I’ve been suffering from blog block recently and missed my last two self-imposed deadlines, so writing about … well writing, is possibly a strange topic for this blog post at this precise moment in time. But here goes!

Writing content for your own website can present a challenge. You undoubtably understand your small business the best and know exactly what you are all about and how you deliver your services. But … sometimes in your enthusiasm for your business (don’t get me wrong conveying that enthusiasm is great) the writing can get a little laboured and key points can sometimes be lost amongst a lot of unnecessary content.

In this post I’ll share some key things to consider when drafting your content so that it encourages your small business website visitors to get in touch … and become your customers.

1 It’s all about you

Well, more accurately, it’s all about your customer. It’s easy to get carried away by the aforementioned enthusiasm and write about all the great things that you can do and the services you offer. But your customers don’t want to read about you they want to read about what you can do for them.

Focus your writing on the word ‘you’. Less ‘me, myself and I’ and more ‘you and yours’.

Last month this blog featured its first guest post and it got me thinking about the benefits of having a guest contributor on your small business blog. There are a lot of articles, blog posts and content out there extolling the benefits of guest blogging for the blogger:

• Building relationships with a wider audience
• Gaining status as an expert in your field
• Driving traffic back to your own blog or website with links

These are all valuable reasons for writing and getting your own content featured elsewhere. But as a time-poor small business owner I thought I’d write about the benefits from the other side.

The benefits of featuring guest content on my own blog

1 Featuring a guest blogger saves time

This was probably the greatest appeal for me.

I have a self-imposed schedule of a minimum of one 2,000 word, or thereabouts, blog post a month. I don’t think this one is going to make it. This coincides with a mailing that I send on the first of each month although at the time of writing that mailing is likely to be a little late this month!

It takes me roughly three hours to research and write each post initially. There is then time put aside to proof read and edit, source a suitable image and publish the post.

As a small business website owner, you have possibly felt under pressure to add fresh content to your website. We’ve all been told that Google likes a well maintained and regularly updated website and a blog is a very easy way of doing that without having to constantly think of tweaking the main structure of your website … although it is important that you keep that current and don’t neglect it.

Apart from posting content in the interests of ‘just adding content’ to boost your search results, there are plenty of other reasons for starting a small business blog and some of them could just help give you a new focus when you’re struggling for blog post ideas.

Ultimately, your website and/or your blog is all about promoting your business and finding customers. Careful planning of blog content allows you to provide real value and benefit to new and existing customers. This in turn can build trust and loyalty which will lead to long term business rewards.

Regular posts on your small business blog allow you to:

1. Show a bit of personality behind your brand
2. Reinforce your key messages and build awareness of your services
3. Generate engagement with new and existing customers
4. Establish yourself as a respected voice within your niche
5. Attract new, and otherwise different, visitors to your website

1)  Show a bit of personality behind your brand

People do business with people. If you’re a small business, or perhaps ‘the’ business this is even more true. Depending on your offering, it is likely that your potential customers are investing in you as the provider of services rather than just the services that you offer.

Your website will be outlining all your goods and services and encouraging your visitors to make contact. It will be factual and detail the logistics of how you work and what a client can expect from you. You may have written an excellent ‘About’ page that outlines what qualifies you to deliver those services but it probably doesn’t give a huge amount away about you … the person.

If only there were some magic formula for writing a blog post. An easy template for creating a post that everyone shares and gets a load of traffic.

Sometimes it can seem like an uphill struggle, but the thing to remember is that a thoroughly researched and well-structured post will always add value to your blog even if it’s not getting a huge amount of traffic initially.

Get the basics right and then the traffic will come so remember these key points:

• Well written and grammatically correct content will create a great first impression of you and your blog or small business website.
• Factually accurate content will add to your credibility as an expert in your field.
• Search engine spiders can detect good well-written content that isn’t just stuffed full of keywords to try and boost your SEO.

It’s safe to assume that your early posts won’t get much traffic as no one will know that your blog exists. However, your posts will always have some value if they’re well written and follow a few basic guidelines. New visitors, impressed by a current post will search back to see what else they can learn from you. Your older posts that didn’t get a lot of exposure initially will have ongoing value and can be shared long past their original publish date, especially if your content is ‘evergreen’. (More on this another time.)

In other words, don’t ever compromise the quality of your content for the sake of just getting something published.

If you're anything like me getting started with a blog post is difficult, but once you've got going it's sometimes hard to know when and how to stop. What is the best way to end and sum up your blog post?

Writing a great attention-grabbing headline and a compelling introduction will encourage your visitors to read on through the rest of your post. You will have outlined what you’re going to be writing about, defined a clear benefit to reading on and reassured the reader that it’s worth their time to read it.  

But having read your article, what do you want them to do next and how do you want to reinforce your message at the end of your post?

Why is a strong conclusion so important?

A strong conclusion to your post can encourage your readers to take some action, which was probably the aim of your post in the first place. It can also make your post and therefore you more memorable.

Don’t overlook your closing paragraphs. By getting it right you could be encouraging your readers to: