially a numbers game.
Blogs add your unique voice to the discussion
A little like the idea of positioning yourself as the subject expert, blogs give you a platform to share your own unique experience and angle. It doesn’t matter how saturated any market is, because there is always room for a new voice, saying something different and interesting.
Take, for instance, Apple: in the 1980s and early 1990s, IBM were the dominant personal computer choice. But what happened? Apple came along, with a new idea and new vision that was different to those established giants. They had a unique take on something that had already existed for years, and became wildly successful!
So how can you bring a unique voice and angle to a marketplace which will help you stand out? Via some insightful blog posts!
Blog content helps you connect to your customers by identifying their problems
Solving people's problems is basically at the core of most businesses and their business plans. If you can identify what problems people are having, and where there are only poor solutions, then you can exploit that and create something that will be in demand.
Blog posts are great to help strengthen your offer as a business. Think about the number of ‘How to’ videos on Youtube. They’re now one of the major ways that any of us learn how to fix household appliances (I recently solved why our Dyson vacuum cleaner wasn’t working exactly via this method). Could you write a blog post that helps people find an answer to a common problem?
Or, perhaps you’re an online retailer, and Valentine’s Day is coming up. People are looking for solutions to the problem of what to get their partner that isn’t just the same old lovey dovey nonsense. Could you put together a listicle of your products that might help them?
On a side note, you can find out what problems people are having by doing a bit of SEO keyword research. If you’re a builder for example, some keyword research might show you that there are 5,000 searches a month on how to cut tiles so that they fit around corners. You could then write a blog post about that, include a short ‘how to’ video on there, and optimise the post for that search term.
Chances are that people will start seeing your content in the local area, and many of them will still think it’s beyond what they’re willing to bother with, and will contact you for a quote!
It gives you loads of content for your social posts
Social media is a constant chore – I understand that, because I’ve been doing it for 15 years! How do you create relevant content for your channels that isn’t just promoting the same message over and over again?
This is one of the untapped benefits of writing a blog post. That’s because one blog post can provide you with loads of social content!
You may even have existing blog posts which you can revisit and grab some bits and pieces from to create social content.
Let's say you have a step by step guide on your blog about how to start collecting antiques. You could use the photos and top line instructions to make an Instagram carousel post. And in another month’s time, you can re-use that again (people generally don’t remember social media content after a certain timespan).
Or if you sell crafting materials, you might write a blog post about how to make a decoupage card for example. In that blog post, not only can you link to your products, but you can then create a how to social media post. That should drive traffic to your blog, and then customers move down your funnel to buy the items that you sell to help them make it.
Perhaps you’ve written a blog post about the differences between different types of flooring. Again, everything you’ve written can be taken and used for social media posts again and again!
All of this is fantastic content, because you’re not using it for the hard sell. You’re giving people useful, free content with no expectation of getting anything from them. That’s a fantastic value exchange for them, and actually if you get it right, you’ll find that the authenticity of your content will get them into your sales funnel, create trust and eventually result in more enquiries or leads.
Writing blog content for small businesses
Thank you for reading – I hope that this little guide to long form blog content might be useful to your long term small business marketing!
If you need some help putting together your blog content, why not drop me a message and find out where I could help you.
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