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

Here are just some of the more immediate benefits of starting a business blog to help grow your small business faster:

Lower Costs

It goes without saying that all businesses nowadays need a web presence, even if only to provide potential customers with some reassurance that they are a legitimate and professional organization.

A business blog is a low-cost alternative to setting up a traditional website. If you are a small business owner with no time to learn web coding languages like html or you don’t have the money to hire a web designer or web developer, then a business blog is the most inexpensive way to promote your business on the Internet.

Easy To Manage Web Publishing Solution

Blogging software is extremely simple and easy to use and manage. It requires no technical knowledge at all. You just write about your business and click save to publish your content to your blog. With the click of a few buttons, you can update your business blog faster than if you had to contact a web designer to make changes for you, or do HTML coding and FTP uploading of the edited pages to your server.

We highly recommend setting up your blog using the WordPress Blog Publishing platform and hosting the blog on your own server. This gives you complete control over your web content and allows you to manage your entire web presence online “in-house”.  With our step-by-step business blog video training tutorials, you can have a professional business blog completely set up, fully configured and live helping you grow your business online in less than 48 hours.

Here’s a video we created that show you just how much control you have over your web presence with a business blog:

Click on the image below to watch the video
(window opens in new browser – please allow a few seconds for video to load) …

(Video Duration: 11:58 mins)

Better And Higher Search Engine Rankings

What makes ranking higher in search engines so appealing and desirable for any business with an online presence, is that all traffic derived from search engines (known as “organic” traffic) is free! This means that organic traffic plus a great sales conversion process = more sales of your products and services at less to no cost.

Search engine marketing is one of the fastest growing areas of online marketing, and many companies are now hiring search engine marketing experts to help them optimize their sites for better and higher search engine results.

The bad news is that if your competitors are ranking higher than you for search terms related to your products or services, then they are probably taking your share of the online market, especially if they have a great sales process in place that converts visitors to their sites into new customers. In simple terms, what this means is that if your business does not rank in the top 20 spots on the major search engines, then you really don’t stand much of a chance of getting some – or any – of that highly coveted “organic” free traffic.

The good news, is that search engines like Google love blogs and will index your content very quickly in their search engine results IF you know how to set up your blog correctly. Our step-by-step video tutorials show you exactly how to set up a business blog with built-in automated search engine optimization features that, once set up and configured, will have your content being indexed very quickly by the search engine robots without problems and in a way that will keep pushing your site up higher and higher in the search engines and past your competitor’s listings.

In fact, if you arrived at this page from a search engine, then you have just experienced proof that what I’m saying here is true and does work

When it comes to achieving top search engine rankings, business blogging also offers a huge built-in advantage over traditional (i.e. static) web sites, which most people other than knowledgeable internet marketers often don’t even know exists. Our video training tutorials show you not only how to fully benefit from this built-in advantage that blogs have over websites, but we also include free access to membership sites that teach you everything you need to know to achieve better rankings for your business blog and continuously drive free traffic to your site (for more details click here).

Build Community And Trust With Better Communication

Business blogs allow you to connect and interact more easily with your audience, and make the process of sharing your expertise and knowledge with readers simpler through the use of various channels such as commenting, plug-ins (e.g. polls, newsletter opt-ins) and a platform that allows business owners to publish content immediately and disseminate timely information to a larger and wider (or more targeted) audience.

A business blog also provides various communication and time-saving benefits. By educating and encouraging your customers to visit your blog for the latest news and updates about your business, a business owner can get their message out to many people at once.

A business blog also offers access to self-updating RSS feeds. When people subscribe to your business blog feed, every time you add new content the feed gets updated with your latest post. For many, this is a better solution for keeping interested people updated than adding the new content to a website or sending out an email broadcast to a subscriber list. This is exemplified by a speech Bill Gates gave at the Microsoft CEO Summit 2004 in Redmond, Washington, where he said that “if you just put information on a Web site, then people don’t know to come visit that Web site, and it’s very painful to keep visiting somebody’s Web site and it never changes. It’s very typical that a lot of the Web sites you go to that are personal in nature just eventually go completely stale and you waste time looking at it; And so, getting away from the drawbacks of e-mail — that it’s too imposing — and yet the drawbacks of the Web site — that you don’t know if there’s something new and interesting there ; this [i.e. blogs & RSS] is about solving that.”

A Richer Experience For Visitors

One of the secrets of building a successful business presence online, is that you want people to keep coming back to your site. To do this, you have to give your visitors a positive and rich experience, as well as a great reason for them to keep returning to your site on a regular basis.

A business blog allows you to express to your visitors the unique qualities of your business in a rich and wide-ranging number of ways:

As you can see from the above illustration, with a blog, you can add multimedia (e.g. videos about your products and services), rotate freshly updated content, syndicate content, add links to useful resources, provide easy site navigation features, and so much more! Whatever you want to communicate to others about your business, you can easily do with a blog.

Simplicity, Flexibility, Customization And Easy Expansion

If you are currently considering spending money on getting a website developed or updated, you would have to ask yourself … why? Why not start a business blog instead? As we’ve already discussed, a business blog:

• is a simpler way to establish a presence online,
• is highly flexible – in previous posts we show you how you can change the entire look and feel of your site with only a couple of clicks of the mouse.
• is completely customizable – we have added videos throughout this blog and in our main site showing you how you can completely customize your blog through the use of themes, plug-ins, widgets, etc …
• can readily expand as your business grows. Hundreds of developers have created thousands of applications for your business blog that allow you to do just about anything you can think of … run a membership site, set up an e-commerce store, share your content automatically on all major social networking sites, add posts to your blog via email, allow multiple contributors to add content to your blog, etc …

In short, there are so many benefits to small business in choosing a blog instead of, or as a complement to a website, that, if you haven’t done it already, then it’s probably time you do some serious research into the business blogging revolution and get your own business blog up and running ASAP!

For more details on how to set up a professional blog that will benefit your small business and help grow your business online fast, see our step-by-step business blog video tutorials page.

Something I hear quite often at these meetings and pretty much everywhere I go is “my website is currently under construction”, or “my website is still being developed.”

The online business revolution actually started a few years ago, but many business owners have not yet heard of it. It’s called “blogging“.

I own several businesses that operate exclusively online and I mostly promote them now using business blogs. These blogs take me less than a day to fully install, set up and configure, and the software, themes and plugins that add incredible functionality to my sites cost nothing to buy. Additionally, I can get my sites indexed in Google in as little as 2-3 days, even on a brand new domain name, and within a week or so, they are already attracting buying visitors to my sites.

It all seems crazy to me, therefore, when I hear people telling me that their website “is currently under construction” or “still being developed”.

If you could take your business online with a professional-looking site in less than 48 hours and have the site actively promote your business every time you add something about your business (like a new product announcement) and click the “publish” button, then why would you spend hundreds of dollars and wait weeks or – as is usually the case – months, to put up a static website?

It doesn’t make sense to me. Especially when it comes to small business owners. In a previous article, I explained why a business blog is a better, cheaper, easier, faster and smarter option to promote your business online than using a normal “brochure-like” website.

I was going to create a video that explains the differences between a business blog and a normal website, but then I found this excellent video on YouTube, called Business Blog Vs. Normal Website:

As you can see from the video above, if you are a business owner – especially a small business owner, there are many reasons why you should consider using a business blog instead of a normal, static website.

Does that mean that we are going to see the “Death Of Websites” being promoted around the web?

No … I don’t think so. A website does have its own set of benefits and it’s important to know when to use both. In fact, I took an excerpt from a previous video I recorded that explains why business blogs are a smarter way of doing business and made it into the video below, where I share with you a very effective strategy I use to promote and grow my businesses fast and sell more of my products and services:

I hope you have enjoyed watching the videos above. If you want to avoid waiting weeks or months to get a website built and save yourself a bunch of money, then visit our main website at www.SelfPublishWeb.com to learn how to get your own business blog up and running in less than 48 hours and start growing your business online fast!

Martin Aranovitch