Regularly create and publish fresh, relevant content

This is only the fourth of our series of articles about online marketing for small businesses but so far there has been one particular topic that we have mentioned each time as being an essential part of marketing your business online. And that is about regularly creating and publishing fresh, relevant content on your website and elsewhere (more on that another time!).

Many, many local websites are ‘brochure’ sites

We talked last time about what a ‘brochure site’ is – a site that is effectively a paper brochure held online – and how ineffective those types of websites are to small local businesses looking to attract and convert customers via the internet. Many, many local business websites are brochure sites.

If your site is a ‘brochure site’, what can you do about it?

In simplest terms you can improve your website effectiveness by just adding some fresh content every so often. However, this may be complicated by having to pay your web designer each time you create a new page. The other option, which is a much easier and quicker way to get new content online is to add a blog to your current website. This is, in effect, a separate website connected to your main website via a button or text link on your site.

We recommend WordPress

As I said last time, we recommend using WordPress for this – which you can also use to create a whole website – but there are other options like, for example, Typepad. One word of warning, if you are about to rush off and set up a blog to sit alongside your website, is it is much better to have a self-hosted WordPress installation. This means that you have the WordPress software, which is free, on your own hosting like you do with your website. WordPress do offer an option via their website www.wordpress.com where you can quickly set up a blog that they host for you. Whilst this is extremely quick and very easy, you don’t have much flexibility with it and they own the blog address so if you subsequently move it to your own hosting you will potentially lose some readers.

So we would recommend downloading and using WordPress from www.wordpress.org

What to write about on your blog

So, assuming you have a blog – where adding new content is as simple as clicking ‘Add post’, writing something and then clicking ‘publish’ – or at least the facility to post content to your website, what next? What do you write about?

I often speak with people who are worried that they will run out of things to say – in fact I used to worry about that myself (anyone who knows me will laugh at the concept of me running out of conversation!). Think about a typical day in the life of your business: how many questions do you answer about your area of expertise? How much useful advice do you give to your prospects and customers? How many times do your friends and family tell you to shut up and stop boring them about the latest products, news and happenings in your niche? How many trade journals, websites, blogs and email newsletters do you read relating to your business interests? What stories do you end up gossiping about or swapping with your business partners or network contacts relating to your area of expertise?

Plan time to write regularly

Ideas for content generation are flying around you all the time; all you have to do is grab a few and start writing them down! If this still sounds daunting then I would suggest planning in some quiet time every day or once or twice a week when you write something. I never imagined I would be able to put together these articles each week – writers’ block; time; inspiration – would no doubt get in the way, but I have been getting up at 6am every day and just writing. I have four blogs, and they are all benefitting from this new regime too – and the traffic is increasing day by day, which is obviously the point. Just need to work on selling something and conversion (yet another topic for another week!) and we’ll really be flying.

Write for real people, not search engines; but do remember your keywords

Remember that you are writing for real people, not search engines (although a local web designer tells me that no one reads blogs anyway – not sure I agree totally with that one!). But do remember to get keywords into your articles that you have identified as important for your business; make sure they are words that your potential customers are likely to be searching for when looking for your type of business. It’s easy to come up with a list of words that you would use, but often these aren’t the same as those that your prospects would!

Choosing appropriate keywords to target is a whole other topic for another day but you can at least start by brainstorming those that you think are right for your products and services in your target area, and then ask family, friends and existing customers what they would search for when looking for your type of business, so you can start to build up a definitive list of those keywords (including local identifiers) that you want to target in your web copy.

Originally published in the Kent on Saturday on Saturday 18 July

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