Blog Marketing Your Small Business

Be Part Of The Naked Conversation

I’m in the middle of reading Naked Conversations by A-List Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. It’s a fresh book (2006) covering business blogging.

You have to forgive my over-enthusiasm for this topic. I’m a huge blog fan, my current business project is about building blog traffic (www.BlogTrafficKing.com) and blogging, to put it bluntly, has changed my life, or at least been a major positive force in my life for the last year. It’s also done wonders for my business prospects, opening up doors to opportunities I never would have expected 12 months ago.

Blogging for business is one of the most remarkable marketing tools I’ve come across. The further I delve into Naked Conversations the more I am convinced of the value of blogs, especially for small business. I’ve made it my mission to convince you to start blogging for your business.

The Blog Is The Only Online Marketing Tool You Need

If you run a business and you have a very small budget for online marketing I would completely forgo starting a standard website and start blogging instead. A blog can incorporate all the regular website features such as your business location, contact details and services/product pages. But the real power comes from all the extra advantages that on the surface you can’t see and until you experience blogging you won’t fully appreciate.

These include:

– The ease of updating and creating pages. Most blog content management systems are intuitive, simple and efficient. If you know how to write an email you can create a page for your blog.

- The search engine optimization advantage. At one point I thought it was just because blogs were a fad, but now I can safely say that search engines love good blogs and I don’t see this changing any time soon.

- Simple installation. You can pay a subscription fee and have a blog up and running immediately or install blog software on your own server and be done in a few steps.

- Link power. Blogging, if you do it right, includes a lot of link love, which means you link to other blogs and they link to you. And not only blogs, the potential to convert a blog into a PR machine is real. Blogs, at least for the moment, are garnering attention from everyone and everywhere. Coverage in mainstream media, both on and off line, is *almost* easy to attain.

- And of course, the naked conversation. In a nutshell this means you can have a completely transparent two-way conversation with your customers. Imagine being able to influence your customers without being perceived as a business trying to sell something. Do you think that would be an advantage?

It Costs Time And Energy, Not Money

Just by writing (blogging) one small article per day demonstrating your knowledge you can very quickly establish your expertize, boost your credibility and best of all, start converting prospects into customers. Provided you have the time and motivation to produce content the financial investment can be kept very low. If you factor in the basics — hosting and a domain name — your yearly expenditure is under $100 to maintain a blog. That’s a bargain.

Talk To Your Customers

A blog creates a dialogue with your readers. Simply by blogging and responding to comments you start a natural conversation with anyone interested in what you offer. A natural conversation is so much more powerful at making a sale than any other form of advertising. It’s so effective you don’t need to include any overt sales pitch whatsoever in your blog. In fact, as the authors of Naked Conversations state, you should avoid including any sales pitches in your blog at all. Once your blog gains traction your customers will seek you out and ask to buy from you.

That sounds nice doesn’t it, customers asking to buy from you. I’m not joking either. I blog a lot about building web businesses but I do not sell any web design or online marketing services. My experience shines through my writing and podcasting and my readers perceive me as an expert at online business. I have never once said I provide web marketing services yet on many occasions I have been approached for assistance in building a website or consulting on a web project. I have no plans to launch a web marketing business but I suspect if I did I’d have an eager client base ready to buy thanks to my blogs.

The First Mover Advantage

Here’s the real clincher — why you need to start blogging about your business today — No one else is. Chances are no one else in your industry is blogging either. Sure, if your industry is online most likely there are some blogs out there, but if your business is offline than there is a good chance if you started blogging today you will be the first.

In my series — Internet Marketing For Small Business — I made use of a plumber as an example of a typical small business that could use blogging to bring in search traffic and customers. I was delighted to see in Naked Conversations the authors also mention the humble fixer of leaking taps. They noted that they could not find one plumber who was blogging.

If I was a plumber in need of business I’d start blogging. I would write “how-to” guides to help people fix things around their house. I’d spill all my knowledge from my brain into words on my blog. I’d be extra careful to make sure the title of my blog included the phrase “Brisbane Plumber” so when anyone searched online for a plumber in my city my blog would be the first search result.

This same case could be applied to plumbers in every major city in the world. I have no doubt the same could be said for all the trades including electricians, painters, repairman, garden maintenance – and that’s just the trades. Any person who blogs locally about their small business can very likely expect fantastic results, which over time are only going to increase as more and more people go online and use search to find solutions to problems.

The opportunity to take advantage of this trend is now. There is only one blog that will dominate each local niche. I can only expect to be the “Brisbane plumber” if I’m the first one to start blogging about it. If another Brisbane plumber sets up a blog first it will be very hard to supplant their leadership position. The first mover advantage is real.

Preaching To The Converted?

There is one problem with blogging. It’s a significant problem that will stop this article having much impact on mainstream small business. Most of the people who should hear what I have to say, who stand to benefit the most from small business blogging, will never read my blog. They don’t even know what a blog is. They may not even use the web on a daily or even weekly basis.

Most bricks and mortar business owners don’t have the time or simply don’t travel in the right circles to be exposed to the concepts I present here. Books like Naked Conversations go a long way to help the cause because they take blogging offline. Unfortunately for the moment though, most people who read this blog are bloggers or savvy Internet users, in which case I am largely preaching to the converted.

Of course that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t urge any small business folk reading this who are not currently blogging to get into it, or if you are already blogging, to get out there and rave about blogging to your colleagues and business peers. As bloggers it’s important to understand that a knowledge gap exists that divides those that know and understand how to take advantage of blogs and those that don’t. The few that take the time to breach that knowledge gap stand to benefit the most.

Yaro Starak
Small Business Blogger