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If you are a small business, chances are that you are most likely very familiar with the “feast or famine” cycle that most small business owners go through, where there’s either too much work going on for you to handle it all, or not enough business coming in through the door.

As a small business coach, I’ve seen too many small business owners simply shrug their shoulders at this, seemingly convinced that this is the way small business works. On a few occasions, I’ve been able to prove some business owners wrong on this point, after working extensively with them for several months, helping them implement systems to ensure that their business always had an active prospecting pipeline going, and allowing the business owners themselves to step back from the day-to-day activities of the business in order to perform more entrepreneurial work, such as growing their market share in a certain area, or identifying new business opportunities brought about by changes in business laws and the economy.

Transforming a typical small business from a “people-dependent” operation into a systems-driven enterprise, however, requires a significant investment of time and effort, and a deep commitment by the business owner to the process of releasing control over most aspects of managing the business.

If your business seems to be affected by the “feast or famine” cycle, then I want to show you an easy, smart, simple, quick and inexpensive way to start alleviating this condition.

It’s called small business blog marketing.

Basically, you start a business blog, then write about your business and publish the information online through your blog.

Let me explain why this is a very smart thing to do, and how it can help you ride the ups and downs of small business life.

First of all, starting a business blog is simpler, quicker, cheaper and easier to do than setting up a small business web site. In a moment, I’ll share with you some valuable small business marketing tips you will want to know about when starting your own business blog.

Secondly, by adding regular content to your blog that educates people about the benefits of your business, products and services, you will not only create more trust and authority with potential customers online when they visit your business blog, but you will also increase visibility and exposure for your business in your particular niche market.

So … how will this help you successfully manage the “feast or famine” cycles that most small business owners experience?

Well, in times of “feast”, you can simply refer people to relevant posts you have made on your blog that provide them with the information they are looking for. Every business owner is familiar with the sometimes frustrating experience of having their valuable time taken up by the usual explanations of how, why, what, when and where certain aspects of their business are done. Rather than spend 30-45 minutes or more reiterating the same thing over and over again to luke-warm prospects, why not write an article about it and post it to your blog? Then, the next time someone asks you to explain this very same thing, rather than waste an hour of your or your staff’s time, just ask them for their email address and send them a link to the page on your blog where you have posted this information. Your prospect can then research the subject in their own time and come back to you when they are ready to move to the next step.

Now … if, in your blog you have set up a way for people to opt-in to a database (e.g. a newsletter subscription form, or special report), then you have already taken a significant step towards ensuring that your business can survive in times of famine. When work slows down, you can contact your list subscribers with special offers, or information about products or services they may want to consider at that point in time.

By incorporating small business blog marketing into your regular business activities, you will be providing genuine service to those you cannot service immediately, as well as creating a prospecting pipeline for leaner times.

5 Essential Small Business Blog Marketing Tips

Small Business Blog Marketing Tip #1 – Host Your Business Blog On Your Own Domain

Although many small businesses set up their business blog on blogging platforms that offer free hosting, this can be a costly mistake in the long run. It also indicates that the business owner is not aware of what a valuable business asset a blog can be. By setting up a blog on your own domain, you are ensuring that all traffic, content and links pointing back to your content pages are growing the value of your web property and not someone else’s, and also that they won’t suddenly disappear if, for, example, you decide to take your business to the next level and change blogging platforms or change hosting providers.

Small Business Blog Marketing Tip #2 – Set Up Your Business Blog Using A WordPress Blog

WordPress provides an ideal business blogging platform (hosted on your own domain, of course). Wordpress is free, and supports an active community of plugin developers and professional designers who have created thousands of plugins that can add incredible functionality and powerful features to your blog, as well as thousands of professional themes you can use to completely change the look and feel of your blog. Best of all, most WordPress plugins and themes can be downloaded for free, and customized for your own business use in many instances.

Small Business Blog Marketing Tip #3 – Automate Your Business Blog Marketing SEO And Search Engine Indexing Functions

Although a WordPress blog is fairly easy to install and set up, the default installation is quite basic and lacks most of the functionality you need to ensure that your content is automatically optimized for ranking better than your competition in the search engines, as well as getting quickly indexed and added to the search results of all the major search engines and blog directories. This is by no means a “negative”, as WordPress allows you to quickly add all of this functionality by simply installing and activating certain plugins. All you need to do is spend a little time learning which plugins work best together to deliver this important automation to your blog.

Small Business Blog Marketing Tip #4 – Add New Content Regularly To Your Business Blog

Every small business owner I have ever met carries an incredible amount of information in their head about their business, their industry, expert tips on buying, installing and using their products and services, benefits and features, comparison data on competitor products and services, etc … In short, there is no shortage of information to provide potential new customers with. Many small businesses, however, don’t fully understand how much leverage they can create for their business by turning this information into “sales bait,” i.e. short informative articles, announcements, interesting posts, news releases, answers to frequently asked questions, etc … that can attract the attention of people searching online for specific solutions that you can help deliver, educate and engage potential customers, and funnel visitors into a process that delivers not only great value and service every step of the way, but that can ultimately lead to new customers and new sales for your business.

Having a simple plan to add 2-3 articles per week to your business blog can lead to amazing results. As I have just stated, there is no shortage of information when it comes to thinking of things to write about your business. If you commit to investing as little as 20 – 30 minutes a day to business blogging activities, you can transform your business quite rapidly.

Divide your business blogging time as follows:

• Spend 40% of your time researching topics to write about. Start an ideas file and add to it every day – even just the title of a blog post will do.

• Spend 40% of your time writing your article. Open up a simple notepad text file and just write on a topic the same way as you would if you were explaining something to a prospect one-on-one. Keep the style conversational, use your own voice and don’t worry about editing anything until you finish writing at least 500 – 700 words (4-5 short paragraphs)

• Spend 20% of your time editing and proofing what you have written, then publish it. You can always easily edit your post later if you need to add, modify or delete sections of your post.

Using the above business blogging time schedule, if you invest just 20 minutes a day, five days a week into maintaining a business blog, you will spend a total of 40 minutes researching (e.g. reading other blogs for ideas), 40 minutes writing your post(s), and 20 minutes editing and proofing your article. This is enough time to add one or two new posts every week or so, and start growing your business online. Keep this commitment for one whole month to get the blogging habit and do this for three months before evaluating your performance and your results. I guarantee you will be more than pleasantly surprised!

Small Business Blog Marketing Tip #5 – Use Your Business Blog Performance Data To Improve Your Business Results

As a small business blog marketer, your goal is to deliver content that will attract new visitors to your site, engage and build trust with your readers, and then direct them to areas of your site where they can either get more information about the benefits of using your products and services, contact you for the next step, or place an order once they have made a decision to buy.

Setting up a simple information system that tracks where visitors to your blog are coming from, what keywords and phrases they are typing into search engines and other sites to find you, how long they stay on your blog when they visit and which pages they visit the most when they are browsing through your blog can all provide valuable information that you can then use to improve your business, deliver better customer service … even uncover a demand for new products and services.

I hope you have found this information useful and I wish you great business blogging success. For more information on how to start your own business blog, including step-by-step video tutorials on installing and using WordPress, automating your business blog marketing, setting up an information system to monitor your business blog performance and growing your business online faster with a blog, go here: Start Your Own Business Blog

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