Small blogs. Love them or hate them, but what should you DO with them?

You may be a natural born writer with lots of ideas spinning around your head that you can blog about. Then again, you may be the complete opposite, and really struggle to string a relevant coherent sentence together.

With precious little time to experiment with our business blog, we cannot afford to spend hours staring at our blank canvas wondering what to write about, or who to share it with.

Using Your Blog To Get Clients

When you blog for a hobby, it is perfectly fine to simply start writing to see where it goes and watch what happens – to speculate, if you like. Many bloggers start with an idea in mind, only to find their blog evolves into something completely different, and follows along a different path to what they originally intended.

This is fine if you are blogging for a hobby, but it’s not such a good plan if you are blogging for business.

Credit: easyemerge.com

Credit: easyemerge.com

As a small business owner, sole trader or entrepreneur, you don’t have the time to be able to blindly experiment with your blog. You need to be able to jump in with a voice that speaks to your industry or business niche. Your time is precious, so you cannot afford to waste it on something that is irrelevant.

[bctt tweet=”Your time is precious, so you cannot afford to waste it on something that is irrelevant.”]

It is very easy to fall into the trap of spending hours publishing content that is not going to engage with your desired audience, and certainly that wasted time would have been better spent running other aspects of your business.

If you jump blindly in with no set guide or direction, you will quickly become frustrated with your blog, see no audience responding to your efforts, or maybe even attract the wrong audience to your blog – ones that will not click through to your website to buy anything.

All this effort can become overwhelming after a while, so it is well worth avoiding the situation in the first place by working out a plan of action for your business blog before you even start out. If you have already started your blog, but your trial and error approach has left you floundering, then take this opportunity to pull yourself out of the mire, and get your blog back on track.

Build Your Own Blogging Guide

The internet is a wonderful resource – that is undeniable! There are literally thousands of blogging tips and guides out there, most of them free, and with a little research you should be able to narrow down one or two free guides that are suited towards your type of business nice or set-up.

You can cherry-pick ideas that appeal to you and the way you work, so you don’t have to blindly follow a guide that already exists. But choose guides that will make your life easier, and that you can see will give you the results you desire.
How do you choose the right blogging guide to follow? Simple. Write down what you want to achieve from your business blog, be that attracting more clients to your therapy centre, or getting people to buy products from your site, or convincing people to hire your services, or whatever.

Browse what is available until you find one or two guides that you will feel comfortable about following, and that will ultimately have the same end-goal that you want. There are many different blog guides out there to choose from, and they are not all the same, so make sure you don’t pick one at random only to find it isn’t appropriate for your business needs.

What worked for one person’s roofing business may not work for your hypnotherapy clinic. They are not in the same business niche as you, and their business model is very different to yours.

Set Out A Realistic Publishing Schedule

Be realistic here. Look at your working week and decide what publishing schedule you can commit to that will not be too overwhelming, and fits in with your other business commitments.

A publishing schedule that suits your personality and business type may mean blogging three times per week, or once per week, or even once per month. There are many conflicting ideas about how often to publish, but no matter what others recommend you to do, it has to be one that you will actually do!

Are you a morning or afternoon person? If you need a bottomless mug of coffee to make you feel human in the morning, and your brain doesn’t engage with your body until at least lunchtime, then setting up a regular morning blog writing schedule will probably not work well for you.

You need to set your blog writing time to when you are feeling the most creative and awake. I know some entrepreneurs who are night owls, and will leave their blog writing until the evening when they are sitting comfortably at home, and are tucked quietly away from all distractions such as their office phone, or shop staff.

Whatever schedule you create yourself or choose to follow, it should be one that is right for your business and your personality, and one that you will consistently do. If it’s not going to happen, it will not work.

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