The Small Business Guide to Online Marketing. Lola Bailey
href="#fb3_img_img_f6da93bd-cc74-5738-9f4b-72df1fdd7c15.jpg" alt=""/>
On examining the list, some words may jump out at you – ‘chocolate recipes’, as shown in the screenshot below, tells me that there is a significant demand for chocolate recipes online with 368,000 local monthly searches. The competition for these keywords is ranked at ‘low’, which means that you stand a good chance of being found online if you use these terms within your content. Terms with low or medium competition are good; look out for these. If you are indeed selling chocolates, you may want to include chocolate recipes in your content and include those recipes that have large local monthly search volumes, i.e. are popular, such as chocolate truffle or hot chocolate recipes.
Narrow Your Search
Your earlier search will have given you a good starting point for some valuable keyword information, but the subject itself – chocolate – is very general in nature. A useful next step is to narrow your search down even further. For instance, you may want to improve the sales of your dark chocolate brands and to that end, your strategy might be to focus on the health benefits of dark chocolate. Once again, you will need to enter in a few keywords that you believe people might use to find information on dark chocolate, such as ‘healthy dark chocolate’, and then focus on the keyword suggestions from Google. Expanding (click on the + symbol next to the term) two of the keyword suggestions from the tool reveals the following:
Previous to this search, you might have planned to write a piece for your blog or website entitled ‘The health benefits of dark chocolate’. After seeing these keyword results, your knowledge of what your potential customers are actually interested in is more refined.
Implement What You’ve Learned
Your original blog headline was going to be: ‘The health benefits of dark chocolate’. Although there is nothing inherently wrong with this headline, it does not take advantage of the information provided by the keywords tool about the search needs of potential visitors.
A more effective title, based on your research, would be: ‘Seven reasons why chocolate is good for you’. It’s all in the data (2900 local monthly searches, to be exact).
Beyond the Blog
Blogging and its benefits
A blog can be a very powerful marketing communications tool – and an incredibly cheap one. There are several reasons to start a blog, which you will learn about in this section; perhaps the most common reason why businesses start blogs is because they enable dialogue with customers and help to ‘personalise’ customers’ experience of a brand.
Creating a blog home page
I highly recommend content management systems for blogging. Simply put, a content management system (or CM system) is a system that allows you to independently manage the content of your website, without needing to know any complicated programming language. CM systems allow you not only to manage the content of your website, they will also provide you with the ability to approve and validate the content on your site before it goes live on the web. CM systems can also control the time a content element goes live, the day and time it is removed from the site and the locations on the site where the content element appears. Web pages are generated from templates. This allows your content writers to concentrate on what they do best – writing. Then, when they, or you, are ready to publish items to the website, the content will display the standardised branding of your site.
A good example of a content management system is WordPress. CM systems have outstanding capability (if using WordPress I suggest you go for the self-hosted version, which you can download at wordpress.org) – enabling you to service your marketing needs effectively and in a timely manner. Below is a snapshot of Ihubbusiness' homepage, a blog which was created in WordPress (www.ihubbusiness.co.uk).
Your blog home page is your welcome page for your blog. Here are two key considerations for your home page:
What image do you want your blog to portray? Fun? Elegant? Serious? Think about how you want your brand to be thought of, and dig deeper to find out how you want your blog to look. Consider which fonts, images, etc. will work best with your chosen outcome.
Which elements do you feel are important, in order for your readers to feel comfortable about your blog? For example, blogs are generally expected to include the following information:
Posts
An ‘About’ section – this is sometimes at the footer of a blog
A contact page
Categories – these are the logical groupings of your posts. Categories are the means of sorting your blog posts into topics, to make it easier for visitors to search your blog.
A blogroll – this is basically a list of links that appears in your sidebar. You can link to any site found on the internet in your blogroll; however, best practice is to link to those sites which are directly related to the content of your blog. Remember that you are in effect recommending those sites to your readers as sources of related, reliable information, so choose carefully!
Subscription options
Logo.
Your logo can also serve as your ‘avatar’, or picture, when you post comments on other blogs or forums. You can also use it on marketing items, such as business cards.
As your blog grows in age you can add other elements, such as archives, recent posts and much more.
Creating a blog post
Your posts are the most important element of your blog. They should take up at least 75% of screen space on your blog’s site. Blog posts appear in reverse chronological order, which means that your blog remains current and timely. The main elements of your blog posts should be:
1. Title
This is the most crucial part of your blog to get right. It is basically your headline; it needs to lure visitors in so they want to read more. Titles are also useful in terms of search engine optimisation; search engines value titles strongly in ranking results, and using popular and relevant keywords in your titles will help you drive more traffic to your blog.
2. Publication date
It’s all about being current on the internet, and visitors want to know that yours is an active blog that they can rely on for up-to-date information.
3. Introduction
This is possibly the second most important part of your blog. You can start your blog-introduction by, for example, asking a question or quoting an interesting statistic. Again, the idea is to have your visitors wanting to read on.
4. Body
Here is the meat of your article. It helps to include images to add colour and visual relief. Images can also