Having a blog on your site is pretty important, I’d say a must, but I hear “I don’t have time to create posts”, “who cares what I say” and “what would I write about?” all the time. If you’re serious about digital marketing, helping to build your site’s authority to appear in search engine results and generally showcasing that your business knows what it’s doing then…. “you’ll find an hour from somewhere”, “your customers and prospective customers” and “ANYTHING” (anything broadly related to your business that is!).
I’m afraid I can’t help you with time management or the analysis of your website visitors today, but here are six blog post ideas you can work through, and I’ll write another six later in the year… One post a month? C’mon, you can handle that, surely?!
March – Reaction to a Media Story
Yesterday was Budget day, and this is just one example of a big news story that might affect your business in some way. It’s not always easy to plan such a post, because obviously you don’t know what tomorrow’s news is, but jump on opportunities when you can as you could get extra traffic to your site from people searching for the story and related reactions. If you’re in the landscape or gardening business, what about your opinion on London’s proposed garden bridge? Animals, that Crufts dog? Tech, the announcement of PlayStation’s virtual reality headset? Marketing, the Trump… whatever you can call it? Dragons, the Game of Thrones spoilers (and no I haven’t looked)?
April – A Day in the Life
What do you do in a day or a week? I’ll bet it’s surprisingly varied and interesting to someone else, or if you really don’t think it is, why not ask an employee to write something about their role? This type of post could be very visual too, using images or a video to help show off your products or services in a different way to usual. Try using humour too, most customers or clients like to see the human side of a business and this could build a rapport you might not otherwise be able to create.
May – Frequently Answered Questions
Most companies find that they are asked similar questions over and over again, or the industry as a whole generates queries about certain topics. This is also another good opportunity to attract some traffic from search engines, especially with the advent of Google’s voice search and the increase in question led searches. Offer your readers really good, complete answers with images where appropriate and search engines may reward you with high rankings for your effort to present top quality content.
June – What NOT to do
What mistakes do you see your competitors doing that you just want to shout about – although don’t name anyone, this wouldn’t be cool! Alternatively, do your customers get caught in a trap and make the wrong buying decisions, perhaps they ask the wrong questions or don’t ask any questions at all. Blog content should be really useful to your audience, so why not advise and steer them in the right direction, it’s likely they’ll thank you with their loyalty.
July – Publicise your Offers, Sales and Promotions for Loyal Customers
While you might send out an e-shot, amend your homepage or slash prices on your e-shop, having a landing page dedicated to promoting the very best of your deals is somewhere you can direct people too from all these other places. It gives you the opportunity to talk at greater length about the details and showcase the products you might really want to shift, whether it’s because you have excess products or you need to make room for a new season’s stock. If your business is service based, a sale isn’t probably something you have done before. However, you could encourage existing clients to add another service with a price deal, new clients could get a month’s trial at a lower cost or a referral scheme could mean a client gets a reduction from their next invoice.
August – Client or Customer Wins
One way of encouraging new business is to highlight who your current customers are, brands attract brands, and telling the world you have X number of contacts or you supply X with X can illustrate you really mean business. You may have a client or case study section to your website and this is where you would typically have details along with a shining testimonial quote. Nevertheless, you could roll a few clients into one post, which could also show the breadth of work you undertake.
Blog content is also excellent social media fodder, so don’t forget to share it on the networks you use, and tip based posts can work well as social ads. Also, you don’t have to create an all singing, all dancing press release to contact the media with your company news, especially if time isn’t on your side. Write a good post with all the information and drop the local, trade or appropriate national media an email with just a couple of sentences and a link. Or have you tried tweeting them? Promote your blog on any emails you send to customers, and if you have a store or do any face-to-face, why not encourage shoppers at the point of sale either by telling them verbally or with a sign. The more traffic you get to your website, the more likely it is that your business will be kept front of mind and adding internal links from your posts to other relevant pages on your site might just inspire a purchase.
If you REALLY don’t have time to create your posts, get in touch to discuss how we can help keep your blog alive!
