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Essential Tips for Starting a Small Business Blog

Blogging is serious business. Almost every small business owner realizes the significance of maintaining a regular, updated blog on his/her website. Not only does it help in search marketing, it is also a great way of connecting with your customers.

Lee Odden recently wrote a good post on AllBusiness.com about tips for starting a small business blog. The article explains what thought processes must take place before you start a blog for your website.

The article talks about how much important it is to identify your goals and target audience. Odden also gives useful tips about technicalities such as design, choice of blog hosting software, analytics, RSS Feeds etc. We also get to know various ways of linking your blog posts’ feed to status updates in Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social bookmarking and networking sites.

Odden mentions that it is a good idea to have specific ‘categories’ to segregate your blog posts, as this will help in managing your content better. He also suggests keyword research before deciding the categories, which I think is an excellent idea to

get relevant traffic as well as links.

You can read the entire article here. Please share your own tips about blogging in the comments section!

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How To Find Content For Small Business Blogs

“You are what you publish.” is the new age mantra for all small business owners. Blogging is like golfing on the net.

Not only do you get to network with prospective clients who are looking for services you offer, it is an important search engine marketing tool as well. Search engines index, categorise and rank a well documented blog. But the question “How to Find Content for your Business Blogs?” remains. Cynthia Trevino has outlined some ideas here that could be considered.

# 1. Look for what the competition is writing about.

# 2. Pick up topics from networking sites.

# 3. Ask your customers about their problems and offer solutions.

# 4. Ask your sales team about frequently asked questions.

# 5. Share your passions and once in a while, blog about your personal matters.

“Good quality content is just another basic business requirement these days.  It’s not a nice-to-have. Especially for small businesses without large marketing budgets.  Writing compelling, interesting, helpful content and posting it online can help you to be more “findable” when buyers are searching for solutions.”

For further insight into blogging, you can also read this.

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Jason Fried (37signals)'s 'Out-teach the Competition to Beat Them' Strategy

Jason fried of 37signals talks about how they sell more by out teaching the competition. He allays fears that if you put your ‘secrets’ out, your competition will copy them. Somehow, that’s counter intuitive but true.

Out teaching the

competition and building an audience is a nice strategy and strikes a chord with me. Our blog is a testimonial to that. Such ‘be-a-nice-person’ strategy can work in this time and age because, on the Internet, you can reach out to your audience inexpensively.

I have thoroughly enjoyed this video and I think small businesses have a lot to learn from it. Check it out!

Check out their blog: Singal V Noise