Building Your Small Business Internet Marketing Plan Part 2

Picking Your Blog Topic

The natural tendency for a savvy business owner is to write about a business service or product.  We suggest you do not take this route.  Boring writing is, well, boring.  Who is going to click and read a dull sales pitch?  While your product and/or service is VERY exciting to you, to the casual reader surfing the internet it is less intriguing than watching spiders climb the water spout.

The crux of Personality Based Marketing is writing about you and your life.  People surfing the net for entertainment will stumble across your posting, read it, and want to learn more about what you do.  The transition from your blog site to your web site (where the features and benefits presentation takes over) is the art behind blogging.

Pew Internet & American Life Project concluded that 62% of American Adult Internet Users “surf the internet for fun”.  83% look for info on hobbies or interests and 89% use the internet to find information.  Your business website is well suited to capturing searchers looking for your product and/or service and your blog should help feed the traffic stream, but your company website is a turn off to users surfing the web for entertainment.  Writing about your life decisions, ambitions, and other demographically identifying information will connect you with different market segments when their guard is down (because they don’t expect a sales pitch).

I must inject a quick ethics concept at this point of the presentation.  Our goal is NOT bait and switch, when we write our personality topics.  They MUST be honest.  For example, if you write about your love of cats because you feel cat lovers could benefit from your service, BUT you actually hate cats (except with a white cream sauce) your deception will eventually be discovered and the business relationship possibility eliminated. Again, we are writing with the premise, “All things being equal, People prefer to do business with People they know and LIKE.”

Let’s get started.  How do you pick a topic people might be interested in reading?  We suggest you pick any topic that interests YOU and is socially acceptable.  Here is the exercise:

1. Pick something that brings you joy (non work related)
2. Write three reasons why this joy makes you better at your profession
3. Use Google’s Keyword Tool to find the high traffic keyword phrases from step 2
4. Create your article title based on the most popular keyword phrase

Here is an example:

My start topic is (step 1):  Playing music in the church band.

This helps me improve my business service by (step 2):

1. Keeping me grounded in the importance of inner harmonies.  The greatest soloist can not entertain an audience over the long haul.  Playing music keeps me focused on the need for team.
2. Playing music at the highest level requires constant improvement.  In my business I must always seek new knowledge and practice my craft.
3. Applauds are earned, not given.  Good enough, isn’t.

Looking at each of my three supporting reasons, we can pick out distinct keyword phrases (step 3).  We have:

1. team work (60,500 average searches per month)
2. continuous improvement  (33,100 aspm)
3. service quality  (60,500 aspm)

Article title (step 4):  How Playing Music Helps Me Focus on Team Work

The obvious next step is writing the article.  It will happen such that you are not able to find keyword phrases with enough search traffic.  Resist the urge to search for popular keyword phrases first.  Writing your blog article is hard enough when telling a story you are passionate about. Trying to fit your story to what’s popular makes the writing process exponentially harder.

The very next question my students ask is, “How many searches per month should I be targeting?”  My typical answer is, “Anything above zero”.  Actually, there is no right answer to this question.  Google shows you a graphic bar that represents competition for the keyword phrase.  If there is no (or low) competition, then you could be fine with just a few thousand searches.

On Monday we will dive into the Marketing site of business blogging.  You’ve written your blog article and published, but there is still more work to do.  We will teach you how to use “social bookmark” and other blog sites to generate interest in your blog article.

Ed Bejarana
BusinessBlogging.net
a division of Zenith Exhibits, Inc.

You can start blogging today for FREE, visit www.PortlandBusinessCommunity.com

Related posts:

1. Building Your Small Business Internet Marketing Plan Part 3
2. Building Your Small Business Internet Marketing Plan Part 1
3. Mixing Internet Marketing Channels
4. Marketing your business via business blogging
5. Business Blogging with the Three E’s